(urth) Claw = Fang?

[Daniel Petersen]

Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com> wrote:

Good and evil, the divine hammer and tongs which forge us, yes? Still,
between
such awesomely superhuman shaping tools, I'm not sure I see where room for
free will exists, except as a self-POV.


If I believed we were between those hammer and tongs, I'm not sure I'd
believe in the existence of freewill either, Lee.  But I don't believe that
nor do I think it's evinced in Wolfe.  My point in bringing up the fact
that both the New Testament and Wolfe often use  a single image to
symbolise both good and evil (e.g. lion), as indicated by context, was
emphatically *not* to to aver that either or both thereby proclaim some
kind of dualism.  Far from it.

Both hammer and tongs (if we must think of it that way) would only be good,
for only good has enough substance to be such hard shaping tools - whereas
evil is always parasitic, a tending towards nothingness (I think that
conception's fairly Augustinian and Lewisian and it's surely not too crazy
a stretch to think Wolfe may hold to something similar).  So the evil that
is symbolised by claws, fangs, thorns in Wolfe would be all that tends
toward the dissolution and disintegration of the characters, their
societies, and their environments - in all three Books.  The good
symbolised by these is always those forces of compassion, truth, justice
and so on that tend toward healing, reversal, renewal of all that bends
toward nothingness.  (Think about the major narrative arcs of each of the
Books for a moment and consider whether that doesn't well encapsulate the
moral universe of the tales.)

The freedom of creatures to bend with good's healing integration or,
conversely (and perversely), to bend against that good in the direction of
evil's disintegrating non-creative force seems plausible (and urgent) to me
in Wolfe.  His characters are not just inert objects being shaped by
opposing forces.  They are *imago Dei *creatures of inherent goodness
(think of the way Silk views even the 'worst') being called to 'go with the
flow' of that goodness rather than flowing in the opposite direction.
 That's libertarian freewill to me, not some pretend 'freedom' that must be
what it is by eternal decree (hammer and tongs style) even though it can
subjectively feel as if it's making it's own choices because that makes
life psychologically bearable.

-DOJP

On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 1:56 PM, Lee Berman <severiansola at hotmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> >Daniel Petersen: And this making all serpentine/clawed
> >images in Wolfe simultaneously resonant of both the angelic and demonic,
> >the divine and the diabolical - appropriately, as both Jesus and Satan are
> >imaged as a lion in the New Testament.)
>
> This brings to mind Severian's revelation on Tzadkiel's ship that the
> unquestionably angelic Barbatus and Famulimus have a watery, "kelpie"-
> like origin, connecting them to the giant sea beings back on Urth, one
> of whom has the demonic name Arioch.
>
> Angelic Tzadkiel also displays this connection with his/her self-described
> association with a sponge and the ability to pinch off smaller,
> human-shaped
> avatars in similar fashion to Scylla, The Mother and (likely) Abaia.
>
> Good and evil, the divine hammer and tongs which forge us, yes? Still,
> between
> such awesomely superhuman shaping tools, I'm not sure I see where room for
> free will exists, except as a self-POV.
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-- 
Daniel Otto Jack Petersen
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