Index · 3 messages · 1 voice · 04 May – 09 May 2018

some help? Mary King (famous equestrian), Riverman (famous stud horse), and horse races vs. the Odal rune (inheritance) in Sorcerer's house

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Marc Aramini04 May 2018, 14:11as archived

So ... I am almost done with the Sorcerer's House writeup, but Gene has doubled down on obscurity here. As those who have read the book know, a spectral horse appears in the same chapter as Kiki, right in the middle of the book, when Bax has a vision of himself on the side of the road after his brother has assaulted a police officer (Kate Finn) and been arrested. For those familiar with my thesis, you will recall that I argue that the house visions are born of a kikimora spirit, and that she sometimes wears a foxes appearance, but that there are two such spirits, one more malevolent than the other, with the benevolent one being Martha Murrey (who says she is a "scarecrow" after traveling - the kikimora name can mean "scarecrow). Martha is 40 years old in appearance, Bax is 40 years old, the butler appeared to cause havoc in the town 40 years ago - the kikimora can be born when a mother or child dies in childbirth, and those things add up pretty nicely. The Odal Rune looks like a fish and is found on all three rings of the triangles.( ? ) It means inheritance. Since I argue that in patterns of three two are supernatural are not real while one is real, the Odal rune on the inner ring suggests to me that the Skotos strip is a real inheritance (i.e. - he is the son of Alexander Skotos and maybe Mary King, who dies in childbirth and gives birth to the spirit of ... (?) (They appear in letter 20 BEFORE Mary King's context is introduced, as nebulous as it is - she shows up to disappear by the cemetery, on the same night Kiki appeared to say that she goes to the river to wash her shroud.) Both Mary and Skotos showing up in the same letter, even though Bax disavows any relationship, suggests to me that they might be Bax's real parents, and that the Skotos strip is his real inheritance, though his mother would then have died long ago - and how Kiki, Lupine, Winkle, and Martha Murrey map onto that is still a headache. HERE COMES THE BIG PROBLEM - his first hand switch occurs when he asks Martha Murrey about gambling and the horse races. He mentions gambling quite a bit, even associating Skotos with Sandy Scott, whom he knew from Churchill Downs. WELL ... Mary King, the only famous one I could find, is a well known and successful equestrian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_King_(equestrian) Riverman is a famous and successful race winner and sire of champion horses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverman That's a really, really big coincidence. So ... funding the house through horse races, which would pretty much eliminate the possibility that something happened forty years ago that caused these spirits to be born (Emlyen and Iuean are internal visions manifested by the Kikimora in this reading - whatever happens to them (hit three times with a stick) immediately happens to Bad (hit back three times with a stick)) VS. Mary King and Skotos as his parents, with something occurring which precipitated the birth of a Kikimora spirit in childbirth 40 years ago ... One more thing. Manjushri says that he must team up with the woman "he" struck to come out ahead. Bax notices a falseness to Manjushri's claims about what is holy (because it is a kind of deceitful illusion, like the facefox), but then teams up with Kate Finn so that charges are not pressed. Kate Finn appears right after the first dismemberment and also, I think, drops him off when he finds another body part at his house. This team up is more than finding George in the house - it is so that he can keep George from getting a record when he takes George's place. She also sees Goldwurm's tower from the window during their search (I am pretty sure, but will review this). Martha Murrey says that she had a friend named Nina O'Brien who was run down in the street but people only cared about the Hound of Horror stories ... If she is a spirit that lingers forty years passed, then ... who is Nina O'Brien and when did she die? (this does create a weird link between the deceased friend of Martha and the hound of horror, but that is nebulous). Emlyn winds up in a pact with Lupine - does this parallel Bax's final alliance with Kate Finn? Is the Irish connection of O'Brien and Finn enough to parallel those two? (i.e. - is Kate Finn the face of Lupine like Martha Murrey might be the face of the benevolent Kikimora?) Are we to assume that the spirits also have triple identities, two assumed and one true? If so, how does that work? Could Mary King and Riverman being associated with horse racing really be coincidence? It seems to me that everything except that is explained by the Kikimora - EXCEPT the dinner scene after he meets Kiki in which Cathy Ruth comes over and the gnome like jeweler seems to know Skotos but own't talk about it. Is that a dream vision, too, like his sojourn through his fireplace and out his window (the kikimora brings vivid dreams)? If so, what the heck is up with Cathy Ruth? I really want to square these details away before I close out the essay.

Marc Aramini04 May 2018, 14:18as archived

↳ in reply to Marc Aramini

autocorrect and poor typing may cause some confusion there - triannulus was replaced by triangle, Bax always auto-corrects to Bad. Sorry.

17 quoted lines

On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 7:11 AM, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at gmail.com> wrote: So ... I am almost done with the Sorcerer's House writeup, but Gene has doubled down on obscurity here. As those who have read the book know, a spectral horse appears in the same chapter as Kiki, right in the middle of the book, when Bax has a vision of himself on the side of the road after his brother has assaulted a police officer (Kate Finn) and been arrested. For those familiar with my thesis, you will recall that I argue that the house visions are born of a kikimora spirit, and that she sometimes wears a foxes appearance, but that there are two such spirits, one more malevolent than the other, with the benevolent one being Martha Murrey (who says she is a "scarecrow" after traveling - the kikimora name can mean "scarecrow). Martha is 40 years old in appearance, Bax is 40 years old, the butler appeared to cause havoc in the town 40 years ago - the kikimora can be born when a mother or child dies in childbirth, and those things add up pretty nicely. The Odal Rune looks like a fish and is found on all three rings of the triangles.( ? ) It means inheritance. Since I argue that in patterns of three two are supernatural are not real while one is real, the Odal rune on the inner ring suggests to me that the Skotos strip is a real inheritance (i.e. - he is the son of Alexander Skotos and maybe Mary King, who dies in childbirth and gives birth to the spirit of ... (?) (They appear in letter 20 BEFORE Mary King's context is introduced, as nebulous as it is - she shows up to disappear by the cemetery, on the same night Kiki appeared to say that she goes to the river to wash her shroud.) Both Mary and Skotos showing up in the same letter, even though Bax disavows any relationship, suggests to me that they might be Bax's real parents, and that the Skotos strip is his real inheritance, though his mother would then have died long ago - and how Kiki, Lupine, Winkle, and Martha Murrey map onto that is still a headache. HERE COMES THE BIG PROBLEM - his first hand switch occurs when he asks Martha Murrey about gambling and the horse races. He mentions gambling quite a bit, even associating Skotos with Sandy Scott, whom he knew from Churchill Downs. WELL ... Mary King, the only famous one I could find, is a well known and successful equestrian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_King_( equestrian) Riverman is a famous and successful race winner and sire of champion horses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riverman That's a really, really big coincidence. So ... funding the house through horse races, which would pretty much eliminate the possibility that something happened forty years ago that caused these spirits to be born (Emlyen and Iuean are internal visions manifested by the Kikimora in this reading - whatever happens to them (hit three times with a stick) immediately happens to Bad (hit back three times with a stick)) VS. Mary King and Skotos as his parents, with something occurring which precipitated the birth of a Kikimora spirit in childbirth 40 years ago ... One more thing. Manjushri says that he must team up with the woman "he" struck to come out ahead. Bax notices a falseness to Manjushri's claims about what is holy (because it is a kind of deceitful illusion, like the facefox), but then teams up with Kate Finn so that charges are not pressed. Kate Finn appears right after the first dismemberment and also, I think, drops him off when he finds another body part at his house. This team up is more than finding George in the house - it is so that he can keep George from getting a record when he takes George's place. She also sees Goldwurm's tower from the window during their search (I am pretty sure, but will review this). Martha Murrey says that she had a friend named Nina O'Brien who was run down in the street but people only cared about the Hound of Horror stories ... If she is a spirit that lingers forty years passed, then ... who is Nina O'Brien and when did she die? (this does create a weird link between the deceased friend of Martha and the hound of horror, but that is nebulous). Emlyn winds up in a pact with Lupine - does this parallel Bax's final alliance with Kate Finn? Is the Irish connection of O'Brien and Finn enough to parallel those two? (i.e. - is Kate Finn the face of Lupine like Martha Murrey might be the face of the benevolent Kikimora?) Are we to assume that the spirits also have triple identities, two assumed and one true? If so, how does that work? Could Mary King and Riverman being associated with horse racing really be coincidence? It seems to me that everything except that is explained by the Kikimora - EXCEPT the dinner scene after he meets Kiki in which Cathy Ruth comes over and the gnome like jeweler seems to know Skotos but own't talk about it. Is that a dream vision, too, like his sojourn through his fireplace and out his window (the kikimora brings vivid dreams)? If so, what the heck is up with Cathy Ruth? I really want to square these details away before I close out the essay.

Jeffery Wilson08 May 2018

missing from the archive

The list delivered this and never kept it. What survives is what the reply below quoted of it.

If Nina O'Brien was pregnant, perhaps there were two spirits generated at the one time. Also, Finn may be Finnish rather than Irish, since kikimora is also Urgo-Finnish.

Marc Aramini09 May 2018, 16:05as archived

↳ in reply to Marc Aramini

Thanks for responding Jeffery. Finn also means "fair," which could be contrasted with Skotos (Darkness), Murrey (dark purple almost black) and Mr. Black. In my opinion Wolfe became slightly too minimalist post 2010 in presenting these puzzle pieces - it's almost impossible to faithfully reconstruct the events from 40 years ago with confidence in this text. Mary King, who is emphasized as an important part of the puzzle, is given like three lines dedicated to her in the book, during which she is presented far before she appears, and then appears only to disappear near a cemetery and say she is headed the same place Bax is headed ... The text even says details about her will be important "no matter how nebulous" - gee. While I am confident in my reading of Home Fires, I had to make the biggest leap ever to understand who Coleman Baum was - there wasn't enough in the text to train me. Consider the difference in Fifth Head of Cerberus: the names of three women on St. Crois - Pheadria, Nerissa, and Urania. When I found that Phaedria was a type of moth, I KNEW that Nerissa and Urania would be moths or butterflies BEFORE I EVER LOOKED THEM UP. People say that you can force Wolfe into any pattern, but you simply can't. I couldn't do this with character names in any other of his novellas, and knew with certainty that it would be so, because I had already internalized the patterns in that particular text. Extra research is just verification of a conclusion reached through other means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cepora_nerissa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urania_sloanus I already knew these women had a metamorphic stage to their life cycle and I didn't even really need to do that extra textual research. Many many times I know that what I am looking up for verification is not apophenia because the text has already taught me I will find what I expect once I literalize metaphors or switch them to ironic statements and follow them to their logical conclusions. I was not surprised to find that on the island of Philae where Latro ends up in the last Soldier book all of the symbols of the Egyptian Gods save to Horus were erased by Christian iconoclasts in history - it was exactly what I was expecting from the text, though it isn't in the book. But the introduction of a different name here and a friend of Martha dying in such a way becomes very difficult to integrate into a book already built on a triple structure that occasionally seems to violate it, with Cathy Ruth and Kate Finn being the two most obvious and egregious "outliers" that might just be another manifestation of the triple structure - right after we get the warning that of what seems to be "She comes" from Winkle, Cathy Ruth calls and enters the text - but that She could be lupine, kiki, mary king, martha, Madame Orizia, or even Kate Finn, and those identities could blur into one another. The final dinner at Lakeshore, where the waitress can't seem to remember that Bax orders his food done a particular way, and Cathy Ruth and her jeweler soon-to-be father in law come over, she finding the note about the werewolf and the jeweler refusing to answer how he knows Skotos, also seems to be very dreamlike, but how can we integrate these characters into the waking world? The fractures here require some serious extra-textual assumptions to force into a linear pattern at the finest level.

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On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 10:28 PM, Jeffery Wilson clueland.com < jwilson at clueland.com> wrote: On 04-May-18 9:11 AM, Marc Aramini wrote:

Martha Murrey says that she had a friend named Nina O'Brien who was run down in the street but people only cared about the Hound of Horror stories ... If she is a spirit that lingers forty years passed, then ... who is Nina O'Brien and when did she die? (this does create a weird link between the deceased friend of Martha and the hound of horror, but that is nebulous). Emlyn winds up in a pact with Lupine - does this parallel Bax's final alliance with Kate Finn? Is the Irish connection of O'Brien and Finn enough to parallel those two? (i.e. - is Kate Finn the face of Lupine like Martha Murrey might be the face of the benevolent Kikimora?) Are we to assume that the spirits also have triple identities, two assumed and one true? If so, how does that work?

If Nina O'Brien was pregnant, perhaps there were two spirits generated at the one time. Also, Finn may be Finnish rather than Irish, since kikimora is also Urgo-Finnish. -- Jeffery Wilson - < jwilson at clueland.com > RIP - A&M Texarkana Computational Intelligence Lab < http://clueland.com/demo/interact/ >

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