Sherry Gold's death

StoneOx17 · 30 May 2002, 11:40 · from urth-v0205.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: StoneOx17 at aol.com
Subject: Re: (urth) Sherry Gold's death
Date: Thu, 30 May 2002 07:40:05 EDT
Message-ID: <urth-v0205-1129 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0205/1129.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="part1_157.e93fa49.2a276995_boundary"


--part1_157.e93fa49.2a276995_boundary
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

In reply to my statement that I thought Sherry died after Weer,

mantis wrote
> Stone Ox wrote
> >I'm not convinced.  I see Sherry's death as being one instance of the
> >"everybody is dead" theme, and Weer's stroke as being the first of
> >his ailments in the afterlife (although it may be a reflection of a real
> >stroke that killed him)
,,,
> >In fact, I think Weer had his posthumous
> >stroke _because_ Sherry Gold died, and that she was the last
> >person alive who remembered him well
...
>So Sherry's death triggers Weer's wandering?  No, just a posthumous stroke,
>a turning over in the grave--the wandering is still triggered by the fall
>of the elm (hundreds of years after Sherry's death)?

The wandering is still triggered by the fall of the elm ... showing real-life 
posthumous events can have an effect on Weer's spirit.  Why not Sherry's
death as well?

>If =this= is true, then any post-stroke memories (in the factory, limping;
>the illness and death of the secretary; the letter from Peacock to Smart on
>the desktop [?]) are all of the more spacey "corridors of time" category,
>like the visits to Dr. Black (did it ever really happen?) and Dr. Van Ness
>(compilation of many visits boiled down, with bad splices), rather than the
>"realistic" category of nearly everything else.

No, I'd say rather that the stroke is filtering back into his recollections 
and
coloring them.  You have to admit =something= funny is going on with the 
stroke.  In real life, when Weer slept with Sherry, he could hardly have 
apologized to her for a stroke he had after she died.

I wrote
> >And thanks to Michael Straight for his suggestion, obvious once
> >it's been made, that the Chinese philosopher's headrest at the end means
> >that Weer will be reliving his afterlife (and not necessarily for the first
> >time).

mantis replied
>I don't know if you have addressed this or not, so I'll just go ahead: One
>problem with the "recurring loop" reading of PEACE is that there are clear
>ways to signal such a thing: FINNEGANS WAKE (and in genre, DHALGREN) uses 
>a split sentence, the opening fragment then lining up perfectly with the
>ending fragment many hundreds of pages later.  The text is a circle, no
>question about it.
>
>The framing structure of PEACE does not really allow such a thing: it is
>quite linear. A. D. Weer starts writing in a notebook (the beginning) and
>then he stops writing (the end).  It would not have been too hard at all
>for an ending fragment to match up to a beginning fragment, but it did not
>happen.  Nor would it have been difficult if Weer had a notion to express
>himself in non-writing, through song or sculpture, for example (change of
>media, but the same story), but that did not happen, either.

I have to admit I'm not so sure about the circularity.  You could also take 
the 
hope of resurrection from the Chinese philosopher's pillow as a warning 
against belief in reincarnation, and not as a sign that Weer's ghost will 
relive 
his afterlife.  Given how little I know about Purgatory, I can't even say 
which 
interpretation is more in line with Catholic thought.   

>Speaking of which, I'm hoping I can get Gene Wolfe to go to the Winchester
>House in San Jose, or tag along if he is already going!
>
>Oo, even better: get some friends to go dressed up as characters from
>PEACE.  Have Sherry Gold wandering around inside Winchester House, bobby
>socks and all.

Good luck ... that sounds like great fun!

Stone Ox





-- 
--part1_157.e93fa49.2a276995_boundary
Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

<HTML>In reply to my statement that I thought Sherry died after Weer,

mantis wrote
> Stone Ox wrote
> >I'm not convinced.  I see Sherry's death as being one instance of the
> >"everybody is dead" theme, and Weer's stroke as being the first of
> >his ailments in the afterlife (although it may be a reflection of a real
> >stroke that killed him)
,,,
> >In fact, I think Weer had his posthumous
> >stroke _because_ Sherry Gold died, and that she was the last
> >person alive who remembered him well
...
>So Sherry's death triggers Weer's wandering?  No, just a posthumous stroke,
>a turning over in the grave--the wandering is still triggered by the fall
>of the elm (hundreds of years after Sherry's death)?

The wandering is still triggered by the fall of the elm ... showing real-life 
posthumous events can have an effect on Weer's spirit.  Why not Sherry's
death as well?

>If =this= is true, then any post-stroke memories (in the factory, limping;
>the illness and death of the secretary; the letter from Peacock to Smart on
>the desktop [?]) are all of the more spacey "corridors of time" category,
>like the visits to Dr. Black (did it ever really happen?) and Dr. Van Ness
>(compilation of many visits boiled down, with bad splices), rather than the
>"realistic" category of nearly everything else.

No, I'd say rather that the stroke is filtering back into his recollections and
coloring them.  You have to admit =something= funny is going on with the 
stroke.  In real life, when Weer slept with Sherry, he could hardly have 
apologized to her for a stroke he had after she died.

I wrote
> >And thanks to Michael Straight for his suggestion, obvious once
> >it's been made, that the Chinese philosopher's headrest at the end means
> >that Weer will be reliving his afterlife (and not necessarily for the first
> >time).

mantis replied
>I don't know if you have addressed this or not, so I'll just go ahead: One
>problem with the "recurring loop" reading of PEACE is that there are clear
>ways to signal such a thing: FINNEGANS WAKE (and in genre, DHALGREN) uses 
>a split sentence, the opening fragment then lining up perfectly with the
>ending fragment many hundreds of pages later.  The text is a circle, no
>question about it.
>
>The framing structure of PEACE does not really allow such a thing: it is
>quite linear. A. D. Weer starts writing in a notebook (the beginning) and
>then he stops writing (the end).  It would not have been too hard at all
>for an ending fragment to match up to a beginning fragment, but it did not
>happen.  Nor would it have been difficult if Weer had a notion to express
>himself in non-writing, through song or sculpture, for example (change of
>media, but the same story), but that did not happen, either.

I have to admit I'm not so sure about the circularity.  You could also take the 
hope of resurrection from the Chinese philosopher's pillow as a warning 
against belief in reincarnation, and not as a sign that Weer's ghost will relive 
his afterlife.  Given how little I know about Purgatory, I can't even say which 
interpretation is more in line with Catholic thought.   

>Speaking of which, I'm hoping I can get Gene Wolfe to go to the Winchester
>House in San Jose, or tag along if he is already going!
>
>Oo, even better: get some friends to go dressed up as characters from
>PEACE.  Have Sherry Gold wandering around inside Winchester House, bobby
>socks and all.

Good luck ... that sounds like great fun!

Stone Ox


</HTML>

--part1_157.e93fa49.2a276995_boundary--
An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net