Decoding "Tracking Song"

John Bishop · 24 Oct 1997, 09:57 · from urth-v0005.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: John Bishop <jbishop at ch.hp.com>
Subject: (urth) Decoding "Tracking Song"
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 09:57:08
Message-ID: <urth-v0005-0356 at digest.urth.net>
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[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other work=
s]

  I looked up "cim" in the OED and the OED supplement;
  there is a "cime", an alternate spelling for "cyme",
  which is a technical term for a particular kind of
  bud ("a head of unexpanded leaves").  This doesn't fit.

  Here's the Cim name quote (p 199 of the 1980 Timescape
  pb edition of IODDAOSAOS):

      When I was born my father wished to name me
      Seven Snows, which is a common name for girls
      amoung our people.  But I was born while he
      was away in his boat; and before he returned,
      my mother had left her bed and seen the Cim
      blowing from tree to tree like a soft star in
      the air, and completed the naming.

  Re-reading that passage I am struck by the way it
  carries hints of meaning in all the phrases: the other
  name, the boat, the implied customs of naming, the
  relations between the sexes in her people.

  It's also not clear what the Cim could be: is this
  a single thing or a stuff?  The best real parallel
  I've seen is the floating dandelion-like seeds of
  some trees, which in the spring sometimes float in
  clouds from their parent trees.  That's a bit star-
  like, but not like "a star".

  Re Nashhwonk: yes, the description of the fight makes
  the "chair" sound much more like moose antlers (it
  can cover his head) or elk antlers (many sharp points).
  I conceed.  North America it is.

  The tone of the interactions between the narrator and
  the Nashhwonk named Mankiller (and where else have
  we seen _that_ concept?  This too is no accident!)
  is interesting--the moose is confident and friendly;
  it's a surprise when he dies, as you expect him to
  continue after such an introduction.

           -John
 =20

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