Father Inire Theory cont.

Lee Berman · 14 Dec 2010, 00:29 · from 2010-December.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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2010 19:29:18 -0500
Subject: (urth) Father Inire Theory cont.
Message-ID: <SNT123-W6324ADA19D2DF9BDB77F1DCF130 at phx.gbl>

>David Stockhoff- I agree that Inire does a strange disappearing act. But he might be on The Ship 
>unbeknownst to Severian.

Yes, that is what I am suggesting (or that Severian is lying to us about not knowing)

>and he might have simply hopped into a mirror. Who knows where he called home.

Well, I do. But that's not much help to others, I know. Not sure we want to go with the travelling
through mirrors bit. That path seems mostly reserved for monsters. I think there is a reason Severian
took a ship to Yesod rather than that big mirror Book.

>As for there being only one Ship ... that's fine, except that Jonas's ship crashed. I would more readily 
>accept a single Ship that can move between Briah and Yesod.

Yes, that's what I am proposing. I haven't been following the discussion on the Antechamber=spaceship very
closely. Is there some reason the crashed ship HAS to be interstellar and not a local solar system tender?

>Jeff Wilson- I don't think it's important to see "again" a character who never made an overt appearance to 
>begin with. There's no reason for Inire to be around after his mission of helping bring the New Sun is 
>compelted, in fact having him around afterward would itself be a loose end to deal with.

It's all in what we each hope to get out of the story Jeff. To me, writing in an important, central character
and then dropping him without any real explanation is sloppy writing. I don't think that is one of Gene WOlfe's
faults. If it doesn't bother you, that's cool. I think the story can be read in that way only.  If I understand, 
in your view, the character of Father Inire signifies...well...nothing much I guess.

In my view, this is another universe. A spiritually inferior universe to our own. A Gnostic universe. In my view, 
Father Inire in all his myriad, diverse roles, represents the inferior Gnostic version of God, a Dionysian demiurge 
who has created everything and can't help but constantly interfere with all that he has made, poking and prodding 
his creations to their destinies, not allowing Free Will.  In some manner, this god has fathered a son
who becomes an inferior, gnostic Christ-figure and is telling us his life story from his own point of view. This 
Christ-figure brings about an inferior Flood which creates a cleansed planet with 4 gnostically paired gods of dark, 
light, male and female, leading eventually to the most potent gnostic, Dionysian holy figure of all, The Green Man. 

For me, my view of Father Inire has a lot of meat on its bones and I prefer it to the "nothing much" model. I just mean 
it works better for me. Jeff you have said you don't like the that my Father Inire Theory is so "global". Perhaps 
you now understand just how global it really is, so I must expect you have absolutely no use for it. Still....

Jeff, I'm going to guess that there is a very, very important "person" in your life, someone central to your creation 
and the core of your being who has never made an overt appearance. Am I right? I think this "person" is important to
Gene WOlfe also.

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