Mirror Image Freedom

Lee Berman · 15 Dec 2010, 15:48 · 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: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 10:48:24 -0500
Subject: (urth) Mirror Image Freedom
Message-ID: <SNT123-W181A887A993C660EC9CDF8CF140 at phx.gbl>

>David Stockhoff- You're right---that's a huge, diametrical opposition. Stark differences 
>in freedom seem to appear in the series, as well as the Wizard Knight.
>What do you think it means?

Heh, good question! You made me think about it. I have to be cautious to not inject my own
views into things, but rather focus on what I think are Gene Wolfe's (my own socio-anthropological
viewpoint is that individual freedom and government control are, along with all political and
religious variations, a function of human adaptation to the prevailing environment of the time).

>From a gnostic point of view, order/control in opposition to freedom/chaos is found in the 
metaphors of Apollonian vs. Dionysian aspects of human nature. Apollonian being the scientific
male side and Dionysian being the female (or perhaps hermaphroditic) mystical side.

(haven't we seen a conflict between these two approaches in recent debates in here? As I mentioned
in one post, my approach here is seen in an entirely different light when I am perceived as female;
testosterone levels drop and the alpha male snarling subsides)

I am more and more considering that The Cumaean should be seen as the female aspect of Father Inire 
just as Tzadkiel has "his" female side. Since the Commonwealth is a controlled, regulated, rigidly
maintained place, we have *Father* Inire as its de facto ruler. We never see Tzadkiel as captain of
the rather mystical, free-wheeling Ship on the outgoing voyage. But on the return trip we do see Tzadkiel 
sitting in the captain's chair and at that time Tzadkiel is female.

>From a poltiical point of view, Gene Wolfe is a mixed bag. He (like me) was born and raised in a society
which (some say fanatically) obsesses about individual freedom.  But as an engineer and scholar We can guess 
he has an appreciation for the need for a rigidly ordered society also; though order through a royal hierarchy 
seems to appeal to him more than order imposed by communist ideology and politburo committees (Group
of 17).

By assigning the Dionysian, personal freedom loving domain of BotNS to his Angel and the Apollonian rigidly 
controlled domain to his Devil (sorry) I think Wolfe is suggesting that if we cannot have perfect balance we 
ought to always err on the side of freedom. Having Tzadziel's son, Venant, be killed during the battle on Yesod 
probably invokes his recognition of the price we must pay for freedom.

I have not read Wizard Knight yet. Since it was written by Wolfe post-Cold War I would be interested in finding 
any socio-political differences from BotNS. Spoilers by those who have read it are welcome.

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