(urth) Like a good Neighbor

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Sun, 11/20/11, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:

>  
> 
> The Green Man may (as B, F and O suggest) have more
> knowledge and power than they 
> 
> do. I completely agree that he is likely meant as a
> connection to The Neighbors
> 
> in some way. Your "tree connection" is spot on.  But
> The Green Man is another name 
> 
> for Great God Pan, a powerful, but primitive deity with
> plant associations (including
> 
> the vines of Dionysus). No matter how powerful and mystic
> this god is, he can never
> 
> be as spiritually advanced as we (Christians,I assume Wolfe
> means) are.  It is the 
> 
> angels who are spiritually superior to us, not the rustic,
> pagan gods of the past.
> 
>  
> 
> But I understand that once you have set upon a path for
> many years it isn't easy or 
> 
> even desirable to backtrack and reroute. But as I see it,
> doing that would
> 
> allow for a shorter, simpler path to what you are aiming
> for. Just my 2 cents,
> 
> of course. With apologies.    
>         
>           
>   

Well, a few things.  I DO see resemblances between the city of the inhumi and nessus, from the sewer to the "grove of disintegrating towers like a noble face rotting in the grave" used to describe the city on Green.  

Another thing is that the whorl left in the past, may have experienced relativistic speed, and is probably in typhon's future because there is NO indication it travelled through the time distortions of the ship on Urth of the New Sun.  In addition, when they show up on urth the narator says, "I wanted to take us to green, where Sinew is.  I wanted to see him again, as I still do, I wanted you others ... to see wha real evil is, so that you might undestand why we on blue must come together in brotherwhood BEFORE OUR OWN WHORL BECOMES WHAT GREEN ALREADY IS.' I fell silent, forced to think myself about what I myself had just said.

He wants them to see the condition that led to what Green is, to see what it was, when he winds up on Urth.  There is nothing about seeing what Green will one day become.  i think this is a REAL temporal inversion to see Green as a past Urth, that makes no textual sense and has no textual support.  If Green is the future of Urth, the vanished people have "every right to be there" because they are actually men, it explains how the inhumi are everywhere, it explains how "man climbed up in his tree and has not come down yet" from long sun, and we don't have to worry about how everybody wound up in the past, we only have to explain how the solar system changed during the cataclysm of the coming of the new sun.

And that hunter gatherer system you are describing is not an accurate picture of the neighbors - they are elsewhere.  Sounds more like a description of HePenSheep and those guys, who have gone native but are not Neighbors.