(urth) "Myfather's mounted guard"

[Mo Holkar / UKG]

At 18:34 18/11/2008, Son of Witz wrote:
>what are my qualms then?:
>just that most of the added details only add to the plowman's 
>meaning and add very little to the soothsayers' or transcendental 
>meanings.  This book is like what Dorcas says about the floating 
>cathedral (It is the Catheral of the Claw that jumps into the air 
>when it's set afire, right?) She says "It
>seems to me that what you call the third meaning is very clear. But the second
>meaning is harder to find, and the first, which ought to be the easiest, is
>impossible."  So, I guess since the first meaning is so difficult, 
>Borski should be commended for connecting the breadcrumb trails with 
>some neon paint.
>
>However I can't help but feel that what Wolfe wanted us to take away 
>was the third and second meanings, and he used the ambiguity of the 
>first to lead us further than plot.  I'm not sure where to credit 
>it, but an esoteric teaching I've heard is "there is no escape 
>through the horizontal"  and I would argue that most of these 
>readings leave us wandering in the labyrinth.  I find the 
>transcendental readings, the vertical dimension, lead us out of the 
>labyrinth and into even MORE interesting territory than the 
>labyrinth of incestuous time warped bloodlines and religio-political 
>manipulation.


Just to pick up on your larger point here, I feel the same way -- 
although Wolfe unhelpfully blurs the issue by including some plot 
puzzles that _are_ important to the higher meanings (eg Dorcas's 
identity). So it's easy to get step-by-step drawn into deeper and 
deeper puzzling over implied or possible layers of meaning concealed 
within arcana of plot, in the hope that a discovered correspondence 
may shed a new light on something important.

I guess a (playful) comparison might be made with Church history. 
Some theologians back-calculate the date of Creation and determine 
the numbers of angels that can fit in various places, while others 
are only interested in the revealed Word of the Gospels. Wolfeanism 
is too young to have yet had a Reformation, but give it a few hundred years...

Mo



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