First Exodus theory revised

Lee Berman · 11 Feb 2011, 17:39 · from 2011-February.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: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 12:39:21 -0500
Subject: (urth) First Exodus theory revised
Message-ID: <SNT123-W26AE8485F932C81269580CFEF0 at phx.gbl>

>Gerry Quinn: So you are saying the Outsider really is a wooden toy?  After all, that's 
>what the dream tells us and we certainly didn't know it.

Ah, Gerry, your pugnacious, argumentative side is on full display in this post. Still, is
probably better to not let that side get the best of you. For brevity, I'll just say that
for me this view of the Outsider hearkens back to the wooden marionette we see early in 
BotNS in Severian's dream and forward to the mythic references to the Outsider that 
we encounter later.

>I've re-read the passage containing the dream, and in fact it has a very 
>clear and obvious interpretation, which isn't really about sex and sexuality 
>although I was heading in the right direction.

If it was clear and obvious, why didn't you get it the first time? Am I really to believe
the Gerry of now is clear-sighted to the obvious but the Gerry of a couple hours ago was
muddle-sighted and confused? Perhaps the label "obvious" shouldn't be so hastily conferred,
especially if the conclusion is not obvious to everyone, even you.

>***************************************************
>[using quotation marks for italics]
>"I would claim her in that case, long before the end.  As I have so many 
>others.  As I am claiming Kypris even now because love always proceeds from 
>me, real love, true love.  First romance."
>The Outsider was the dancing man on a toy, and the water the polished 
>toy-top on which he danced with Kypris, who was Hyacinth and Mother, too. 
>"First romance", sang the Outsider with the music box.  "First romance".  It 
>was why he was called the Outsider.  He was outside -
>[Remora wakes him up]
>***************************************************

>Isn't it totally obvious what is being said here?  Kypris is the goddess of 
>LOVE.  His love for Hyacinth and his love for his mother.  Kypris, Hyacinth, 
>Mother - they are all aspects of love, which proceeds from the Outsider.
>There is absolutely no implication that they are the same human personality. 
>In fact the idea is absurd, because we know who Silk means by Mother 
>[capitalised] - he means his adoptive parent....

>Yes, there are important revelations.  The Outsider is the God of Love. 
>that's about as important a revelation as you might hope for.

Again, no it isn't obvious or everyone reading it would have gotten that interpretation
years ago on first reading, and you would have gotten it on your first reading.

I think "The Outsider is the God of Love" is an interesting interpretation worth considering.
It could be condensed to a common modern Christian aphorism, "God is Love" and perhaps that's
what Gene Wolfe intended to convey here. I don't see how that jibes with the wooden puppet or 
the later "God of Wine" association we get for The Outsider but I wouldn't dismiss your idea 
out of hand. 

My own interpretation would focus on the idea that The Outsider has directly interacted with each 
of the women mentioned in a way which is significant to Silk. I would not dismiss Marc's consideration
that the dream shows a thread of identity connection between these women as "absurd". "A who
was B who was C" implies an ABC connection to me.

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