To the Seventh

Jim Jordan · 13 Jan 2000, 11:40 · from urth-v0028.mbox · original

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: Jim Jordan <jbjordan at gnt.net>
Subject: (urth) To the Seventh
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2000 11:40:25
Message-ID: <urth-v0028-0687 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0028/0687.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

At 09:25 PM 1/9/00 -0800, you wrote:
>The chess analogy arises in "To the Seventh", a story
>I found problematic in various ways. Nutria, do you
>think God's shifting of focus to another part of the
>board near the end will save Chance and co, diverting
>Satan long enough for the pawn to queen? And: why the
>comic book texture of the universe portrayed? I
>thought Wolfe might be implying Chance's cosmos is an
>inferior parody of reality, its "God" a demiurge...

	The title indicates to me that moving to the Eighth can only happen after
death (thus, resurrection, glorification, queenification). Getting to the
seventh (consider the number in terms of sabbath) is all God does to people
in THIS life. So, "God" turns to someone else to move forward.
	For the rest, it just struck me as an allegory. If you press an allegory
too far, it falls apart.=20
	We've had the same kind of discussion here about "Westwind." If you press
the allegory one way, the Ruler becomes a false god and some kind of
"Christof / Christ-Off" (as in *The Truman Show*). But that seems to me to
be rather far from what Wolfe rather obviously intends in a simple story....

Nutria


*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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