(urth) The Sorcerer's House Questions (*Major Spoilers*)

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes]

"All statements are in some sense true, in some sense false, and in some
sense meaningless." - the Principia Discordia.

On Mon, Apr 19, 2010 at 9:24 AM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote:
> Can we put this together with John's post and call this "the reification of
> narrative desire"?
>
> Any story is, naturally, true and false at the same time, in exactly that
> way. Storytellers are hopeful liars. Readers are hopeful consumers of lies.
> And so on. Sorcerers take it one step further.
> That's fantasy (entertainment).
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2010 08:14:27 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com>
> To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Subject: Re: (urth) The Sorcerer's House Questions (*Major Spoilers*)
> Message-ID: <106850.13854.qm at web37606.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
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>
> I'm with you on this.
>
> I think a big part of it has to do with how the last few chapters start to
> talk about the nature of what a sorcerer does. Earlier, I mentioned how
> similar Martha's description of magic words are to Bax's description of
> lying. A lot of it comes down to controlling context and influencing how
> people will receive what gets said. (I.e., Bax has no idea what the magic
> words mean, but he can "sell" them, and that makes him a powerful sorcerer.
> Even the triannulus seems to come down to interpretation (the pictures are
> quite abstract, apparently, and Emlyn and Bax see either a fox or a wolf,
> depending on what they want...and Emlyn even suggests that sometimes it's
> hard to tell when the spell is finished since it often depends on symbols).
>
> But if being a sorcerer is being a powerful story-teller, so powerful that
> you can make lies (or at least empty words) have real power, then perhaps it
> is possible that the story could be both true and false at the same time.
> And that's an idea I really like.
>
>
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-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes