Pike's ghost

Lee Berman · 29 Nov 2011, 20:50 · 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: Tue, 29 Nov 2011 15:50:47 -0500
Subject: (urth) Pike's ghost
Message-ID: <SNT123-W181DB1759DF9C702FEE0B0CFB30 at phx.gbl>

>Gerry Quinn: None of that can sustain even cursory scrutiny.  A ?wain? is just a 
>large cart, but that?s beside the point.  The description refers to two of Pas?s 
>bulldozers which ?were still at work upon the whorl?.  They were planting a tree 
>behind his throne.  If the mountain head were above a throne, a tree behind it 
>would be kind of invisible, no?  It has absolutely nothing to do with the mountain head.
>The orgy is on a drape Blood has ordered or acquired to cover the Sacred window in his 
>brothel.  It is an obscene parody of Campion?s well-known original painting.  Typhon did 
>not have two penises, or if he had Severian did not mention it.  The two penises in the orgy 
>painting are clearly created by a painter steeped in the two-headed iconography of Pas the 
>whorl god ? it was painted by someone in the Whorl, and could not have been painted before 
>Typhon became Pas.  [Campion may or may not have departed with the Whorl.]

Gerry, you are entitled to your opinion though I concur that it doesn't sustain even cursory
scrutiny. You are reading the text in isolationist fashion, as though it is describing some
reality rather than being a work of literary fiction which contains allusion, often to the 
author's own previous work.

In this case there is a clear, easy to see connection between this painting and Severian's 
encounter with Typhon. We don't know where it was created, Whorl or Urth, but it depicts 
Typhon on Urth, where Typhon actually had a throne. It does not depict Pas.  How does a computer 
program have a throne, not to mention preside over an orgy?

Campion's painting is a cleaned up version of this one, not the reverse.

(Blood's primary association was with Scylla, not Pas, btw)

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