(urth) H'mmm

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Fri, 11/18/11, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: (urth) H'mmm
> To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Date: Friday, November 18, 2011, 10:20 AM
> Marc,
> 
> I'm beginning to get a glimmering of what you're talking
> about. Is it
> possible for you to lay out what you believe is going on,
> in a fairly
> brief and linear fashion? I've read your lengthy essay and
> came away
> only a little the wiser; I must be a slow learner here.
> 
> --Dan'l

I will try my best, this is kind of tough.

Neighbors don't show up again until Horn falls in that Pit, and then after that he meets one that says, "my name is horn, too."  I argue they "shared his blood" by eating him, and used it to create the neighbor Horn.


Okay I will try to keep it in terms of simple mechanism: trees on green are described in very very human qualities: they solve problems, eat other trees, and weep for the dead.  All of the weird shifts in narrative happen near a tree. Liana vines parasitize them and the narrator's liana staff acts like, and is called, an inhummi (he can astral travel with only his staff and no other inhuma present, and it has a little face on it).  Inhumi can survive for long periods buried under ground, as you would expect for something that was partly vegetative.

Horn is terribly disturbed when he sees that an entire island on blue during a storm is made up of giant herbs.  It is my contention that, just as the inhumi pass on the genetic material of the blood they eat to their offspring, the trees do so as well (they eat, after all).  the vanished people are mad when someone goes into the forest with an ax because they are going to cut down their parents.    So the genetic material, blood, is used, eucharist style, to take part in the substance of what they eat and join with it.  The crossing of strains makes a hardier individual more fit for survival, as the first chapter of OBW relates.  

Severian on Urth was obsessed with the idea that when the New Sun came a brush would animate itself and run up a tree.  The future of the Green Man is  vegetative one, and this is what we see on Green.  The trees have eaten all the vestiges of man to create neighbors and the other "double" species, and the vines that have parasitized them are like a lower form: they can only pass on some sentience to their offspring based on who they fed off of.  

The city on Green is Nessus, and Horn reenacting the myth of Severian and bringing a flood/purging of corpses is a conflation of horn and severian that I still can't explain.  In any case, now that the whorl has returned to its origin point in the far future, the lianas have become the dominant life form on Green - the trees cannot deal with them.  Horn makes the deal with the trees to allow the return of the Vanished PEOPLE, but he has unwittingly permitted the vanished gods/trees to "share blood" with the populace. Now the nieghbors will return.  

When the narrator ends up on Urth, he was trying to get to Green at a time before the evil of the inhumi overran it, and later when the inhumi go with him they make the claim, "we are everywhere!" because they recognize their distant past while the humans deny it, just as Silk denies he is Silk because it means Horn made a sacrifice for him, the "better" man (man was sacrificed for his "better" future - the neighbors get to "move on")

So, in a nutshell, on ancient Urth the trees awoke, undertook a eucharist to join with man, and mankind essentially vanished wholesale from Urth in favor of the "crossed strain" neighbors.  Short Sun is in a future after Sev lived, (the passage of time on the whorl was either 300 years or 3000 years, one Maytera muses that she dropped a decimal in her calculations or even more with relativistic time dilation) because hybridization creates completely new species in only ONE generation.