(urth) Silkhorn as Blue god

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Sun, 12/9/12, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:


From: Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com>
Subject: (urth) Silkhorn as Blue god
To: "urth at urth.net" <urth at urth.net>
Date: Sunday, December 9, 2012, 8:11 PM




I don't know if this has been noted before but at the end of
OBW, the narrator is telling several stories at once in typical
confusing fashion, shuttling between them with each new paragraph.
Parsing out one thread it seems to me that not only is Horn conflated
with Silk, but that character is conflated with Babbie, and blind Pig 
(and perhaps blind Tartaros also), with the suggestion of possession by 
Whorl gods via a sacred Window. At the very end of the book, there is a 
very similar vibe as at the end of UotNS, where Severian is recognized 
as a god of a watery planet.

Horn is camping on a river island and calling to Babbie. Then:

>Someone on shore called again for Babbie and I understood that he meant
>me; it never so much as occured to me then that I had sometimes been 
>called "Silk" or "Horn"...I waded ashore and set off through the forest
>at a trot...I found him in the forest, sitting in the dark under the
>trees. I could not see him. It was too dark to see anything. But I knelt
>beside him and laid my head upon his knee, and he comforted me.

Later, the narrator meets a couple kids (Brother and Sister) in the woods.
He teaches them how to fish and hunt. The kids see and interact with the 
Vanished people sometimes. The narrator says:

>Last night I dreamed that Pig, Hound and I ran into an abandoned house to 
>get out of the rain. It seemed familiar and I set off to explore it.  I saw
>a clock--and the hands were on twelve. I knew that it was noon, not midnight,
>althought the windows were black as pitch...

>..Nothing about my dream of an angry and vindictive Scylla who talked like
>Oreb, the dream that woke me screaming and so terrified Brother and Sister:
>"Window! Window! Window!"

>I asked them [Brother and Sister] about the Vanished Gods. They said there 
>was one in the forest, so I told them about him. And a lot more, things that 
>I should keep to myself. I tried to teach them how to pray, and found they 
>already knew although they did not have the word.                           
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All of these things have textual explanations, though. Windcloud got to know Silk and Horn because they both lived in his house for a time, possibly the hus Babbie. Pig carried Silver Silk in him and the eye is necessary to get the fragment out (and back to Silk's body, too?), Babbie winds up carrying most of Horn in that scene, our narrator changes from 1st person Horn with dominant control of narrative to Silk in denial with fragment of Horn left at that particular point, in IGJ the depiction of Horn's time on green is now in 3rd person and the 1st person narrative is mostly present tense and preachy preachy preachy, clearly Silk. - The Rajan is a god insofar as Silver Silk is. Pretty sure that the flashing lights at the end of RTTW indicate silver silk is returning to Silk's body, which has been animated by Horn, and will be mixed until the end of OBW, the scene you reference.
 

The vanished god is the big tree he sits under that lets Horn say "good-bye"
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