Tracking Song

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 03 Jun 2002, 17:26 · from urth-v0206.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: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy at siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (urth) Tracking Song
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 2002 10:26:18 -0700
Message-ID: <urth-v0206-1164 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0206/1164.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Nutria then Alga wrote...

> > Certainly the Bible gives no hint of an ultimately=20
> > saved Cain, and I know of no pseudigraphical literature
> > that does. But it looks to me as if Wolfe might be
> > playing that trick here.

> But Ratty, way back when, someone, maybe you, silenced me=20
> on some rant by pointing out that Cutthroat is loved=20
> wherever hegoes. By  everyone. Even when he is menaced=20
> underground it isthe immediate affection that everyone=20
> seems to feel for him immediately that saves him. How does=20
> that follow a Cain reading? The mark? If so, that needs a
> bit of explanation.

Genesis 4:14=20
	But the LORD said to him, "Not so; if anyone kills Cain,=20
	he will suffer vengeance seven times over." Then the LORD=20
	put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill=20
	him.

Okay, this is a little ambiguous ... the two statements may
be taken as related in (at least) two different ways:

1) The mark effectively informs anyone who finds Cain that God
   will take sevenfold vengeance on anyone who kills him;
2) the mark in some way directly prevents anyone who finds Cain
   from killing him.

_IF_ we read "Tracking Song" as a riff on Cain -- concerning=20
which I remain not fully convinced -- then we'd have to=20
conclude that Mr Wolfe had based his story on the second
interpretation.

--Blattid

--=20

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