(urth) fifth head owlet- wolf

[Marc Aramini]

You assume the author is wrong when it is convenient to your surface reading.   Maggots are the early stages, trees the matured metamorphosed possibly "ghostly" lifecycle, thus predendritic.  


Assuming the author is wrong in an interview is the reason you and I can not have meaningful discourse past a certain point and must always simply agree to disagree.

Spacefaring can imply being airborne.  Two events can be described in one passage characterized by mass confusion. 


Sent from my iPhone

On Apr 10, 2013, at 10:10 AM, "Gerry Quinn" <gerry at bindweed.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> From: Marc Aramini
> 
>> Oh Gerry - because he is cryptic by nature.  Notice that no mention is made of that
>> second space faring race using their hands at all.
> 
> No need to mention it, because they are clearly intended to refer to humans, the ancestors of the Shadow Children.  And even if they hadn't been, they built starcrossers.  And even if they hadn't done that, they are placed in juxtaposition to the first people (the Saint Anne indigenes) who did not use their hands.
> 
> You can't use Wolfe's supposed crypticism in a circular fashion to ignore all that has gone before and keep tunnelling into deeper and deeper layers of alleged symbolism.  Which you never come out of.  First it's trees, then it's maggots, and somehow these concepts are seen as supporting each other instead of being quite contradictory.  How does that work?
> 
>> If you don't think all the consistent imagery points to anything deeper, that's fine,
>> but you have to ignore a whole lot of literal statements that are all consistent to
>> avoid that elided bit of what symbolism is - something that stands for something
>> else, sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally.  Believe it or not occasionally
>> authors have hinted at something that is not overtly stated.
> 
> In my opinion you are reading all manner of symbolism into occasional words or phrases, and had the words been different you could probably have found a way to read the same symbolism from them.
> 
> ***********************************************
> "What's gone with that boy,  I wonder? You TOM!"
> No answer.
> The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the
> room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or
> never looked _through_ them for so small a thing as a boy; they were
> her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for "style," not
> service--she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well.
> She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but
> still loud enough for the furniture to hear:
> ***********************************************
> If I were to grab at any conceivable literal or metaphoric interpretation, I could conclude that Tom is a cat, that Aunt Polly has X-Ray eyes, and that that the furniture is sentient.  And that's just the first paragraph of Tom Sawyer, which I selected at random.
> 
>> Whether I am always right is another matter, but to deny that Wolfe can write about
>> one thing, drop allusions, and imply something else is a bit intentionally ignoring his
>> ambiguity.  Wolfe's interview said Marsch was a shadow child.  Marsch is bitten by
>> the cat.  How else does he become a shadow child if not through that infection?
> 
> Actually what Wolfe said was that a Shadow Child replaced Marsch (in my opinion it's fairly clear that he misspoke here and meant an abo).  So why would Marsch need to be bitten?
> 
> Maybe VRT ate him. Or maybe he died - perhaps from the bite - and only then did VRT start imitating him.  On the basis of the Old Wise One's story, it seems unlikely that the person being copied needs to die, but if the indigene wants to take his place in society, it is obviously convenient if he does.
> 
> - Gerry Quinn
> 
> 
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