the miracle of apu-punchau (text based questions)

Jeff Wilson · 12 Jan 2011, 17:13 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2011 11:13:31 -0600
Subject: (urth) the miracle of apu-punchau (text based questions)
In-Reply-To: <867558.5682.qm at web161803.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
References: <867558.5682.qm at web161803.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4D2DE13B.8070803 at io.com>

On 1/12/2011 10:47 AM, Marc Aramini wrote:
> So are the constellations Sev sees supposed to be visible from the other side of the world at that time?  Is this a mirror like effect, a portal, something else?  I don't understand that passage very well.  What would cause unseeable constellations to appear in the sky?

A giant mirror, or giant mirrors, like the sails on Tzadkiel's ship. 
Given F, B, and O also visit him at this time, I would say it is the 
very same ship.

>> From chapter xliv, the morning tide
> "There was a shimmering azure light.  The claw had returned - not the claw destroyed by ascian artillery, nor even the claw I had given the chiliarch of Typhon's Praetorians, but the Claw of the Conciliator, the gem I had found in my sabretache ... The claw endured, shining and swaying against the dark void. ... I lifted my head, opened my eyes, and spat a stream of crystal fluid like no water of Urth's; it seemed not water at all, but a richer atmosphere, corroborant as the winds of Yesod."
>
> I am assuming here the claw he speaks of is the new sun in the sky, right?  But what is this water he's spitting that is like Yesod, and nothing like the water of Urth?

He's exhaling air, and the silvery bubbles have a lustre in the renewed 
sunlight that he has seen before only on Yesod.


> The chapter title here is old lands and new, but the demons making the claim that the sea lift the continents to something new  seems to have a significance I do not immediately grasp.  Is this just another city on Urth, an older one than Nessus?

No pat answer here. It could be a more ancient human city, or it could 
be a city built by inhuman Things ala Lovecraft.

> Here Sev has "abandoned" his life and slips into this watery grave, but whether this is real, imagined, where it is exactly, seems terribly confused, and I wondered if anyone had made any sense of the bolt that cleaves ocean and suddenly leaves him deposited going through the curtain of the REAL citadel (like the other one was not?)

I am pretty sure he is dreaming, fitfully as he adjusts to breathing 
underwater. Possibly another Lovercraft reference, R'lyeh is a sunken 
city where the Cthulhu lies dead but dreaming.

> So Severian is Green. That last quote is not important at all. Seriously though there are a lot of weird weird weird things going on at the end of Urth that I just can't seem to get my head around,

This is probably intentional; there should be more going on in the birth 
and death of worlds than Severian is able to perceive and communicate.

 > and Apheta saying that planetary bodies can be created doesn't help 
very much.

She says stars and planets can be created *in Yesod*, and they are not 
the same as the objects Severian knows by those same words.


-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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