Silkhorn as Blue god

Lee Berman · 10 Dec 2012, 04:11 · from 2012-December.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: Sun, 9 Dec 2012 23:11:05 -0500
Subject: (urth) Silkhorn as Blue god
Message-ID: <SNT123-W19B2683AD47ABF6A9FFD15CF490 at phx.gbl>

I don't know if this has been noted before but at the end of
OBW, the narrator is telling several stories at once in typical
confusing fashion, shuttling between them with each new paragraph.
Parsing out one thread it seems to me that not only is Horn conflated
with Silk, but that character is conflated with Babbie, and blind Pig 
(and perhaps blind Tartaros also), with the suggestion of possession by 
Whorl gods via a sacred Window. At the very end of the book, there is a 
very similar vibe as at the end of UotNS, where Severian is recognized 
as a god of a watery planet.

Horn is camping on a river island and calling to Babbie. Then:

>Someone on shore called again for Babbie and I understood that he meant
>me; it never so much as occured to me then that I had sometimes been 
>called "Silk" or "Horn"...I waded ashore and set off through the forest
>at a trot...I found him in the forest, sitting in the dark under the
>trees. I could not see him. It was too dark to see anything. But I knelt
>beside him and laid my head upon his knee, and he comforted me.

Later, the narrator meets a couple kids (Brother and Sister) in the woods.
He teaches them how to fish and hunt. The kids see and interact with the 
Vanished people sometimes. The narrator says:

>Last night I dreamed that Pig, Hound and I ran into an abandoned house to 
>get out of the rain. It seemed familiar and I set off to explore it.  I saw
>a clock--and the hands were on twelve. I knew that it was noon, not midnight,
>althought the windows were black as pitch...

>..Nothing about my dream of an angry and vindictive Scylla who talked like
>Oreb, the dream that woke me screaming and so terrified Brother and Sister:
>"Window! Window! Window!"

>I asked them [Brother and Sister] about the Vanished Gods. They said there 
>was one in the forest, so I told them about him. And a lot more, things that 
>I should keep to myself. I tried to teach them how to pray, and found they 
>already knew although they did not have the word.

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