do the Hierogrammates care about the megatherians?

Lee Berman · 21 May 2011, 23:44 · from 2011-May.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: Sat, 21 May 2011 19:44:43 -0400
Subject: (urth) do the Hierogrammates *care* about the megatherians?
Message-ID: <SNT123-w106660F9E74DFE20D9CA79CF700 at phx.gbl>

>James Wynn: I think your responses to Lee's points were argumentative without 
>touching on the point he is making.

This is in Gerry's nature and I think I can accept that. Harping on the "giant
sloth" bit was an error (the correct term for that creature is "megatheriam") but 
what bothers me is the attempt at using it for reductio ad absurdum. To me that is 
a dirty trick to play on a fellow member of the small group of passionate Wolfe fans. 
Why not be respectful of those with whom you share such a narrow interest? But if you 
can't you can't. I have this one cousin who...well, anyway. Regardless of his abrasive 
nature I will always consider him part of the family. Gerry also.

James I agree with your negative evidence comment. Why wasn't it Group of 19 and 
Cadroe of the 13 Stones?  I think WOlfe is a careful writer. If he didn't want his
readers to connect Megatherians with Ascians rulers and Cadroe's stones I think he 
would have made the effort to not throw a bunch of 17's at us, assuring that this 
discussion would never occur. Surely he cares at least that much about us.

I have always liked the suggestion that the number 17 had some reference to communism.
The Politburo suggestion is a good one. I've contorted the number of existing communist 
nations on earth in the 70's at 17, as another attempt to find some meaning.

The thing is, that does nothing to negate other connections. In fact I would expect 
Wolfe's somewhat persistent use of that number to have a simultaneous mythological, a 
political and perhaps a personal significance. Even Gerry, with his insistence on 
simplified explanations, has admitted that Wolfe often writes at multiple levels of meaning
and understanding.

Anyway, for me the connector of Cadroe's stones to the black bean (megatherian origin) story is
the conversation of Severian and Agilus. There, the terms "seeds" and "stones" are connected.
The connection between beans and seeds isn't hard to make. The overall picture it paints of 
megatherians (and hierogrammates) is a coherent and poignant one, as I think my chess game 
analogy earlier illustrates.

For me, it was a revelation when I learned that Wolfe didn't invent any of the terms or names he 
uses in BotNS. It would certainly diminish the story for me if I thought he was throwing a numeral
at us over and over for no reason or as a red herring. For me, Wolfe creates his mystery not with
a bunch of false paths but by making the true path so difficult to follow.

p.s. Like David I also like the observation that the ringing of the bells is a figurative 
expression that the New Sun person is disturbing the curtain as the New Sun celestial body
is disturbing Urth.

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