(urth) Silk beating two horses, Orpine rotting to vines, and Wolfe's dedication

Marc Aramini marcaramini at yahoo.com
Mon Feb 14 21:43:24 PST 2011


I was browsing over the first volume of long sun last night and I have to admit it made me feel a little ill.

Here is Wolfe's dedication to Lake of the Long Sun:

To Dan Knight, who will understand more than most.

This right here validates all the twisted readings of Wolfe I've ever done, he is simply not a straightforward writer from the get go, and I think he expects almost everybody NOT to get everything.

Okay, in one dream, Silk is beat two black horses, but he is said to be whipping the wrong horse every time he tries to hit its brother, that if the brother does not help, the horse being hit will die.

The horse winds up being cast into the save grave as orpine, who rots away to like flowers and vegetation in his dream, but it also talks about receding waters and other stuff, too.  Does anybody have a good explanation for Silk whipping the wrong horse?

Also, the last pages of Nightside have Silk contemplating two disturbing things that are kind of doubletalk if not taken literally: he talks about how the Outsider split him in two, and how that old version of himself would be frightful to meet.  In context, this describes the harmless prelate and the burglar willing to contemplate violence, but I think this is surely, surely the best and only hint in the text that there may be a multiplication of Silks, something I DON'T like.

But MORE disturbing is his immediate comparison of the Outsider with Auk, thinking, what if the Outsider is good ... in a dark way?  Thoughts like this are what lead me to believe Typhon has a hand in his enlightenment.  

If the embryos were grown before, and in any way have a familial relationship to the monarch, could Mucor be Echidna, or another daughter like Scylla or Molpe, and her alien brain the reason that the scans of the other gods are so alien in appearance?

What I don't like in these theories is there is just no way to determine if these embryos were ever fully grown or not.


      



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