(urth) Dionysus

[Marc Aramini]

Okay, I just can't ignore commenting.
 
I don't think Silk is tri-partite in the way James Wynn does, I think the neighbor Horn is a separate body.  My timeline is -  Horn falls in the pit, his genetic material is reassembled and hybridized by the trees that inferentially make up the island and produce neighbor Horn.  Somehow, his spirit survives this process but he ultimately dies again, where it is sent to the soon to commit suicide or just suicided Silk (or so spiritually destroyed that he is no longer really there anymore).
 
Horn takes over until the very end of OBW (current timeline, not flashbacks) when he sits under a big tree, says goodbye to everybody, and then his spirit flees into Babbie now that he has jump started Silk's soul.  This is why instantly the text gets more positive - "I should have said how nice this guy was, I should have said this positive thing, oh yeah, I caught the ball, I won the game." to paraphrase.  Clearly Silk here.  And the flashbacks get weaker and weaker because Horn just left to go ride Babbie, which is where he is in the scenes on urth when he tries to protect his son and says huh huh huh, trying to get out his name and pointing to his horns or tusks or whatever it is Babbie has.  
 
Silk from then on is trying to deny he is Silk because he believes he has killed his friend and student Horn and needs to become him, but it is Horn who really does save Silk by getting a download of Silk's personality back into the body and then voluntarily leaving to go ride Babbie, the beast with three horns.  This is so clear to me I don't want to argue it with anyone, just throwing it out there again because I feel like the tri-partite discussion of Silkhorn is interesting but in my reading that neighbor Horn never gets inside Silk, instead it is Horn going into Silk's empty body and then re-downloading the copy of Silk into it from mainframe later.
  
 
The pit is the crux of what happens to Horn.  I think certainly his body dies there, and that the island is inferentially made of huge carnivorous trees that recombine with his genetic material to make neighbor Horn.
 
Most probably remember my theory that the hybridizing of corn is an important thematic clue to what is going on with the vines and trees - that the mixing of genetic matter of blood with the vines creates inhumi and the mixing of genetic matter with the trees makes neighbors.
 
One of the big islands on Blue is made up entirely of these enormous trees, and I always got the impression that the pit Horn fell into was the carnivorous maw of such a tree. The neighbors are now in a position to "come visit" because I think Horn has pretty much given them permission to eat people and thus hybridize with them, creating tree/human mixes.  Thus, the neighbors woul be people, too, but hybrids through this odd transubstnation (ie - significance to lines like, we are the neighbors, etc.)  Giving the world to humanity be eating all of them.  Somewhat sinister, no?

--- On Tue, 12/7/10, Andrew Mason <andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com> wrote:



2. There is in any case something odd about the deal. From a normal
human perspective it is unclear that the deal would be binding; but it
is also unclear why the deal would be necessary. Would humans have the
right to chase Neigbours off Blue if they had not given them
permission to stay? They say 'tonight we give [this whorl] to you'.
This doesn't itself seem to be part of the deal; they say it
unconditionally, and then ask Horn for permission to come back.  But
no one forced them to say it, and if Horn had not been there no one
would have known that they had said it. Or they could, as far as one
can see, have said 'we give you this whorl on condition that we are
allowed to visit it from time to time'. That they asked even one
human's permission seems an extra act of grace on their part.
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