Silk beating two horses, Orpine rotting to vines, and Wolfe's dedication

Gerry Quinn · 15 Feb 2011, 16:12 · from 2011-February.txt.gz

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From: gerryq at indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:12:46 -0000
Subject: (urth) Silk beating two horses, Orpine rotting to vines,
	and Wolfe's dedication
References: <376975.70123.qm at web161806.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <A51B3B389E00408E9AD0043E1C46801A@jill>

From: "Marc Aramini" <marcaramini at yahoo.com>

> I don't want to always incite words between Lee and Gerry, but Gerry, when
> I read something that I think is interesting or confusing, I like to write 
> down a
> few quick thoughts and post to the discussion list, because, well, maybe
> somebody has a better understanding.  Sorry about the imprecision.  Its 
> not
> theorizing in any but the loosest sense, like, gee, here is an image,
> does anybody think it could be this or this?

I wasn't being critical.  I was just making the point that Wolfe is often 
pretty straightforward if people would just let him be ;-)

> As far as the two horses, sometimes I get the feeling that perhaps it is 
> Auk and
> Silk who are sharing the burden here instead of Silk and Severian.  Who is 
> the
> beaten, tortured horse in the Silk, Sev grafting?  Or is it more like 
> Piaton and
> Typhon?  Two many "yoked" pairs to make a great comparison, but they are
> called, I think, "brother" horses.

At a basic level the horse imagery comes from the two real horses that 
pulled the deadcoach Silk rode in that morning.  To interpret the dream we 
need to work out what they mean metaphorically.  The obvious metaphor is 
that they represent the urges or actions of the dreamer   Certainly, Silk in 
the dream is riding the deadcoach.  That makes it hard for one horse to be 
Silk and one horse somebody else  Typhon, if Silk were for some reason 
dreaming about riding him, would surely be a single horse with two heads. 
I'm at a loss to know what Severian would have to do with anything in the 
Whorl.

Of course, by the metaphor both horses can be considered parts of Silk.

They are brother horses because they share the traces of the deadcoach, no 
more.

> As far as saving the manteion obsessively rather than saving the whorl, I 
> think that
> works on one level but the brutality of the whipping, to death, does not 
> seem to
> parallel that situation well in my mind.

The horse is not being whipped to death as such, but to exhaustion.  But 
these are dream horses, not real ones.  Whipping the horse just means taking 
a course of action.  The dead horse probably represents the fruitlessness of 
the wrong action.

But remember the central imagery of the dream - the grave going down too 
deep, the velvet background of space and stars at its bottom, the dying 
ecology of the Whorl.  What can that mean other than what it says, plain and 
simple?  And knowing that, what else can the horses mean other than Silk's 
actions as they pertain to Exodus?  [You could try to squeeze Auk and Silk 
into their shoes, with Silk as the whipped horse, but this doesn't really 
work for a number of reasons, mainly that Silk does not fail in the end even 
though he stays behind.]

- Gerry Quinn

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