Father Inire as a giant vegetable

Lee Berman · 09 Nov 2011, 13:22 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2011 08:22:41 -0500
Subject: (urth) Father Inire as a giant vegetable
Message-ID: <SNT123-W2352467CA8265071FF92DDCFDF0 at phx.gbl>

>Gerry Quinn: Ah, how wrong I was to discount the vegetable and fish imagery that 
>permeates BotNS, focusing *instead* on the travails of some pitiful wandering human 
>and his species!..Vegetables versus fish is *the key*!

I think Gerry has been on this list too long. His subconscious is starting to absorb
the deeper structure of the narrative, even if his conscious mind resists.

You are 2/3 right Gerry. There is dynamic of conflict on Urth but not only between 
creatures of ocean and land, but also of sky. We see the same tri-partite dynamic
on Blue.

If only he could avoid the thinking which corrals his thinking into using terms like
"instead" and "the key" as though there is one and only one way to understand the text
and our goal is to determine which one is "best" and discard the rest.

I don't quite get it. You don't have to be a literature professor to understand the concept
of multi-layered analysis. Science requires a similar mode of thinking. Does a physicist rant 
that he lives on earth not some stinking solar system or galaxy and that he is composed of head, 
arms and legs not atoms? Does a morphologist run around screaming at the ecologists that he is 
not some part of a larger integrated system of living creatures and then yell at the 
microbiologists that he is not some sack of little jelly globs called cells? 

What gives? ;- )

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