Babbiehorn?: Was: a sincere question mostly for roy

David Stockhoff · 17 Nov 2011, 16:31 · from 2011-November.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: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2011 11:31:24 -0500
Subject: (urth) Babbiehorn?: Was: a sincere question mostly for roy
In-Reply-To: <1321543103.86888.YahooMailClassic at web161806.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
References: <1321543103.86888.YahooMailClassic at web161806.mail.bf1.yahoo.com>
Message-ID: <4EC536DC.9030305 at verizon.net>

On 11/17/2011 10:18 AM, Marc Aramini wrote:
> Just fading away is fine, but in that scene where he says good-bye, we have a reference to Babbie, a non-animal conglomeration spirit for Babbie, Babbie trying to communicate huh huh huh style and pointing at his "tusk", and Babbie getting angry and attacking someone who attacks one of Horn's sons, in addition to the prophecy "I see you, Horn, riding a beast with three horns."

At the end of OBW we have only the prophecy---which by rights should be 
fulfilled either by the end of OBW (Horn's tale proper) or BSS in its 
entirety (since Horn is not entirely dead and gone at the end of 
OBW)---and the tree scene. We ought to be able to guess from that, that 
Horn has gone---but the cliffhanger is, where?

Babbie is probably already part Horn, but you're saying he gets even 
more Horn in him and this comes out in IGJ. OK.

Has anybody tried to count the Horns as separate versions? Seems to me 
with all the pieces of Horn floating around they might come back 
together, each with a bit of someone else attached, maybe 3 of them, and 
that should be in Babbie. Horn's soul is gone; his mind is the Neighbor 
[N-Horn]; he joins Silk after Green [S-Horn]; he has a piece of himself 
in Babbie [B-Horn].

Can the IGJ Babbie simply be said to contain three Horns---three 
versions of Horn? I don't pretend to understand the arithmetic of 
nomadic minds, but I'd prefer an explanation like that to one that 
(mis)takes tusks for horns.
> Horn leaves the building, and all that seems to point to a very clear destination. This is textually supported by the opening character notes, from a chapter entitled Horn's book to the name listing that gives horn as the protagonist in the first volume but not for the following ones.  It also makes sense in why the sections written in IGJ do not use entirely first person to relate the stories of Horn on Green.  And if Silk killed himself, the sections in Rttw are third person because Silver Silk, the narrator, wasn't in his body.  That was the now gone Horn.
> The good-bye, the "i caught the ball", the presence of the tree, the change in prayer habits, the proselytizing, the shift in tone, the 3rd person narration places, all point to Horn being in Silk's body until the end of OBW, then leaving, but leaving Silk to imitate him as he imitated Silk in his youth.  I really can't see it otherwise.

Babbie has to be there for some good reason, too. Not just to see Horn 
off to sleep. The only difficulty I have is with the mechanism---and 
does it explain Horn's identity confusion? I'm willing to accept 
Neighbor/tree magic without entirely understanding it, and I find 
plausible James's explanation that Horn and Babbie are already 
connected, so that Horn easily thinks himself Babbie.

I also can see Mucor being present at Horn's "deathbed," calling Babbie 
to her and to him in a voice Horn first takes to be his own because he 
once called Babbie just like that, and he's asleep after all. Babbie is 
there astrally because Mucor has that power.

Narratively it fits. But someone had to DO it: means, motive, and 
opportunity. Did Horn want to go? Did Mucor want to save Horn from ... 
what? Or did Babbie do it for Horn? It seems like a conspiracy of beings 
wanted to keep a significant piece of Horn "alive." Why?

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