Patera Inire

Roy C. Lackey · 18 Jul 2010, 07:31 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2010 02:31:24 -0500
Subject: (urth) Patera Inire
References: <002501cb2565$9985d2c0$01d34a0c@rclackey><84362.24062.qm at web37603.mail.mud.yahoo.com>	<4C41F6B7.3050100 at gmail.com><002901cb25fe$adf003e0$06d24a0c@rclackey>
	<4C4286B4.6010601 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <004901cb264b$3d619880$16d04a0c@rclackey>

James Wynn quoted and wrote:
> > Roy C. Lackey wrote:
> > I mentioned Patera Silk as an example from the Sun Cycle of a man who is
a
> > priest who had no natural children. Priests of the RC Church, and
others,
> > also are commonly addressed as Father, even though they are mandated by
the
> > laws of their church to be celibate and not to engage in sexual
congress.
> > It's Father in English, Padre in Spanish, etc. But you already know
that. In
> > LS, priests are addressed as Patera in exactly the same way that priests
in
> > the Catholic Church are addressed as Father; I daresay for the same
reasons.
>
> Well, Palaemon is also referred to as "Master" in exactly the same way
> "that priests in the Catholic Church are addressed as Father". That is,
> it is his title. No one in the Whorl refers to their natural father as
> his "patera". Nor has anyone else in the world ever done so as far as I
> know. It doesn't map.

I agree. If I had said any such thing I would have been wrong. I didn't say
any such thing. Quite the opposite.

> I agree that the Chapter priests are intended to
> call to mind RC priests. But if Wolfe wanted to choose a cognate for
> "father" he had dozens of actual options.  Whatever one thinks he was
> going for _most_ directly, I don't think "father" is it.

Again, I agree. I'm not the one who thinks Inire is anyone's father. In so
far as this subject has anything to do with the thrust of this thread I
started, I have said that the titles "Father" and "Patera" are religious
titles that have nothing to do with either being a biological father.

> > Roy C. Lackey wrote:
> > Anyway, Inire is stated to be a cacogen, an alien. It is very doubtful
that
> > he could have fathered any children on a human woman.
>
> I'm really not trying to prove that Father Inire fathered children by
> seed and coupling. I'm not trying to prove anything specific at all.
> Only this: In a Wolfe story, one might be a parent or child or sibling
> in many ways. A character might call someone "father" (as N5 called
> Maitre and Hoof called the Rajan) or call someone "son" or "daughter"
> (as Silk called Blood and the Rajan called Jahlee). Obviously, their
> relationship is not parent-child in the traditional sense. But that
> doesn't mean that that is not what Wolfe was angling at. He does it so
> often, I would beware assuming he does not mean it in any particular
> instance just because it is not immediately apparent how he would mean
> it that way.

And just because a priest addresses a member of his congregation as "my son"
or "my daughter" does not imply that he is the father of either.

-Roy

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net