UotNS and how it screws with your head

John Watkins · 14 Jul 2010, 18:25 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:25:59 -0400
Subject: (urth) UotNS and how it screws with your head
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Cliff thinks something funny is happening with up and down, and makes a good
case...

On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 4:19 PM, Cliff Judge <transentient at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Or maybe not? The talk of "higher" and "lower" universes reminds me of
>> something I noticed during the re-read of BotNS, which I mentioned here a
>> couple weeks ago...there is something Wolfe emplys a couple of times where
>> Severian confuses down with up. When the undine saves him from the neuphars
>> as an apprentice....I believe he described it as being pushed up, then
>> pulled down, then waking up on the stone stairs. (The undine pulled him down
>> and out from underneath the nenuphars, then pushed him up in reality.) When
>> he goes into the drink in the Garden of Sleep, a hand reaches up from the
>> bottom and grasps his, and pulls him DOWN - then the next thing we know,
>> Dorcas has pulled him UP to the surface. Perhaps the most telling event was
>> his ride in the grav-led with Typhon, up to the gallery in the head. He
>> feels a terrifying plummet, and then comes out and asks Typhon "how can we
>> have come up to such a height, when it felt as though we had fallen so far?"
>>
>>
>> What this might do to a theory of higher and lower universes, such as we
>> have in Wizard Knight, is place the Increate at the top - but you get to the
>> top by going DOWN. In this way, the energy that flows out of the suns and
>> into "lower universes" - the collected energy of ages of human existence,
>> life, work, joy, perhaps - flows TO the Increate.
>>
>
This tickled my brain and I just realized why.

"Soon as he reach'd the point, whereat the thigh
Upon the swelling of the haunches turns,
My leader there, with pain and struggling hard,
Turn'd round his head where his feet stood before,
And grappled at the fell as one who mounts;
That into hell methought we turn'd again.

...

...I raised mine eyes,
Believing that I Lucifer should see
Where he was lately left, but saw him now
With legs held upward.  Let the grosser sort,
Who see not what the point was I had past,
Bethink them if sore toil oppress'd me then."

So here in Canto 34 we have Lucifer located at the Earth's core, and the
expected reversal of gravity in his presence.  This seems to be invoked by
the incident with Typhon, who is already doing a bit of a temptation in the
desert schtick,.

As for the other cases in which up becomes down and vice versal, I suppose
that's precisely what would happen when one passes through a horizontal
looking glass to another world, isn't it?  Or the reflective surface of a
still body of water?

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