Dionysus

Jane Delawney · 04 Dec 2010, 04:06 · from 2010-December.txt.gz
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From: jane_delawney at sky.com (Jane Delawney)
Date: Sat, 04 Dec 2010 04:06:59 +0000
Subject: (urth) Dionysus
In-Reply-To: <4CF803BA.7010406 at gmail.com>
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	<4CF803BA.7010406 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4CF9BE63.2010900 at sky.com>

Very very quick additional on this - so sorry I can't be on list more 
often, there's lots of stuff I would have liked to respond to but so 
much! Really don't mean to start hares and not then follow up but 
sometimes that's what happens. Apologies if I've irritated anyone.

Anyway ...

On 02/12/10 20:38, James Wynn wrote:
>
>> Gerry Quinn-
>> As for the rest, though, I'm not terribly convinced.  If the 
>> Neighbours can resurrect bodies, why not just fix Horn? 
>
> Perhaps it is because I'm old-fashioned that I don't have a problem 
> imagining the soul in the body as a person inside a suit. In fact, 
> Wolfe almost never presents the soul in purely classical terms. He 
> always presents it as a "wave" of memories and identity--EXCEPT for 
> Mani in the Wizard Knight, and...significantly...in the Book of the 
> Short Sun. /The Neighbors could not just heal Horn because the spirit 
> had left. /(my emphasis). 

Some evidence in support of this POV - toward the end of RTTW Silk/Horn, 
Jahlee and others go on a 'spirit travel' jaunt with the idea that they 
might get to see what is happening on Green. Silk/Horn and the other 
participants in this experiment know that they might go anywhere as long 
as it is a place where one of their company has been before.

Silk/Horn has assumed that save for himself, none of them save Duko 
Rigoglio (who Silk/Horn knows was a Sleeper, and thus was on Long Sun 
Whorl in a state of suspended animation) has been anywhere but Blue; 
since  Rigoglio /was/ a Sleeper, he probably won't influence things all 
that much since he was, well, asleep prior to the Landings.

Unfortunately no-one has taken into account the idea that Sleepers used 
to be  people, with lives, before Typhon 'volunteered' them for his 
starship cargo. Rigoglio 'hijacks' the spirit travel, and the entire 
party ends up in his home location, which just happens to be Nessus itself.

Rigoglio just about has time to realise that this isn't quite the Nessus 
he used to know, when he is wounded by an Omophagist. The party 
escort/drag/carry him to the Citadel in search of medical attention, but 
the best they can find proves to be inadequate, and Rigoglio dies.

Two things of relevance occur during this little jaunt. Firstly, Jahlee 
(I think it is) proposes that they all go home and that Rigoglio seek 
conventional medical attention back on Blue. Silk/Horn vetoes this; he 
knows that Rigoglio will have no wound that any Blue-ese physician will 
be able to help; he'll be returned 'with his spirit bleeding to death 
inside him', beyond the ability of medicine to intervene. The party 
presses on, only to find that the healers of Nessus give Rigoglio 
'herbs, when they should have given blood' and thus really fail to help 
him at all.

Secondly, after Nessus-Rigoglio dies, the party returns to Blue - and we 
are told that when Rigoglio awoke on Blue, he was a 'spiritless thing', 
his spirit-self having died on the Red Sun Whorl. 'Spiritless' is afair 
specifically distinguished from 'soulless'. No more details are given, 
but the  reader is left in no doubt that in all respects that matter as 
far as human life is concerned, Rigoglio is actually dead, even though 
his physical body was not harmed in any way during the expedition.

In the light of this I think it possible that when Horn is dying on 
Green, the Neighbour can't prevent it, because his spirit has already 
separated itself from the body. All she can do is transfer this spirit 
into another body in pretty much the same state, ie whose spirit is in 
the process of departing; a process analogous to the 'spirit travel' 
which, although mediated by inhumi, appears in fact to be made possible 
at some level by the Neighbours.

Silk kills himself in despair at Hyacinth's death. Horn, by happenstance 
or providence, dies at that very moment on Green. The Neighbour is able 
somehow to transfer Horn's spirit into Silk's only-just-dead body. It 
feels to Horn as though he has passed out for a moment, to regain 
consciousness beside the coffin of a woman he does not recognise (Horn 
didn't see much of Hyacinth back in the day, and it's now 25+ years on). 
His body is streaming blood from various parts due to Silk's suicidal 
self-mutilation.

Why the face thing by the way? I suspect a mourning ritual gotten 
slightly out of hand. Silk may have intended only to make shallow cuts 
in his skin, including the face, neck and arms, which would be very 
Greco-Roman in fact; but he either made a resolution or became too 
focussed on the moment, and made one or several of those neck or 
arm/wrist cuts a little deeper, then deeper  still, with the intention 
of bleeding to death.

All of which begs the question of where Silk's spirit has really gone. 
'To join Pas' is a possibility - the name 'Passilk' seems to be current, 
and there was that moment in BoTLS where Silk had a vision of Pas with 
two heads, one of them his, ie. Silk's, own (naturally Silk has no idea 
at any point that Typhon's second head is that of a slave). One may hope 
not; it's much more encouraging to think that he has gone to live with 
and in the Outsider.

jd


> The Rajan has an extensive discussion about the distinctness of the 
> human spirit and the body's life, and I think it speaks directly to 
> your question:
>
> ---------------------------------
> RTTW (HB) pg 66
> "Let me illustrate my point. A man has a house where he lives for some 
> years with his wife. They are very happy, this man and his wife. They 
> love each other, and whatever else may go amiss, they have each other. 
> Then the man's wife dies, and he leaves the house in which he has had 
> so much happiness. It has become abhorrent to him. Unless the 
> Outsider, the God of gods, restores her to life, he has no wish to see 
> that house ever again. Am I making myself clear?[snip] I am speaking 
> of the spirit departing the body at death. The body is the house I 
> mentioned, and life was the wife who made it a place of warmth and 
> comfort.[snip] Perhaps her husband goes to the gods[snip] perhaps only 
> into darkness. For the moment it doesn't matter. My point is that he 
> leaves the home she made for him, never to return.[snip]
> "Zwaar, who had been silent until then, said, "When the spirit goes a 
> man dies, I think."
> I shook my head. "He dies because you shot him through the heart. Or 
> because he suffered some disease or was kicked by a horse [snip] But 
> you bring up an important point--that the spirit is not life, nor is 
> the life spirit. And another, that the two are one. A husband is not 
> the wife, no more than a wife is her husband; but the two in 
> combination are one. What I was going to say was that though the man 
> in my little story left his house once and for all when his wife died, 
> he had left it many times previously. He had gone out to weed their 
> garden, perhaps, or gone to the market to buy shoes. In these cases he 
> left it to return."
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Also there is in this discussion, a more direct allusion to the fact 
> that Silk killed himself in grief over the death of Hyacinth:
>
> "If you mean you wish to die when I do, Oreb, I sincerly hope you 
> don't. [snip] ...under the Long Sun their rulers went so far as to 
> have their favorite wives burned alive on their funeral pyres. When I 
> die, I sincerely hope no friend or relative of mine will succumb to 
> any such cruel foolishness."
>
> u+16b9
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