(urth) Corundum of the Claw

[Mr Thalassocrat]

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 3:01 AM, Son of Witz <sonofwitz at butcherbaker.org>wrote:

>
> after the Crystal is broken, Severian understands it's ( now missing )
> light as "the only light we had."  He finds the shards, and gives them to
> the see, literally burying the myth.  After the myth is disposed of, he
> finds the real Claw, the thorn, and he waxes philosophical:
>
> "Whenever I looked at it, it seemed to erase thought. Not as wine and
> certain drugs do, by rendering the mind unfit for it, but by replacing it
> with a higher state for which I know no name. Again and again I felt
> myself enter this state, rising always higher until I feared I should
> never return to the mode of consciousness I call normality; and again and
> again I tore myself from it. Each time I emerged, I felt I had gained some
> inexpressible insight into immense realities. At last, after a long series
> of these bold advances and fearful retreats, I came to understand that I
> should never reach any real knowledge of the tiny thing I held, and with
> that thought (for it was a thought) came a third state, one of happy
> obedience to I knew not what, an obedience without reflection because
> there was no longer anything to reflect upon, and without the least
> tincture of rebellion."
>
> There, at the end you have it. He has a happy obedience without the least
> tincture of rebellion. He has been put through his tests, and now he is
> taking up the mantle.
>
The most interesting question for me is whether this unquestioning
acceptance is supposed to be a *good* thing.

 The Claw is only special because it has been soaked in Sev's blood, while
he was on the Ship (or at least that's what
giant-moth-woman-Morlock-bureaucrat Apheta tells him in UOTNS). The religion
of the New Sun only exists because of Sev's actions in "the past". When he
prays at the altar of the Pelerines in the lazarette, he finds that he is
praying to himself.

If you can import a notion from Long Sun/Short Sun, Sev's strivings lead
only back to himself, not outside, to the "Outsider".

And contrast Silk and SilkHorn's enlightenment and experience of the
presence of God, with the thoughtless, formless, fundamentally
non-intellectual nature of Sev's experience in this quote. Personally, I
don't think Wolfe has any time for this kind of mystical experience,
separated from the intellect. I read Pirate Freedom as a critique of it -
the worthlessness of feeling all holy when it's separated from the conscious
will to actually do good stuff.

Sev, the avatar of *his* religion, of course ends up responsible for
the death of most of the people of Urth, without really thinking about what
he's actually doing or having clear sense of why.

When you first read New Sun, and see the strange parallels between the life
of Christ and Sev's life, it's natural to wonder if it isn't all a little
blasphemous, coming from a Christian writer.

I think the answer is that Sev's career is indeed a kind of blasphemy. He
says to Aphata that he is worried that the Hieros are like the magicians,
promising wonders & delivering evil.

I think Sev for them serves much the same purpose as the mutilated cock he &
little Sev find, before they encounter the magicians. The cock is a piece of
apotropaic magic to ward off the coming of the New Sun. I think the Hieros
have moulded Sev as a tool to ward off the coming of Christ, in some sense.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20100623/a349f0d3/attachment-0003.htm>