(urth) the prime calcula/ his citadel and other quotes

[Marc Aramini]

Gerry, one of the things I quoted you dismissed as just Silk being introduced to a new name, I was trying to imply they cast doubts on the validity of Mamelta's clear memories.  Mamelta says her name is mamelta, and when silk asks if that's really her name, she says ... "I think so. I can't ..." indicating she HAS been tampered with.  If I ask you if your name is Gerry, do you say, "I think so."?  Its indicative of supreme confusion, and Rigoglio, aka Roger, also says the memories of those placed aboard where altered in Short Sun.  I don't think it says that her name is NOT mamelta, but it does say that she has been messed with and is confused.  The motherhood stuff in visions equates Kypris possessed people with mother: Hyacinth who was Chenille was was Mother who was Mamelta - ie - only those possessed by Kypris except for this "mother" figure, and both Kypris, Silk, and Mamelta have blue eyes.  Blond hair is not stated to be rare in Viron, I don't
 think, and even though it operates with the same recessive character in general as blue eyes, one would expect MORE people to have the recessive gene.  (It is possible for two parents with the right recessive trait who are dark to have a blond haired blue eyed child IF the recessive traits are significantly common in their genetic background, something we don't see in Viron at all - ie we can't expect anybody to have recessive blue eye alleles).  

So you don't think Wolfe would even bother to include Silk's genetic mother if she is mentioned in the second dream enlightenment? as two sets of parents, when Silks says he thinks he knows how he came to be from something he learned underground?  What other blue eyed women are wandering around?  You said that feeling of being held by a mother was only due to the elevator shaft, but it happened near Mamelta, he looks up her groin, the dream visions equates her with KYpris/mother/chenille/hyacinth.  How much textual juxtaposition will be needed to produce that effect?

The monarch wants a son to succeed him, and at the end Silk's face on Pas shows just that succession.

He is described as a clockwork figure in a clockwork world, at the beginning, something wound up by Pas and stalled, and this is exactly what he enacts in this small closed mechanised system of the universe, a preprogrammed cog of succession that may or may not break free.  Remember that he does want to kill himself at the end from some awful realization, and there are times absurdly in the text when he says Doctor Crane was right, the Outsiders enlightenment just a burst vessel.  Does he believe himself to be a fraud, in addition to Hy's betrayal?


--- On Sat, 1/15/11, Gerry Quinn <gerryq at indigo.ie> wrote:

> From: Gerry Quinn <gerryq at indigo.ie>
> Subject: Re: (urth) the prime calcula/ his citadel and other quotes
> To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Date: Saturday, January 15, 2011, 10:16 AM
> 
> From: "Marc Aramini" <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
> > --- On Fri, 1/14/11, Gerry Quinn <gerryq at indigo.ie>
> wrote:
> 
> >> What colours might they have been that would not
> be
> >> significant, and what do these colours say?
> 
> > any other color would have been insignificant. 
> But blue and black
> > are the same colors as Kypris, and Silk's blue eyes
> are well documented
> > as rare.  p670 of Epiphany:
> 
> Maybe so... but her memories aren't very suggestive of
> Typhon's concubine Kypris.  And she hasn't had them
> wiped, because she remembers events to do with being
> transported to the Whorl.  She seems like an ordinary
> middle-class kid with some brothers and a parrot, trained as
> a computer technician, and forced to volunteer as a sleeper
> on Typhon's colonisation mission.  She was one of many:
> "they said we were going to a wonderful world of peace and
> plenty... we knew they lied."
> 
> 
> > "You don't look like her.  Like Chenille. 
> ... your eyes are blue, but
> > hers are brown."  Almost no one in Viron has blue
> eyes like Silk,
> > Chenille probably resembles her biological father
> Tussah.  So you
> > don't think the motherhood feeling he describes while
> with Mamelta
> > is a narrational juxtaposition at all?  Do I
> really need to explicitly
> > state the importance of her eye and hair color?
> 
> I don't really get the 'motherhood feeling' reference -
> maybe I missed it?
> 
> As for hair and eye colour, they may be right for Kypris,
> but the hair colour is wrong for Silk even if the eyes are
> right (though their blue colour is described as deeper than
> that of Silk's).
> 
> Also, when Silk meets her first, it says "there was
> something familiar - something horrible that he struggled to
> deny - in her smile".  But reading on, it seems like
> that is to do with Mucor's possession of her.
> 
> One possibility to do with the unusual eyes is that blue
> eyes are reasonably common on Urth, but not in the stock of
> those who formed the population of Viron.  Silk and
> Mamelta may well come from outside this stock (TBH I'd have
> thought Typhon would have stored sleepers and embryos of the
> same stock as the locals, but it seems that for some reason
> he didn't bother with this. Perhaps he thought outcrossing
> would be beneficial especially if there was some problem
> causing a population reduction.)
> 
> - Gerry Quinn
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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