(urth) The argument for Intractability

Mon Dec 22 15:34:59 PST 2008

Yeah, craig, I hear ya.  I find a lot of resonance in the Cock and Angel
story.  One of the things I keep coming back to is that while there may
indeed be some 'horizontal level' manipulation going on with the Hierodules,
there is a sense I get that it doesn't matter whether they know if they are
doing the will of the Increate or not:  The will of the Increate will be
done.  I don't know why, but two things stick out to me:  One, that Sev
turns water into wine.  There is no reason for this to happen.  It doesn't
fit the other miracles, and it doesn't fit into the scheme of what the
Hierodules need to accomplish, as far as I can tell.  Yet, it is an echo of
a miracle performed by a True agent of the Increate, Jesus.  As if the
resonance of the role of Logos is manifested through Severian.  It could
just be a 'literary' device on Wolfe's part, but I don't think that's true.

Also, when the Wonder Triples Ossipago, Fumulimus and Barbatus metion to Sev
that even Tzadkiel doesn't posses the power that Sev used to reshape Declan,
or physically raise of the dead as something other than an Aquestor or
Ediolon.  Sev has become, in a sense, more than the Hierogrammates.
Something in this speaks to the will of the Increate coming through Sev in
spite of/because of the intervention of the Hierogrammates.

Two people get together and fuck.  A child is born.  That child grows up to
be the savior of mankind, in a fashion.  Is the will of the increate
involved in the meeting of those two people, or was it random chance?  What
if there were forces manipulating those two people so they would meet, would
those doing the manipulation be doing the will of the increate?  What if the
people doing the manipulation were setting up, on a cosmic scale, the
correlation of the two people fucking and making a child (i.e., the
Hierogramatte manipulation is all about engenerding the next generation of
Hiero's who will in turn create the next generation of Hierogrammates,
etc...it is a Macrocosmic parallel to two people meeting and having a baby,
just on a much much larger scale).  Somewhere, the question of scale has to
be forgotten, and one has to just wonder wether the increate is at all
invovled in the universe of Severian (which the Long Sun books seem to
answer to some degree), or whether he is not.  If he is, then it's hard not
to see that 'his will' be done through Severian and the Hierodules, and that
it doesn't matter, in a sense, whether the Hierodules know they are doing
the will of the Increate or not.

And I see the idea of Severian learing to give his obedience to the
'highest' power not one of giving into the manipulation of the Hierdoules,
as some seem to think, but rather a discovery of the singular man's proper
relationship to God (in a catholic or at least Christian sense), as opposed
to Baldanders who wants to storm the gates of heaven.  In the end, even
Baldanders serves the will of the increate, as by destroying the claw, he
sets up Severian to discover that its power is within him all along.

There is much more to this....

On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 2:39 PM, Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com> wrote:

> The time travel question that you guys have been hashing out seems to me
> important to figure out when trying to interpret the books. And I think the
> question of Sev's "will" is actually important. Are we getting a story of a
> bad guy trying to become good? (Free will) Or are we getting a story of a
> guy learning that his personal will is better left to higher powers?
> (Omniscient, omnipotent God/gods/powers/etc.)
>
> I'm personally with Jordon on this. The "time is like an ocean" idea allows
> you take both of the above ideas at once and have them overlap. You have the
> linearity of Sev's experience, but you also have the meta-temporal
> perspective in which the Hierodules can manipulate things (for the
> Increate?).
>
> There's still the bigger question here for me of whether this is all a holy
> process or just a sham of a holy process. I'm reminded of one of the story's
> in the Pelerines' tent (from the soldier whose name escapes me) about the
> proud cock. The angel comes down and says he's going to punish the cock for
> being too proud. But it turns out that he's wrong, and the story ends with
> the angel admitting that, although he's closer to the Increate than the
> cock, he's still infinitely distant and can only guess at His will.
>
> If the Hierodules are like the angel, how "holy" are their designs in the
> end?
>
> ------------------------------
> *From:* Jordon Flato <jordonflato at gmail.com>
> *To:* The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
> *Sent:* Monday, December 22, 2008 1:16:44 PM
> *Subject:* Re: (urth) The argument for Intractability
>
> Yeah, I think we will forever bang up against a wall if we are looking at
> this linearly, with certain players crawling up the string, and other
> players moving up and down the string to make it the string they want or
> need.
>
> When Malrubius tells Severian Time is like an ocean, not like a river,
> there is a lot being said.  Free will is not moot in a intractable
> scenario.  The development of Sev's 'soul' for lack of a better word is
> absolutely needed, and is only possible because of the events of the book of
> the new sun, which, in part, he helped created based on his future as
> conciliator.  The refinement of his torturers soul is not a by-product of
> the process, it's an intimate part of it.  I dunno.  I think it's a trap to
> think lineraly.  And I can't see any textual evidence for some sort of time
> traveling Catherine sent back to give birth to Severian with an engineered
> embryo.  Although the part in Urth with the woman is an interesting paradox.
>
> On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 10:50 AM, Son of Witz <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>wrote:
>
>> I don't think it completely eradicates free will.
>> It's just that it's not linear. It's all happened already.
>> inhabitants of the timeline just experience it moment by moment.
>> I don't think "the exact genetic combination" is important. Severian's
>> consciousness is what matters, not his body's cells. The book makes that
>> point again and again.
>>
>> This is the territory where it becomes useful to realize that at a point
>> it stops being a SCIENCE fiction book and is truly a Metaphysical Fictional
>> Metaphor.
>> This is why that Paradox is intractable. it's almost a metaphysical
>> prequalifier to be a paradox.
>>
>> ~witz
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Dec 22, 2008, at 10:43 AM, Dave Tallman wrote:
>>
>>  I don't believe Wolfe does intractable time loops, whether in "Free Live
>>> Free" or in "The Book of the New Sun." (I don't think "Pirate Freedom" is
>>> intractable either, though I haven't worked that one out as well).
>>>
>>> Intractable time loops imply no free will -- everything happens as it
>>> does because that's the way it has always happened. Chains of events that
>>> are built up from multiple iterations, carrying back knowledge from future
>>> to past, can be done with free will intact. In "The Book of the New Sun" we
>>> have an agency that can keep things on track -- the Hierogrammates and
>>> Hierodules are time-traveling through history and fixing things. They can
>>> create place-holders like a Conciliator-like religion, the autarchy, and the
>>> Guild, if they deem them necessary as preconditions for the emergence of the
>>> New Sun. Once a good candidate appears, they can fix up his life as much as
>>> desired and splice him back into history to replace their earlier
>>> bootstraps.
>>>
>>> The trickiest thing is his birth. Even if the Hierodules ensured the
>>> meeting of Ouen and Catherine under similar conditions, the odds are
>>> millions to one that the exact genetic combination will be re-created. Thus
>>> it seems likely that Catherine was sent back in time already pregnant with a
>>> cloned embryo of Sev1. (I believe Catherine is the woman we see under guard
>>> in UotNS on the day of the deluge).
>>>
>>>
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