(urth) Sigh.

[DAVID STOCKHOFF]

--- On Tue, 1/11/11, Jordon Flato <jordonflatourth at gmail.com> wrote:
From: Jordon Flato <jordonflatourth at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) Sigh.
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Tuesday, January 11, 2011, 5:05 PM

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 1:39 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com> wrote:



 Returning to the Moby Dick analogy, one is reasonable in suggesting

that "Moby Dick is God" provided one does not mean "Moby Dick, the

whale in the story, created the world in which the story takes place."

The ways in which Moby Dick can be God are much more interesting than

that. Likewise, the ways in which Urth can be Green are much more

interesting than the merely physical way in which it clearly can't.
This is it for me.  The interest in the resonance between Urth/Green and Ushas/Blue (my preference there) is pretty much flattened if we are asked to pretzel our understanding in order to make it literally true. The amount of gymnastics required to make it work are, to me, astounding...and yet it adds little to the thematic resonance which is already there, in existence, and pretty clear (to me, to me, of course).  The equation doesn't balance.  If I felt some really dramatic metaphoric or symbolic resonance was served by having them be literally the same, I might be more inclined to go with it where it leads.  At this point, it actually flattens that resonance for me, and so I reject it.

Exactly. Plus, it's not literature. The proposed elaborate repetition of planetary duos is the kind of thing we have almost seen in various half-mad poets over the centuries ((Yeats, Blake), but even more, what we might imagine scribbled on the walls of insane asylums. In a word, an obsession. Wolfe is not even slightly mad.
Marc: If Green is URTH, is Blue not USHAS? That is, might Green represent the evil past (the corrupted Garden) and Blue the hopeful new world? Couldn't it be that simple?
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