Silk's origin

Lee Berman · 22 Oct 2011, 16:23 · from 2011-October.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2011 12:23:40 -0400
Subject: (urth) Silk's origin
Message-ID: <SNT123-W881154B40A88F08305D08CFE90 at phx.gbl>

>Antonio Pedro Marques: I find your approach radically different from Lee's. 

>You're a bit like Sherlock Holmes, trying to make sense of the evidence, 

>trimming out the impossible and putting your trust in the however improbable. 

I agree that Gerry and I have different approaches but I'm not sure this 

characterizes the difference. I see Gerry's approach as imbued with an 

essential reliance on parsimony, much like Roy C. Lackey's before him.

He works very hard to find evidence to contradict what seem like improbable

explanations in favor of more pedestrian ones. If there is a mantra to be

found in Gerry's posts it is "very unlikely".

>But I don't think anyone can accuse you of distorting the evidence.

I wasn't going to mention it, but since you bring it up...There was a recently

illustration of the difference between my and Gerry's approach. I found a Wolfe

quote which contradicted an idea of mine. So I posted it and said I was wrong.

Gerry recently noted a Wolfe quote which contradicted his interpretation and he

said Wolfe was in error.

>Lee on the other hand works mostly like a genetic algorithm. He thinks of some 

>external myth or theme or leitmotiv and tries to shoehorn the story into it.

This is not correct. I had a youthful interest in Greek and Norse mythology but

I never pursued it into adulthood (until recently). Rather than shoehorning

mythology into Gene Wolfe's work, the reverse has happened.  Gene WOlfe's work

has forced me to delve much deeper into mythology than I ever had before. In

fact, I was pretty proud of myself on first reading BotNS that I knew who 

mythological Typhon was. But I didn't really know about his relationship to 

Echidna and Scylla and Sphynx and Phaea and Cerberus, not to mention the Egyptian

and Assyrian cognate wind gods such as Typhon-Set and Pazuzu. Long Sun forced me to 

delve into the myths and learn about them.

Likewise for Father Inire. My first intuition was that he was patterned after some

sort of Greek god but I couldn't figure out which. Hephaestus? Hermes? Prometheus?

He seemed to have a bit of each. But I just had the feeling Wolfe's intentions were

more specific than that.

It wasn't until the end of RttW that I had my answer. The Outsider's mother is Semele?

I didn't know that meant Dionysus and when I first looked that up I couldn't see the

significance of the wine god to the rest of the story. It took more research to learn 

that Dionysus was a primordial god who, after the decline of the Greek pantheon, managed 

to absorb qualities from all the pantheon gods and become a central deity to the gnostic 

traditions which pre-dated Christianity.

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