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The suicide scene in Exodus of the Long Sun

I have a conjecture about that suicide scene in Exodus of the Long Sun.
Wolfe has argued that Severian's whole character was profoundly influenced by the fact that he grew up without a mother. It influenced how he reacted to/perceived any woman taller than himself, especially, and also anyone whose breasts were of a size that they seemed to offer much needed maternal sustenance/oral needs (why the undue willingness to join the monstrous undine? -- this is why). It also made him somewhat schizoid, isolated, afraid to attach himself to other people... it affected his relations with everyone. Given, then, the huge importance Wolfe invests in the mother-child relationship on later development, with special attention put on what happens to the child when it lacks, we should be thinking on how Wolfe inscribed this awareness into the New Sun's sequel, Long Sun, where a lack in mothering is even more forthrightly (in New Sun we kind of have to intuit that our concern should be more on how Severian is determined by the lack of a present mother than on who exactly she might have been; from the start in Long Sun we are pretty much told that such things as a sense of isolation, loneliness, and profound rage, can owe to troubles in the mother-child "bond") put forward as a potentially central determining factor of one's later self.

The obvious character affected by such a lack is Blood, for the negative repercussions of it -- i.e., revenge through obliteration of her home -- are as much the motive for Silk's call to action (Silk would have set off to save the manteion regardless of whether he'd had a vision or not, for, as Blood says, he looks the type... he's not just going to sit there passively) as is the Outsider's prompting. Terribly and tragically, his mother found it impossible to love him, wholesale rejected him, because he reminded her always of her own sin in conceiving him. But even this is being too kind: it's difficult to find any instance in the text where her instinct isn't to mal-form, disturb, disorient, de-humanize (... that slut!) others, for purposes of sadistic pleasure... and her sniff is characterized as having an azoth-level destructive ability on one's self-possession/self-confidence (Silk will, after her death -- always note how in Wolfe it is after people that grated on you have died, that they are suddenly dealt with "more squarely" -- admonish himself on always being intent on avoiding her, but when revived as Marble/Rose we note that he always makes sure that when someone's about to be subjected to one of her sniffs/brutal dismissals, he's at the time allied to her in some way [as happens when Rose turns on and almost chills out Nettle at the end of Exodus, for instance] ... he perpetuates the avoidance in another guise; actually learned nothing). But though the negative repercussions of it aren't as much on display, as with Severian Silk's own background of profound absence in maternal attention is delineated in the text, with as well some sense of how this had begun to determine what would later become his adult character "mold." We are told: “She had never been a happy woman in any case, her large dark eyes so often bright with tears from sources more mysterious than the fisc, her tiny body shaken with sobs that he could do nothing to alleviate." She was depressed and self-absorbed most of the time, and Silk, rather than focussing on his own needs, became bent on fixing/helping her. His mission, to save the maternal "manteion," and thereby receive her glorious smile! (This he has seen, and recalls perennially... and later says is more important to him that any stack of Hyacinths that could possibly be assembled.)

When Silk is contemplating suicide on the airship... or, rather, behaving in a fashion which others would duly read as his being involved in that, I think it is possible that Wolfe had intended us to read him as in a sense mimicking his own mother here, so to suck up love from others; be the receiver/afflicter rather than the dispenser/afflicted for a change. (How Silk functions in the later half of Exodus, and especially on the airship, is strange enough to be worthy of its own essay: he'd just been this man of action but is becoming -- Dr. Talus-akin? -- a man of dodges and slights as the women-men of Trivigaunti stage themselves as phallus... pubic hair gathered into phallic might!, then this depressed maternal figure who sits still while's other she's prompted approach her lair... and ultimately a bit like that gardener who was drafted to marry the former caldé's love interest, Chenille's mom: someone subjected to betrayals (Hyacinth with man-like Saba) and due to be dominated by his wife (Hyacinth refusing to go into the yucky tunnels, with Silk hapless to do anything about it.) Like his mother was to him, he has made himself indispensable to all figures... no one is being shown as being able to bring peace, as truly fruitful, as truly good -- not just in intent but in results -- without him, and many are aware of it (Mint at one point notes that she has found herself in a situation she could never imagine developing: one where she actually thought Silk in error about something of import). And at just that point, he ducks out, and behaves in just the way his mother seemed to him, in focussing on things that bring him to despair but that are mysterious to everyone else. He thereby prompts anyone who can be prompted to play the role of him as child Silk to attempt to awaken him/Her out of his/Her despair. He thereby gains someone who is so respondent to him he can't ever leave him... an affliction mothers in the Whorl world sometimes also hope to apply to their children when they name them -- re: the naming of a child as "Auk" -- and who'll demonstrate the totality of their need by readily making themselves subject to the grossest, more cruel of whims: Silk repeatedly encourages Horn to join him in on the edge, even as Horn readily senses he's essentially being prompted, URGED, to put his hand in a fire (I mention this specific reference because this is one of the lessons Silk applies to Horn: hand-in-the-fire is, he is being made to consider, a good teaching lesson; a good in the world, not an avenue to disturbance/trauma), to put himself in a position where he could incur great harm, for another's pleasure.

Exodus has a scene where everyone has a chance to meet their mothers and fathers again. And for each one it appears to be a gainful experience; none of them find themselves subjected to Maytera Rose-level dismissal of their worth; none of them get what Blood gets when he agrees to make a sacrifice to appease Musk's guilt over buying the manteion -- total balking, total refusal; all of them find that if they had any sense their parents wanted them for selfish purposes, to promote their own glory, they were mistaken for their thoughts were only always on their happiness ("Remora, all your concerns that you were worthless unless you achieved high position were baseless; you evidently misconceived my intentions a million and one times!; I only ever wanted you to be happy!"). It is a whorl where people are engineered to do what they do, it would seem to me, to obtain exactly this fate -- parental approval -- and, owing it would seem to deprivations in the maternal-child bond, to possess "built-in instructions," which are, like evil in people ostensibly is, ineradicable, to enslaven themselves to the first person who ever duly awakens out of their self-absorption to smile at them, actually notice them... Auk's own fate, vis-a-vis Tartaros; Blood's situation vis-a-vis Musk... "after so many years of refusal, he actually grabbed my hand!"; Silks's vis-a-vis the Outsider. If it is overt, every character who is meant to carry any negative mothering either finds herself in some way redeemed (the hugely redeemed Scleroderm... who incidentally reminds me of Lobelia from LOTR, who also goes from overwhelming and obese encroacher/defiler to selfless provider/warrior of the home defence), excused/refashioned (Rose), or creatively fashioned into an agent of the good (Echidna). She is never allowed to sit only as maligned, and justly. This grace, as we see with Blood, does not apply to "the child," however. If you're a father who pimps out your child (Hyacinth), you remain always the child's father... sorry, no chance Hyacinth if you wanted to severe yourself from him; instruct yourself: he's got you for life. If you are parents so awful you seek constant proof of love without feeling any necessary compulsion to show anything for it -- the gods of the whorl -- you remain, still, as from no less an authority than the thorough disbeliever Quetzal, those one must still look to, hope for better from.




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  • Charles Gillingham     There is no profit in me reading all that. 
  • Silk is a clone made for Typhoon to take over. Silk' s courage through the series is merely the expression of his suicidal drive. He can jump into the middle of battle or up an airship because he's been programmed to not care if he lives or dies.



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  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston     Quetzal is arguing, in part, for something that I do like, that I do like in how Silk engages with people, when he isn't covertly encouraging the maintenance of a kind of weakness in them. It is for not wholesale dismissing people, but in working at seeing what is remarkable in them... so that, presumably, in their seeing your ability to richly discern them but also appreciate them, and, as well, your clear not making a fetish attachment with their flaws, they'll work at becoming the person you see that is remarkable, but even better, more developed... they deserve it, and faith in you, your foresight, gives them faith in their ability to achieve it. We see this for example with Hyacinth, whom, I know, I've argued Silk does project onto and therefore at times commits the crime of NOT SEEING, who responds positively to Silk taking a genuine liking in imperfect, babyish, manipulative and cruel her... penetrating that to see virtues and strengths SHE DOES possess, to try and become a better person... which is what I read as happening in that scene when she instructs the monitor not to reflect her as a perfect beauty but ostensibly as a more refined, calibrated, mature one... the image in the ring (I acknowledge that I might have done a misread of this scene, but that was my sense). We see it also in Chenille as she tries to disown herself of her addiction to rust, not just because the strength of Kypris infiltrated her, but because she sought to work past the strong allure of the drug high, deny herself it, so to cultivate the more giving relationship she would have with the person she loves and who sees worth in her.
  • I like when Silk and the text build on what belief in another person can do, what, I suppose, LOVE can do, but am very cagey about the text's very mixed... its elision, its effacement, of what abuse and trauma can do: that is, its sometimes contribution to the belief that shows of what might appear to be the opposite of love, of hate, may not need to be faced head on. Rose is sort of saved in the text, our understanding of her, by Silk's encouragement that we fundamentally see her as someone who is on route to becoming a very decent grandmother, and who could really have been one to Silk. But before we are directed to understand her as this, she was credited in the text as someone who very likely through her beating the boys in her class, would be contributing to their own beating of their wives and children as they emerge as head-of-households in the next few years. I'm not sure all the children and wives who were going to be subject to that would be all that appreciate of the text's motioning of her into status of decency... for it meaning the forgetfulness, the oblivion, of them, of what happened to them. Horn is beckoned further out onto an airship where he will not only very nearly lose his life, but where he'll have to undergo the psychological torture of having to keep faith with himself even as it means going against everything he's ever believed in (namely, Silk, the greatest man in the whole universe) and potentially earning their disapproval/disfavor... that is, work his way through someone he's always been given reason to trust and whom is asking to be trusted once again now, giving all the signs that at that unique moment of time he is -- and he actually at that moment, really, truly is -- about as dangerous to any nearby agreeable child as any vampire let loose into the whorl could possibly be. The text nicely dresses this incident up afterwards, though, as just Horn being brave... as a moment of empowerment for him (Horn the hero!), even as in capitulating to the "abuser's" desires he did near prove the sacrifice Silk may only have been pretending to have been (sacrifice to what?, you ask... to the near fruition of the Outsider's goals; the sacrifice we always entail when we want interrupted good boding for the success of our new project so to appease the defeated Echindas of the world -- could this be, also, why he was up there?). 
  • We DO get a scene where brutal dismissal sends a Talus off into aggrieved madness -- we do SEE at times incidents where someone's betrayal/disregard doesn't turn someone onto hoping for better things... as Silk's moral lesson of the utility of putting the hand into fire was supposed to teach Horn, but rips them apart, stops any possible progress, cold; we also are always aware of Mucor and what brutal treatment did to her... though she does have a nose for the good, a strong and reliable one, really -- despite of how much death she incurs for those she only understands as objects of play -- and one would have to wonder where exactly that came from for it's only something one would expect from one out of a nurturing background; but when we see it happen individually our stance on it is sometimes ambiguous -- isn't the Talus raging over nothing?... and how human is this over-heated, perennially rageful thing, anyway?; isn't Blood, who turns on his mother's repeatedly presuming over him by calling him "Bloody" after forcing him to incur her never being a mother to him, her previous near total complete dismissal and abandonment of him, by trying to kill her, only kind of helping us out... to show us those who know no crime committed by a mother ever deserves such criminal retribution; that we'd never find ourselves on THAT side? Don't these "people" show the effects of trauma, the true effects, by showing us exactly what we require disowning about ourselves? Don't scream, don't rage... because that forces us to deal squarely with those we'd prefer to keep in a slightly different level of esteem? Regarding Horn, we are never allowed to see the psychological effects this likely would of had on him, for it meaning a betrayal of his own self, his own knowledge, in his allowing himself to be suckered in to a Silk he highly suspected had ill-designs on him then, and for it meaning his effort to save someone ending by his being managed into a position where he was ready to kill his own self. Horn is, unlike many of the characters in the text, built out of a family that knew both a present mother and a reasonably present father... even as Horn half-despises him, so could probably have ridden this out. But there is a betrayal upon us for not being allowed to know that Horn was going to have to ride out something that could easily have done someone else permanently in, f*cked them up real bad (and why not actually in fact to Horn too, if true that in the next series he actually does sacrifice himself so Silk may live... not sure if this happens, but I seem to remember it as something that happens). Quetzal terrorizes children... we witness Colonel Oosik's son's severe impairment, his feeling diminished and dwarfed, at having been sucked at by this old-man vampire, but strangely the text never works against, really complicates, our estimation of him as a source of powerful good and cheer-inspiring sanity and rescue (the wonder worker, the miracle, "we" need, given all that besets "us") until the nature of him as a bodily horror is exposed to the public -- then, we can agree to feel repulsion; a feeling that gets accentuated, very likely, as we get to know Green better. The text highlights something... almost as a demonstration of one's power to obviate it entirely, one's willingness to banish it from one's mind no matter the painful dissonance incurred for doing so, for knowing how strong our need to believe in those who may not be worthy of love, but whom we seek approval and love so powerfully. The alternative would have been to have us spend much more time with all the Teasels out there... all the subjected, and to flesh out more what it did to them to be visited upon by horrors that few ever seemed all that concerned about. When get some in the text... Nettle's almost shutting herself down after Rose goes at her, is another. But probably not enough. I'll explore this further, as this is but first sense of things after just re-reading the text.


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  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston     The counter-argument, that Horn more than anything exposes the damage predators do in a way we all can't but not fail to read, no matter the text's rounding up of all human relations as about learning to forgive and love one another (Exodus, 369), and with it terminating with a "mother waiting for him/us" after beginning with a deliberate, intentional gross violation of her, is perhaps made evident through a supply of deadly, blatantly accusatory delineations of Rose we encounter through the text. Though it is true that presentations of Rose as her as a horror, as really as the total witch Oreb espies her as, begin to subside in the text as she becomes Marble/Rose... and she manifests more as a glove in which to smack evil with, it comes back at the end -- in part through sniffs, at people we like -- and may over-all be show that Horn is negotiating his way to a profound disagreement with Silk's presumption that evil is more a necessity for growth than a blight that forestalls it. 
  • I'll list them shortly.


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  • Sunyi Dn     There is a lot going on in this post, but I have pretty fundamental objections to bad mothering or absent mothering being the source of such severe character flaws. Wolfe may have believed it, but that is hugely old fashioned nonetheless. And I wpuld argue with him on it, if so. I especially reject the notion that breastfeeding makes any sort of difference to a person's ethical outcomes or predisposition for breast fetishisation.



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    • Patrick McEvoy-Halston       People certainly should be writing on and thinking about the effects of mothering in Wolfe's works. To say Wolfe is concerned about the negative effects... the resolutely negative effects of mothering could certainly raise a notable counter -- that he's about negative fathering in the text as well. For instance, with Hyacinth, there's nary a word about her mother in the text... until she learns she's in fact deceased, but a good deal about her father pimping her out as a young girl to be raped by an older man. But also and more to the point, the criticism against mothers is raised but almost always, as I mentioned, textually elided, worked against, somehow (often we come to be more involved in how life's pains affected her, and forget about the child somehow)... something that is not as much the case with fathers -- witness, again, Blood and Mucor. Still, for the most part it's mothering that's the focus in Long Sun, with Auk's attachment to Mint for knowing no mothering at all, Silk's own insistence that his mom was the most important person in the world to him... until the Outsider, Blood's whole instigation of the plot by trying to revenge himself on his mother for abandoning him for "his crime" of offending her by reminding her of her own sin, Echinda, the wife of Pas and the mother of the nine, being so much the representative of evil that Silk knows to make use of her to show how "evil" serves the Outsider's plans, overwhelming Orchid and her demure, non-complaining and agreeable servant child, Marble/Rose adopting Mucor, Maytera/mother Mint and Spider, how Silk can't have sex without thinking Echinda is going to kill him for it, how Rose wants Echinda to finally have her revenge and strike her dead for disobeying her by having a child and attempting life with a man. Overt blame against your mother is resoundly rejected in the book, as it is this that primarily dooms Blood (as well as his pride in his money making, with Remora showing the "proper" example, the "proper path," in growing big in heart just as soon as he loses his luxurious robes and adopts the plainest of manteoins), as Silk takes advantage of the fact of him to momentarily pretend to be innocent for so long being negatively affected by Rose as well. (there's a lot of covert revenge against mothers permitted in the text though... note all the fat, waddling mother-types... was Wolfe's own mother obese? And another covert revenge: Marble reacting to becoming aware of Rose's death not by any instant of remorse but in immediately pilfering her for parts.)
    • But then again, not saying anything about it also seems to make one a participant in evil -- as for instance not saying that Maytera Rose/Marble attaching herself to Mucor could hardly be assuredly an instance of "good grandmothering," given how Rose interacted with everyone in the manteoin as simply a vile, dehumanizing witch, meant of course a failure to rescue her from the capitulated, doomed life that awaited her: as a denied and traumatized child, being in fact not provisioned but becoming the provisioning mother to incapacitated Marble/Rose (we learn this in On Blue's Waters, which I'm now reading). (There are a number of these cast-off lives in Wolfe's works, of young women and men that are pretty much enslaved into serving their mothers, that the free protagonist doesn't seem much inclined to want to interfere with, as if their lives must be sacrificed so his own can be kept free, absent of "clinging"... read for example the fates of Merryn and Ouoen in New Sun. And in Short Sun, it's the mother goddess's option that Seawrack ever "escapes" from her; otherwise, hers, too, would have been an owned life.) 
    • (And further about Mucor and Marble/Rose in Short Sun, we note... or should be in mind to note, that Silk/Horn's concern is on getting Marble/Rose a new eye, not in freeing up Mucor to have her own life... Mucor is bound to her "mom" like the daughter is fated in "Glass Menagerie," while the protagonist himself knows no bounds, and even exults in the escape, while not acknowledging the seeming fact that the reason "you" don't escape while "he" does, owes not only to "your" lack of courage but to the fact that his own freedom seems to require that SOMEONE be made to suffer this fate, unrescued...)
    • Yet, still, it is very clear in the text just how much we are spared with Maytera Roses's dying early... the whole rest of the text would otherwise have been watching great Silk demonstrating why it was that her, singularly, was the one person in the text he did everything he could to avoid. And even as is, one does imagine what it would have been to have been raised by someone like that, and you could never imagine that person as anything other than totally doomed. To even present it like this, which the text DOES DO, is what the father Outsider presents the whorl... otherwise they would be so only attached ONLY to their mothers, so ever-needful of their love, to ever risk manifesting this image in print. 
    • Wolfe's own thoughts about his mother would be interesting to explore. I know he's written that you shouldn't write fearing her reaction... but not because you can't let that interfere with your efforts towards "truth," but because she'll love you and appreciate your accomplishments no matter what (she will? didn't prove so for Plath.). But then again, I remember reading somewhere that he admitted he had to leave her behind at some point, in order to have his own life... anyone know where that he admitted that bit?


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    • Marc Aramini       Mother looms large in Silk’s mind in this scene because he is confronted with the struggle between his good “adopted” mother and the biological mother he has become dimly aware of in the form of kypris, who seeks to manipulate him through hyacinth and in other ways. He thinks about Walking with mother when he is with hyacinth either late in the third volume or in the fourth, and the literal suggestion of that is telling.



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    • Marc Aramini       I think the mother/absent mother imagery is certainly present in the text but I like to put it to almost purely plot purposes - I don’t know if I would be misconstruing the starting position as Freudian but certainly psychoanalytic.


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    • Patrick McEvoy-Halston       Marc Aramini If it's just plot purposes as you say, then Wolfe decided in Long Sun to elide everything he thought of concerning the relevance of the lacking mother-son attachment bond that he held as so relevant in New Sun. It might be that in this text we ourselves have to play the Freud/Sherlock Holmes to fully sleuth out why it is that Blood is made the de facto primary EVIL (well... Urus as well) in the whorl (Silk says Blood does have good points, and would in fact like to know him more, but ends up specifying him as the primary source of the destruction of people in the whorl, and won't go easy on him, intends to hardball him, even after releasing every thief, murderer and the rapist from the Alambrera), after he is made to embody a sentiment -- specifically, revengefulness -- other than forgiveness to a mother put forward in the text as so unendurable, mean, spiteful and witchy, Silk has spent his years at the manteoin avoiding her at every opportunity, and who openly admitted she rejected her child for his reminding her of her own "sins." But even this I'm not sure about. Perhaps Wolfe had the sophistication to know that the hardest thing for human beings to do is to really look squarely at their mothers, for if they register your complaints, your anger, it isolates you from any chance in the future to obtain the salve of their smile/approval you absolutely -- owing to the previous short supply of it -- need (what a single smile does to someone who really knew very little of it in their childhoods, is conveyed best in the text when Auk meets Tartaros for the first time). Evidence that Wolfe is to some extent aware of this may be provisioned in how Severian so much hates Jolenta much of the time that he has feelings of wanting to destroy her (Jolenta being delineated by Wolfe as someone Severian is built to project his mother onto), in Peace's dealing with the abandoning mother/parents AS actually behaving guiltily towards their son, and the treatment of the surrogate mother, his aunt, to him, which is so much of gross over-familiarity (she beckons him to bring her things as she bathes exposed in the tub, as if he was of so little worth she didn't have to factor him in into how she behaved) he's on the road to becoming a Bloody (who implies that he went homosexual for over-familiarity with women, as I recall) in certain short stories.... one of the Dr. Death ones, War Beneath the Trree. It may be we're supposed to infer it when certain characters just quit -- like Able near the end of Wizard Knight does -- when they just can't anymore oblige everyone else's requirement that they serves as agreeable and positive, their sanity-restorers... our own movers-of-the-plotters, savers-of-the-worlders. F*ck you, they seem to be saying... and with this bear signs of becoming Blood. 
    • Concerning Blood, Rose did find a foster-mother for him... it's in the text that she did (she herself visited him once every three months... so herself thereafter just a source of very infequent contact). As far as I remember we don't know much about who she was or what her treatment of "Bloody" was like, and I think the result of the text's failure to delineate this for us is that we do read the end-result Blood, the destroyer-of-many-lives Blood, as the product simply of his mother's rejection, abandonment of him; we aren't meant to factor it in. 
    • I don't know if Wolfe wanted us to explore early childhood matters for it, but we also note that Silk's being oriented as a child as someone who is ever-trying to awaken his mother out of her sorrows, is matched by his later tendency to put himself in her position, to be the self-isolated mother, while letting others serve as the children intent to "awaken" her/him. This is, as I've argued, what appears to me to be happening when Silk isolates himself in the airship, and what may be at work in Green Jungles/Exodus as he isolates himself as surely-not-Silk: so much of others' effort goes into trying to find some tender way to wake him up, with Remora at last finding a solution. He makes himself as essential to others as a mother is to her child, then he isolates himself, and thereby can depend on others finding themselves being obsessed in the effort of burrowing away at "your" troubles to maybe possibly touch something that will make you fully alive to them again. Able does the same thing in the Knight series as well, as I recall... the plot has to stop as we find some way again "to reach" Able; "we" play the nursemaid. (A good sense of what this is like... always trying to reach someone, is to be found in the recent movie "the favourite," as competing favourites try so hard to please the self-isolated, depressed Queen Anne.)
    • What Wolfe may have needed to have done is shown us some of what it was like for Blood to have grown up the way he did. We don't get a lot of the dirty stuff... we don't develop a sophisticated appreciation of what life would be like whoring, for instance (in fact one of things "we learn" is that it often leads to marriage -- an ostensible source of utility!), we don't spend a long time in Mucor's position as abandoned child lost in darkness and dirt -- we don't endure the environments that we know are directly linked to the development of a wrecked person (many contemporaries, for example, would explore whoring more so we saw it as abused children repeating the abuse in some desperate attempt to master earlier trauma... Rachel Kushner in her latest, "Mars Room," goes there a bit more). We can to some extent imagine ourselves into them, but we can avoid doing so if we wish... and even, as we see with whoring, rationalize our way into thinking that... it might even have had its good points, even as it means being greased with too many men's sperm in a single evening: slippery sheets!
    • Perhaps more in the text what we do get are experiences we have that aren't DIRECTLY linked to later character formation, but which do show the kind of experiences that would in fact lead to the destruction of psyches, and to really get at what made for a Blood or an Urus or a Hyacinth we need to take these experiences, multiply them by a factor of a hundred to represent years of incurrences, and then land them onto our "appreciation" of them. These experiences include our own long claustrophic time in the tunnels, our experience of Mint's psychological torture at the hands of Potto (mind you, she doesn't have to experience this alone... Remora offers himself, genuinely, as her sympathic, heroic rescuer, in encouraging that the torture be instead applied to him), and as well, I think, Silk's own manipulation of Horn on top of the airship, which is a taste of what would make for a schizophrenic it if occurred repeatedly in one's life, with their being no way for Horn to behave in anyway "rightly" without it backfiring in some way (if he refuses Silk, he's a bad person who fundamentally doesn't trust someone he seems to only be able to see as the greatest man alive; if he trusts him, he has exposed to severe risk of death, and so has behaved in way Silk might, if he was inclined, be able to reprimand him over -- you should have known enough not to have trusted me in that instance... I taught you well enough to know that!).



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    • Marc Aramini       I think there are certainly lots of terrible mothers in Wolfe as in war under the tree, but I don’t think the idealized mother figure is, in general, in for it in Wolfe’s books. Able’s Metaphysical situation is different and his mother’s ignorance of him completely not her fault. I don’t know that Jolenta despite her artificial proportions can be seen at all as motherly when we have Dorcas in the party.



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  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston     Sunyi Dn Another reason why a new generation of scholars' exploration of Wolfe is so necessary, is that they will be in mind to stop at and more profoundly think about relationships that are key in his novels, that others put little thought into... for it being ostensibly ordinary. For example Michael Andre-Druissi argued that Horn's terrifying relationship with his son Sinew, is just the norm for fathers and their teenage sons; nothing to think about. This could pass as acceptable analysis a number of decades ago, but now this past "normal" is being more understood as actually one-hundred-percent optional, and is only present in families which function perversely, where love is somewhat or largely absent. Younger scholars would correct Andre-Druissi on his assumptions immediately, in a way previous generations may not have felt the need to, and would in their explorations show the Horn-Sinew "relationship" as something as much worth improving on as animal sacrifice was to the sacrifice of children, as the Outsider was to the mostly dark gods of the Whorl.
  • Personally, understanding it myself as optional, as something tragic in that there was so much better available to them if only they'd had kind guides around to help them, works to double-back on some of the childrearing advice that gets presented in Long Sun, especially in the discussion between the Talus-maker and Silk, and in all discussions of how teachers should concern themselves with their students generally. In operation, there is a lot (a lot!) that is progressive in how Silk involves himself with other people, with young minds, with children, as there is in how Crane involves himself with Silk, and Quetzal, too, with Silk, but when presented overtly... how one must interact with children, it semblances mostly old-school pedagogy. And the phenomena of the really horrible relationship between Horn and Sinew, seems, to me, to owe at that to have been allowed to go unquestioned. (The only thing good about their relationship is that Sinew is freed up and doesn't cling... he escapes the non-entity of Hide/Hoof.)


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    • Marc Aramini       Talking of correcting scholars, well then we better get the actual relationships right. Smacks of arrogance I think to assume that which is new is superior to that which is old, eh? The mother imagery is there but silk’s adopted mother is a positive influence though she has died. His real mother tries to protect him too but she had other motives. The mindwiped version of her in Mamelta (we’ll be lovers! Is the first thing she says to him when she awakes, which only comes true through kypris - when silk sees the origin of humanity in the stars he looks up mamelta’s loins - he dreams of sleeping with her in the tube. That’s where he came from originally, though she has been altered and her perceptions destroyed by the surgeries of Typhon before being placed behind the seal of pas)



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    • Patrick McEvoy-Halston       Marc Aramini The only mother I remember of Silk's is the one who was entombed in her own sorrows, something you don't seem to have factored into your analysis of her relationship with Silk, how that would have effected him, what that conveyed to him about what his ultimate purpose in life should be -- tend to my wounds! Even as we are repeatedly (insistently!) told she loved him and tried to protect him, it doesn't take much of a sleuth to gather than his recollections are tainted by terrible need, terrible "requirement"... how was he ever going to awaken her out of her sorrows and perhaps attend to him a bit if he maligned her in any way? Not about to take a chance at that! If Mamelta was the original, if he didn't know her, this becomes only, "neat." It disappeared from my mind... and this appears justified. What is the relevance? 
    • Yes, if "the new" are to look at a relationship between a father and a son which is so averse that it has the father fearing his son will kill him, and disagree with the previous generations' assumption of this as just the human norm, the the "new" is just better. Quetzal telling people that sacrificing animals is better than the old way of sacrificing children, is presumptuous... but this makes presumption seem something praiseworthy, no? Saying people "smack of arrogance"... is, to some of us, itself a bit old school. What is relevant, only, is whether they are better, more correct, or they aren't, not whether they presume too much or not. Everything new and worthy ends up seeming arrogant presumption to a generation that couldn't itself bring themselves to imagine it, for it seeming a trespass, too much from what the old gods permitted. 
    • You and I have quite different takes on Rose as well. You, if I remember right, focused on Silk as having done something in error in not giving his juicy tomato to Rose, not sharing it. Is this correct? A lot of us read this and thought it more the beginning of Silk getting his head on straight... someone's gotta start barking back at the menace of Rose, who in her reign is cowing, stalling, destroying many lives. Silk started at it, but Death quickly stepped in to finish the deed.



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    • Marc Aramini       Yes completely different takes on Rose. That is the selfishness patera silk must overcome so that words become deeds. He fights the seven deadly sins, too, and his triumph over them is a move to true goodness. Rose does not need to be stood up to but loved.


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    • Marc Aramini       And no one surpasses me in arrogance.


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    • Marc Aramini       Nor is anyone more correct bwahahahahhaa


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    • Patrick McEvoy-Halston       Marc Aramini I agree that Rose deserves love. But the love she needs is from someone who isn't so wary of her they'll be afraid to confront her when required, and isn't mostly still hoping to get her off of their backs somehow. Ultimately, it is a good sign of him to be talking back to her, even as, of course, the path to get to is to insist thereafter on a relationship that is fair and equal, even as that would be impossible for him himself to install for his beginning with a corrupted relationship where she knows she fears him.



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    • Marc Aramini       I think she also demands understanding in that her harshness is in her mind for their own good, so they will not fall and fail as she did. In short sun I think there is a scene where silk realizes that both the mayteras in marble loved him


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    • Patrick McEvoy-Halston       The result of not in the past insisting on a relationship which doesn't have him escaping her all the time, is a book where his disciple Horn manifests a kind of glory in her finally biting the dust, with Marble there to immediately thieve parts from. It cultivates gross unkindnesses and revenge.



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    • Marc Aramini       Rose lives on in that incorporation in a way - her body given to good use - we do view these things quite differently. I would like to think my take is fairly orthodox in its Christian POV. Giving of the body for others, abnegation of the needs of the flesh, repentance, temptation, weakness of the flesh, etc


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    • Patrick McEvoy-Halston       Marc Aramini Wolfe has argued that all evil believes itself good, so even if she believes what she does us is good and necessary, it means nothing, really; it gives it no real credit. When we are made to understand how what Hyacinth does with Saba is actually her performing for the good, for the intention is not masked -- it is good of her to try and help Silk -- it is a very different thing that how Rose might understand/justify her treatment of others, which is exposed pretty bluntly in the text as just withering sadism; something that kills all promise and development -- evil, or what evil should be understood as. 
    • Her giving of parts to Marble... largely curses Marble, don't you think? Her body living on... appears to have been a furthering of something that can't be allowed more presence in the world, even as it would point to the destruction of a human life that deserved one hundred percent more love and kindness, as you argue.



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    • Marc Aramini       I don’t think I see it that way. It allows rose to do good in her death, because the flip side of evil believing it is good is that God turns evil to good - Augustinian theodicy. The fall allows a more glorious redemption. Death allows eternal life. This theme is so huge in Urth of the New Sun that I see it as the overwhelming position of the whole cycle- it is typhon’s Arrogance that preserves humanity - an evil doing a good.


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    • Marc Aramini       There is a place where we see human nature blind to itself - on blue. Humanity has the chance to start over and there is every indication they have chosen poorly in instituting slavery. The new world is worse than the old one, but humans can’t see it. Wolfe suggests subtextually In the fate of auk that blue is worse than green, but it is between the lines



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    • Patrick McEvoy-Halston       Marc Aramini This may not be quite what you're referring to, but I remember the lesson of why evil exists, as Silk delineates it. But unfortunately (or fortunately for those who'd want to find empowered there inclination to see something wrong about it) he does so by explaining why it is good to know the burns of a fire, at at time when, if I remember correctly, he is luring Horn out onto a ledge where he's not apt to learn a lesson but for agreeing to a possible predator's lures.... agreeing to suffering that "burn," just simply find himself dead. Evil... breaks good people; people who could have become good. That's a fact of life, as we become more and more aware, as the effects of trauma and malevolent parenting are more and more acknowledged as not generators of "character" but destroyers of selves, and our fear of maligning the predators, merging away from them and risking their disowning us, less and less prohibitorily scary (again, I think it is the existence of the Outsider that permits the Long Sun to be so withering about whom Rose is, what she does to people... she, the destructive mother, isn't now our only option; we have someone else we can reliably turn to). Your attention to Short Sun is interesting, but I'm just beginning to read again so can't now get involved with right now.
    • I hope at some point to explore just how much Wolfe's works support your thesis -- that evil is helpful, as it is that that promotes the good -- or that of current trauma theory, which shows people inhibited and destroyed by not being protected by those who were too enshrined to placating predators.



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    • Patrick McEvoy-Halston       By th way, I think that silk, in eating the tomato while aware of rose’s own hunger, reads as healthy experimentation in being able to incur and ride out her disapproval. It’s a way of not being debilitated in reading our environment as something — even if it is predatory — we always require being distracted by.


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    • Marc Aramini       I see it in contrast to his later complete self-abnegation in short sun when he refuses to eat, denying himself in the process. The surface text makes us think perhaps it is a sign he is an inhumi or something, but it is merely a character sign: a slight tendency to gluttony denied completely. A Venial sin overcome.


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    • Sunyi Dn       I never intimated that we have no need of new Wolfe scholars. Not entirely sure where you got that impression from. 
    • Without wanting to sound overly rude, I am afraid I find your replies exhausting to sift through; I feel they could be half the length they are (at least) and still convey all the same information. You'll forgive me, I hope, if we simply agree to disagree from here on out. 
    • Good luck in your reading and your studies.

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