(urth) Father Inire-Hethor (and trees again)

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Thu, 10/20/11, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:

>  
> >Marc Aramini: It's not hidden if you read Short sun
> looking for it, it almost jumps out.  
> >I can't open the book without finding further evidence
> of it.
>  
> Yep, that's how the Father Inire theory is for me. It
> doesn't make the whole story fall apart
> but actually binds it all together. I think Borski was
> right to look for copies of Father Inire
> but horribly wrong in interpreting him to be a Moses
> figure.
>  

Yeah, I feel like the tree thing is very very explicit but its ubiquitous nature in the text is ignored in lieu of attacking the straw man green is urth scenario.  I agree the monkey like features are an interesting correspondence, but I would like to see an overwhelming compendium of metatextual quotes such as I refer to below, over statements that claim the vegetable matter must have a purpose.

This was part II of my argument for that, referenced with quotes.  Nothing new, its almost ten years old.

"And yet it seemed irrational that so vast a quantity of vegetable matter should go to waste. 
Pas, who built the Whorl, would have arranged things better." 
(OBW 142) 

Thus Horn muses over the foliage on an island he visits. Certainly, we should take it as a hint that Wolfe has a plan for the verdure of the various whorls - the demiurge of Briah would never let such material go to waste. 

One of the most mysterious portions of On Blue’s Waters occurs when Horn falls into a pit on an island, and a stranger holds something to his forehead. This island-pit heralds the first actual appearance of the Vanished People in the text, and bears some examination. Horn’s description of the island and its makeup is paramount in importance: 

I saw the green plain part for us, ripped in two by the fury of the waves, and seeing it so - lifted by great waves at one moment, then crashing down upon the sea again at the next - I knew it for what it was. ... Great herbs (I do not know what else to call them) grow there that are not trees, nor grasses, nor ferns, but share the natures of all three. Their tangled branches, lying upon the surface, are draped with the smooth green life over which Babbie and I wandered. It may be that it covers them as orchids cover our trees here in Gaon, or as strangling lianas cover the cannibal trees of Green. Or it may be that they cover themselves with it as the trees of land cover themselves with leaves and fruit. I do not know. But I know that it is so, because I saw it that night. I saw that I had once thought islands torn like banana leaves, and tossed like flotsam by waves. 
(OBW 161) 

Horn sees the islands torn asunder - and afterwards a Vanished Person with four arms comes up from the sea and boards his boat. The island is made up of vine-tree symbioses, very similar to the ones on Green. In the same scene, Horn has a philosophical discussion with Seawrack about Pas’ return: 

"He had planted himself, in a way, and grew again. Do you know about seeds, Seawrack?" 

"Planting corn. You told me." 

"He re-grew himself from seed, so to speak. That’s what a pure strain of corn does. It produces seeds before it dies, and when that seed sprouts, the strain is back for another year, just as it was before." 

"Do you think that the Vanished People might have done that?" 
(OBW 165) 

The return of the Vanished People is likened to the process of seeding corn. And when Horn falls in the pit, a vanished person appears to him. He states:

"...it was as if my spirit had gone and left my body unoccupied as it did on Green, but in this case it had returned, and my memories (such as they were) were those of the body and not those of the spirit." 
(OBW 195). 

Horn goes on to describe one of his visions in the pit: 

Once, as I lay there at the bottom of the pit, it seemed to me that a man with a long nose (a tall man or an immense spider) stood over me. I did not move or even open my eyes, knowing that if I did he would be gone. He touched my forehead with something he held, and the pit vanished. 
(OBW 203). 

This vanished person, who heals Horn, later identifies himself as Horn! 

There is a mysterious quality associated with blood and transformation. In the Eucharistic scene of In Green’s Jungles, Silk re-enacts the mass of the Catholic Church. Blood serves an interesting function even earlier: He pen-sheep and his family exchange the blood of a shearbear through a process called "Change blood" (OBW 261). The family identifies Horn as "You neighbor-man. ...Change blood Neighbor." This means that Horn has, in effect, through a blood transfusion, become a Neighbor. Later, he meets the neighbors and tells them that they can return to their world. The Neighbor he makes a deal with identifies himself with the statement: "‘My name is Horn also" (OBW 272). Now for the intuitive leap: if the secret of the inhumi is that the blood of humanity affects their offspring, can we use this to help understand how this Vanished Person could also be Horn? Later, Silk will perform a ceremony of the Catholic Mass which symbolizes the
 transformation of vegetable matter into actual blood - transubstantiation: 

Then I broke the bread in two, laid half of it upon his altar, and poured wine over it ... He came, and stood behind me on the hilltop. I have been preparing myself to describe that the whole time I have been writing, and now that the moment has come I am as wordless as my horse. I knew that he was there, that if I turned, I would see them. 
(IGJ 235). 

Who are the creatures watching Silk in the forest? What do we normally find in forests? The trees, the Vanished Gods. We have met them before. After Horn’s little sleep under the tree in the wilderness, he even recognizes the tree as the Vanished God of Blue: "They see the Vanished People sometimes, they told me. Sometimes the Vanished People even help them. That is good to know. I asked them about the Vanished Gods. They said there was one in the forest, so I told them about him." (OBW 381). Somehow, the tree must be the Vanished God that Horn speaks of, for it allowed the transmigration of Horn’s soul into Babbie. When Horn fell into the mouth of a tree on his island and into the "pit", he was effectively eaten. His blood was used to create a new hybrid: the next generation of Neighbor. 

The trees are connected to the vanished people over and over again: a man named Barsat claims to have encountered the Vanished People on three occasions "and felt sure they were by no means friendly. ... He said he was going into the jungle to cut firewood when he saw several standing or sitting in thickets and regarding him in a less than friendly way, and turned back" (OBW 213). Continuously throughout the text, the Vanished People will be linked to the trees. Indeed, in the very end of Return to the Whorl, Hoof looks through the ring of the narrator and sees a Vanished Person sitting on a huge tree that was previously invisible. 

We find that trees permeate almost every aspect of the text, from weeping at the death of Krait to making up entire island chains. Now for the second loaded word: Corn. Of course, Silk is associated with Corn. There are some other properties of Corn that should be examined: 

In plants a doubling of the amount of DNA has been observed to create new species and is believed to have been the basis for the formation of wheat, corn and many other useful plants. It is called polyploidy. In one generation, a new species of plants is generated. There is no gradual evolution of parent to daughter species. Furthermore, the new species are incapable of crossing with the parent. Polyploidy involves doubling the number of chromosomes. In normal reproduction of eukaryotic cells, the chromosomes must double and then separate. In the case of polyploidy, the cell division after doubling does not take place and one is left with a cell of double the number of chromosomes. But this will be two identical sets, without any new information. If you had 23 pairs you will now have 46 pairs. Corn and other crops are usually considered polyploids of smaller native species. [emphasis added] 
( http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/dec99).

With this in mind, we can look at some events from the very first chapter of the book: 

"The point that you’re both forgetting .... I’m not sure how I can explain. We call this whorl Blue, and call our sun here the Short Sun."

"Sure." 

"At home, we called the whorl our ancestors came from the Short Sun Whorl. ... I remember talking with Patera Silk about all the wisdom and science that we left there...." 

"I don’t see what any of this has to do with maize." 

"It has everything to do with it....We need new seed, Hide. More than that, we need pure strains that we can cross for ourselves." 
(OBW 30-31) 

The discussion of corn inevitably invokes hybridization, for corn is one such hybridization. Its genetic number is 4n, twice that of diploid organisms such as human beings. Plants often form new species in just ONE generation by this crossing over: without a reduction in genetic material, the daughter plant has twice the genetic complement and can no longer breed with the parent plant, effectively creating a new species. Corn is polyploid. Hybridization and doubling ... let’s keep that in mind, since it might have "everything to do with [the Short Sun Whorl]". Horn obviously believes that the corn and its implications has some import for the whorl that they live on. 

Notice that Seawrack and the narrator talked about Pas regrowing himself like corn ... and they also talked about the return of the Vanished People as a process similar to corn. Notice that Horn is identified as a Vanished Person by He-pen-sheep because he has shared blood with him. Finally, notice that the trees "eat" and that the island on which Horn fell in the pit and found himself in close quarters with a vanished person was composed of trees. Why have the vanished people chosen Horn as the man to decide whether they can return to Blue? Because he is the mechanism of their return: he was eaten, and his blood was used to create a plant-human hybrid: the Vanished People. Of course, he wasn’t the first human to be eaten. The Vanished People were around a long time before the whorl ever sent any landers down to colonize Blue or Green. 

Just a few more telling passages. As Horn approaches his fateful island, he states: 

Green is great in the sky. Like the eye of a devil, people say; but the truth for me is that it is so large that I look up at it and think on other days, and fancy sometimes that I can smell the rot, and see the trees that are eating trees that are eating trees. I never hear the wild song of the wind without recalling other days still, and how we built our house and our mill, Nettle. ... Time is a sea greater than our sea. You knew that long before I went away. I have learned it here. Its tides batter down all walls, and what the tides of time batter down is never rebuilt.
(OBW 159) 

Here we have a discussion of the cannibal trees and a philosophical discussion of the nature of time. Why would Green evoke thoughts of the passage of time? One final connection needs to be drawn. If the inhumi rely on the blood of humans to maintain their sentience, then how are they related to the Vanished People and their trees? 

Look at the myths of the inhumu: 

An inhuma was caught alive last night, and today I was forced to watch as she was buried alive. ...These people, like people everywhere here, seem to fear that an inhumu may live on even with its head severed. That is not the case, of course; but I cannot help wondering how the superstition originated and became so widespread. Certainly the inhumi have no bones as we understand them. Possibly their skeletons are cartilage, as those of some sea-creatures are. On Green, Geier maintained that the inhumi are akin to slugs and leeches. No one, I believe, took him seriously, yet it is certain that once dead they decay very quickly, though they are difficult to kill and can survive for weeks and even months without the blood that is their only food. 
(OBW 108-109) 

Further descriptions compare them to snake-like beings, and Jahlee constantly clings to men like a vicious liana vine. Indeed, it is entirely conceivable that those details are important. The lesser vines of the Vanished Gods would have characteristics similar to the traits of the inhumi, if they could eat, recombine, and spit out copies as the trees do. They might be composed of hard proteins or polymers, and saprophytes would easily consume the dead vegetable matter that actually composed their body. In simpler, less evolved states, the inhumi/vine would certainly not be susceptible to beheading. And look at the most telling evidence: they can survive for extended periods buried underground. 

We must always keep in mind the special talent of the narrator: he can walk through brush as if it weren’t there. He can send his spirit forth in his "dreams" to distant locales, but only when an inhumi (or Vanished God or Person) is at his side. At one point he projects his spirit without the aid of an inhumi next to him, and ponders how it happened. Certainly, at the time he had his staff. Look at the description of the creation of his staff: 

[Cugino walked] to a huge tree embraced by a vine thicker than my wrist. Two mighty blows from the axe severed its stem twice, and a third a thick branch at the top of the severed portion. ... He tore the section that he had cut off the tree (which must have been thanking him with all its heartwood) ... Before I forget, I ought to say that what my very good friend Cugino called a vine was what we called a liana on Green. Green is a whorl made for trees, and Green’s trees have solved every problem but that one. One might almost call it a whorl made by trees. 
(IGJ 16-17)


What is the problem on Green? The inhumi - and the narrator’s staff later scares a few people, and seems to have a bit of a face. There is a bumping in the night in Dorp. We can infer that the staff of the narrator is a primitive, unevolved inhumi. But thanks to its feast on Silk’s blood ... its children won’t be. It also allows him to perform his astral traveling pretty much whenever he wants. With this origin in mind, doesn’t the myth of the inhumi’s strange properties make more sense?