Like a good neighbor

Lee Berman · 23 Nov 2011, 13:49 · 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: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 08:49:18 -0500
Subject: (urth) Like a good neighbor
Message-ID: <SNT123-W2642DD74464C3D52764F98CFC90 at phx.gbl>

>Jerry Friedman: I'd say there's a vital connection between Severian and Jesus. 
>I'm glad people don't shorthand "Severian echoes Jesus in some ways" to "Severian 
>is Jesus"...The solution might be to avoid unusual senses of "is".

Well, it is a point worth mentioning, Jerry. But as you note, I would not be tempted 
to say "Severian is Jesus" (nor would anyone else here, I think).

The problem crops up in trying to describe beings who are plural identities in the 
story. We have the easiest time of it with Tzadkiel, because we are shown so much of
him/her. Still, we are forced to resort to such slashed gender pronouns and descriptors
such as "mirror book Tzadkiel", "fairy Tzadkiel" and "hairy blob Zak", "caveman Zak", etc.
All the same being yet all significantly different in size, appearance and function.

It becomes much more difficult to describe other plural beings who are not depicted as
clearly such as Scylla/Cilinia, Echidna/The Mother, Abaia/undines, Neighbors and Father 
Inire (I think). 

It gets even worse when the identity cards get shuffled and redealt as for Typhon/Pas, 
Silk, Horn, and Pig/Babbie.

>Sergei Soloviev: My feeling is that while in Severian Wolfe investigates a personalty 
>that in some ways echoes Jesus, in the story of Horn and Silk he explores a "growth" 
>of a saint

I agree Sergei, except on one point.  All saints are dead. Severian shows no signs of
being able to die. I suspect he never will. He will merely fade away into legend as
all the other mythological immortals have done.

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