walk through brush magic

maa32 · 11 Feb 2002, 15:36 · from urth-v0202.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: maa32 <maa32 at dana.ucc.nau.edu>
Subject: (urth) walk through brush magic
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 08:36:04 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0202-134 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0202/134.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Woah! I never considered the connotations of the "magic" abilities that Sil=
k=20
obviously has until it was phrased in a previous post as "walk through brus=
h=20
magic."  This seems to me a pretty obvious affinity with plants and scrubs =
-=20
maybe he is a tree man. (Pig can avoid trees because he has sonar, being a=20
godling machine). I think that particular power (avoid flora) really jives=20
with my tree theories - perhaps Silk has some tree in him.

Another strange power is the narrator's ability to change the story of Fava=20
while she is telling it.  I actually think that this is an ability that Sil=
k=20
has and can exert on everyone.  People will tell stories about him, and he =
can=20
influence those stories unconcsciously (or consciously).  I think this is=20
another of his special qualities - I think he actually influenced the writi=
ng=20
of The Book of the Long Sun and the intercalary chapters of Return to the=20
Whorl - which makes a much better case for a possible divine nature in Silk=
:=20
he can inspire texts written about him just as God can inspire biblical tex=
ts=20
without them being literally true (in a Catholic sense, anyway). However, I=20
think this is an engineered talent he always had.  Notice how quickly peopl=
e=20
are telling stories of his enlightenment in Nightside after he just tells o=
ne=20
or two people.  His power involves people'sm willingness to tell stories ab=
out=20
him.
I asked Wolfe the question "Can Silk change the accounts written about him,=
 as=20
he did the story of the inhuma, to hide or obscure things?"
Wolfe responded: "I don't think Silk would do something like that unless it=20
was for emphasis." He did not deny that this was a special quality Silk had=
.=20
Since that question, Wolfe has not addressed any more of my inquiries.
Marc Aramini

--=20

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