Fuligin as Black Hole...

Ryan Dunn · 30 Jul 2010, 17:00 · 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: ryan at liftingfaces.com (Ryan Dunn)
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:00:05 -0400
Subject: (urth) Fuligin as Black Hole...
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W1243B1B9F8A26B12167E7FCFAA0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W1243B1B9F8A26B12167E7FCFAA0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <62287CC0-20DD-49FE-BBA3-3397254DC067 at liftingfaces.com>


On Jul 30, 2010, at 12:58 PM, Lee Berman wrote:

>> John Watkins- If the coloring has some meaning beyond that particular to 
>> the torturers'guild (they torture people and seem to have some connection, 
>> literal or metaphoric, to Catholic priesthood, so are in black), then it 
>> must be read in connection with the robes of argent, the color more white
>> than white, that Severian is about to put on at the end of Citadel.  So I 
>> think a connection to the old sun and/or its black hole is probably intended.
> 
> Without disagreeing I'd want to point out that fuligin is the color which is 
> darker than black. If black absorbs all colors of the spectrum then a black
> hole is even darker because it actively sucks all light (and everything else)
> out of this universe.
> 
> Conversely, argent is described as the color more pure than white. Argent can
> be used to describe a shade of white but its more basic definition relates to
> silver. White reflects all colors of the spectrum but (polished) silver does so
> in an even more pure way.
> 
> I don't know about now, but around the time of BotNS's creation, I think quasars
> were considered to possibly be the opposite of black holes, leaking energy into
> our universe. Hethor's ship is called The Quasar and was powered by (demon-haunted)
> mirror sails.
> 
> So the opposite of fuligin is argent. The opposite to a black hole is a quasar.
> The opposite to being a torturer is being Autarch/New Sun. Mirrors? Apparently
> they can be used to find good or evil. Depends on which way you pass through
> the looking-glass?
> 
> I dunno. I guess I am agreeing that in addition to religious allusion there is 
> modern (at the time)physics and almost surely a conveyance of sense of personal 
> redemption with regard to the opposites of fuligin and argent/mirrors that we find
> in BotNS. 	


So can we agree, at least, that the cloak and the robe are metaphors and not just habits as such?

...ryan

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