(urth) the prime calcula/his citadel and oreb

[Gerry Quinn]

From: "Marc Aramini" <marcaramini at yahoo.com>
> I've listed these dreams over and over, and I just have to ask
> you does Wolfe really include them for nothing?  We know Chenille
> and Hyacinth are in some sense Kypris because of the possession.
> Did Wolfe include these for PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM?  If I
> wrote these dream sequences, knowing that I was the type of author
> to have a tendency from Peace to omit explication scenes, these
> would mean something and be provably correct SOMEHOW.

Some of it surely is for psychological realism.  Certainly Silk makes some 
equations in dreams that cannot be taken literally.

> I don't understand which details you latch onto and which are
> considered dream-like and extraneous.  Are the visions included
> for no reason?  Are they invalid?  How else is Wolfe supposed
> to hint without coming out and telling us, and ultimately, why
> should we read closely if these things are insolvably cryptic?
> They aren't in some cases.

They aren't included for no reason.  It's a big book - give it some space to 
spread itself out!  There are plenty of hints without having to interpret 
every little unexplained incident as some micro-miniaturised secret key to 
the whole work.  Not every character has to be another character in 
disguise.  Sometimes I get the impression that the more meaningless and 
trivial a thing is, the more some people latch onto it!  Not speaking 
particularly of you, Marc, there are a lot of folks whose methods of 
analysis I have trouble with.


> Can you figure out pig is a godling?  Yes.  How?  His claws.
 > Some mysteries are not meant to stay that way, and I'm only
> saying, though I am not a published author, when I write stuff
>  like this in my vision sequences, its supposed to be applied to
>  the work as a whole.  And I learned that from the parallel
> structures in early Wolfe novels like Peace, where a bunch of
> ghost stories told in a row lead one to conclude the whole story
>  is a ghost story, where Mrs. Porter is Ms. Bold just because
>  she is hot.  Do you really think Wolfe changed so much from
> solvable mysteries to completely baffling ones?  Silk sees his
> mother and father, and there are maternal language scattered
>  all throughout the book that are invariably associated with either
>  Kypris or Mamelta.

I think Peace and BotLS are books of a different kind.  Peace really is a 
ghost story, BotLS is an SF story; they don't operate the same way.  Sure, 
Wolfe doesn't stick slavishly to rules of how a story in a given genre 
should be constructed... but he respects the rules.

I don't find the clues completely baffling.  I think they often have 
concrete explanations that people cannot or will not see.  Characters can be 
confused, they can say things that indicate what they are thinking about, 
rather than what Gene Wolfe is thinking about.  Characters can use metaphor 
when they see or describe objects or events - we don't have to take 
everything they say as the literal truth when there are much more ordinary 
explanations.

The title of this thread, for example, is about stuff Echidna said. I think 
it means "the prime calculator was his citadel, that's where we killed him" 
[prime calculator as in central logic processing unit of Mainframe].  Of 
course other meanings are perfectly possible, and I'm not ruling any out 
here.  But remember, Echidna is possessing a broken down old android whose 
systems are malfunctioning ("what mean these numbers"). What she is saying 
can easily be distorted and confused.

I think the more obscure clues can often be pointers to the ideas Wolfe is 
getting at, but I also think that in his SF it's the concrete events and 
details - the stuff that actually happens - that holds the key to 
understanding.  It's not the Mystical Kabbalah - it's a science fiction 
story, guys!

- Gerry Quinn