vanished people=Hieros

David Stockhoff · 11 Nov 2011, 20:05 · from 2011-November.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Fri, 11 Nov 2011 15:05:09 -0500
Subject: (urth) vanished people=Hieros
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W552A6EF8B9E53AD2B4AE1BCFDD0 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W552A6EF8B9E53AD2B4AE1BCFDD0 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <4EBD7FF5.8050107 at verizon.net>

On 11/11/2011 2:25 PM, Lee Berman wrote:
>
>> Dan'l Danehy-Oakes: I think that one thing that has been missed in all this is
>> that we are told that, under the dying Old Sun, the stars are visible at midday.
>> So the "stone that puts the stars to flight" must be the _New_ Sun.
>
>
> An excellent point upon which I agree fully. Judging by their posts I think others
>
> might be at least grudgingly in agreement.

More than grudgingly! Either the stone is Severian and the New Sun and 
Morning is the new "day" or Ushas (a heavy weight for the poem to bear), 
or the stone is a presentiment or herald of the New Sun's coming, but 
one that has no particular clear corresponding element in BotNS.

BTW, Skuld is only mentioned about 3 times: as "bright", as the World of 
the Future, and in the following from URTH:

"A COCK crowed; and as the stone swung back, I saw the starry sky and 
the single bright star (blue now with its velocity) that was myself. I 
was whole once more. And near! Fair Skuld, rising with the dawn, was not 
so brilliant and did not show so broad a disk."

Does anyone propose that Wolfe wrote the book around the poem? If not, 
then the correspondence is going to be inexact at best---it is a 
question with no final form and therefore no absolute answer. Here 
Severian is both the New Sun and NOT the New Sun. Go figure.

It's already hard enough to interpret a poem in two versions; we can 
hardly expect to map an unassailable, unambiguous interpretation from 
them to another work. We are already moving across languages. In this 
poem, we have only juxtapositions of images to work with.

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