Pike's ghost

Gerry Quinn · 28 Nov 2011, 13:10 · 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: gerry at bindweed.com (Gerry Quinn)
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2011 13:10:09 -0000
Subject: (urth) Pike's ghost
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W32DE1E1E63A572375FA831CFB20 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W32DE1E1E63A572375FA831CFB20 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <70C71EDFDC3B4AEBA0FD38FD41FB8551@Rover>



From: Lee Berman 

> Yes. There is an additional bit of evidence. In the back of a manteion, during a
> search for a working window, iirc, Silk discovers a painting of "Pas" depicting 
> him presiding over an orgy scene of sexual debauchery. The nursing of erection(s)
> presents us with a clear clue that Pas is the Typhon that Severian meets and that
> the depiction  of his tyrannical perversions is accurate.
> 
>  There is no glimmer of recognition in Silk. No jog of memory of some hint in the 
> Chrasmologic Writings or anything. Silk just considers it utter blasphemy, destroys
> it on the spot and never mentions it again (iirc).

Actually this is quite incorrect.  Silk recognises the painting as a ?crude mockery of Campion?s celebrated painting of Pas enthroned?.  

Campion?s painting was probably created at the time the Whorl was being fitted out (it shows bulldozers, referred to as taluses), and in the Whorl, which is unlikely to be as prone to viral images as our current society,  would have needed some time to become  famous.  The obscene parody, then, was presumably created much later.

- Gerry Quinn
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