Beans and other pollutants

Charles Dye · 10 Feb 1998, 09:11 · from urth-v0007.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: raster at highfiber.com (Charles Dye)
Subject: (urth) Beans and other pollutants
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 09:11:35
Message-ID: <urth-v0007-0550 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0007/0550.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable


[Posted from URTH, a mailing list about Gene Wolfe's New Sun and other work=
s]

CRCulver at aol.com writes:

>In _Shadow_, chapter XXXV, there is the tale of the woman who brings black
>beans from the stars. This woman threatens to cast them into the sea unless
>she were obeyed. The lords of the time "a hundred times more complete in
>their dominion than [the] Autarch...had her seized and torn to bits."
>This story seems, in my opinion, to show the planting of the black hole in
>the Old Sun. I think that the sea mentioned is not Ocean but rather
>Oroborus(sp?), which is outer space. The lords, I think, are the monarchs,
>because they were more powerful and had a larger empire than those of the
>autarchy. Thus, the black hole was put into the sun because of the tyranny=
 of
>the monarchs.

I had interpreted this as the arrival of Abaia, Erebus, Arioch, and company.
(Like Baldanders, we're told, they grow ....)  Still, perhaps the one is
symbolic of the other?

>There is an alternative interpretation of this story. Jonas mentions that
>this happens before the city was called Nessus, because "the river" was not
>yet poisoned. Perhaps the black beans that the woman brought from the stars
>were simply a device used to poison Gyoll.
>I would like to know the etymology of 'Nessus' and what relation it has to
>poison.

Nessus, if I recall aright, was a centaur murdered by way of a poisoned
cloak.  (Larry Niven's "Ringworld" includes puppeteers named Nessus and
Chiron.)  As for the poisoning of the river, I don't see anything
terribly mysterious there.  Gyoll is both the sewer and the drinking-
water source for a very large city.  The city climbs the river as the
lower reaches become too polluted to sustain even the most desperately
poor.

raster at highfiber.com

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