(urth) Fuligin as Black Hole...

Ryan Dunn ryan at liftingfaces.com
Fri Jul 30 10:00:05 PDT 2010


On Jul 30, 2010, at 12:58 PM, Lee Berman wrote:

>> John Watkins- If the coloring has some meaning beyond that particular to 
>> the torturers'guild (they torture people and seem to have some connection, 
>> literal or metaphoric, to Catholic priesthood, so are in black), then it 
>> must be read in connection with the robes of argent, the color more white
>> than white, that Severian is about to put on at the end of Citadel.  So I 
>> think a connection to the old sun and/or its black hole is probably intended.
> 
> Without disagreeing I'd want to point out that fuligin is the color which is 
> darker than black. If black absorbs all colors of the spectrum then a black
> hole is even darker because it actively sucks all light (and everything else)
> out of this universe.
> 
> Conversely, argent is described as the color more pure than white. Argent can
> be used to describe a shade of white but its more basic definition relates to
> silver. White reflects all colors of the spectrum but (polished) silver does so
> in an even more pure way.
> 
> I don't know about now, but around the time of BotNS's creation, I think quasars
> were considered to possibly be the opposite of black holes, leaking energy into
> our universe. Hethor's ship is called The Quasar and was powered by (demon-haunted)
> mirror sails.
> 
> So the opposite of fuligin is argent. The opposite to a black hole is a quasar.
> The opposite to being a torturer is being Autarch/New Sun. Mirrors? Apparently
> they can be used to find good or evil. Depends on which way you pass through
> the looking-glass?
> 
> I dunno. I guess I am agreeing that in addition to religious allusion there is 
> modern (at the time)physics and almost surely a conveyance of sense of personal 
> redemption with regard to the opposites of fuligin and argent/mirrors that we find
> in BotNS. 	


So can we agree, at least, that the cloak and the robe are metaphors and not just habits as such?

...ryan


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