(urth) silk, the dancing toy, gods in the tunnels

Marc Aramini marcaramini at yahoo.com
Mon Aug 26 20:08:56 PDT 2013


Yes silk doubting the outsider is, I think, because he has come to doubt some feature of his enlightenment or its sincerity( in addition to no doubt questioning how so many bad things can happen - a tired truism, but the oldest problem of men of faith) No, not me with the dog collar - maybe James. I tend to take Wolfe literally at every step to see if there is some way things can actually be as written or symbolize something else.

There is an odd kind of deciphering in long sun where Wolfe just says things outright (kypris is hyacinth is mamelta is chenille is mother) (because they are all literally possessed by kypris or are her physically, and she is his real mother) and I take the Gods in the tunnels as another one of those instances of just literal statement.  There are gods in the tunnels. 

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On Aug 26, 2013, at 7:51 PM, António Pedro Marques <entonio at gmail.com> wrote:

> No dia 24/08/2013, às 16:45, Marc Aramini <marcaramini at yahoo.com> escreveu:
> 
>> I think that the rather odd naming of the dogs in the tunnels as gods
> 
> Ahh, so I'm not the only only one finding this quite odd. Not that the pun itself is hard to come by - was it you who connected it to 'dog collar', or was it LB or James?), but it's too childish to stand on its own, I think. 
> 
>> is indicative of exactly what it implies literally: the gods are in the tunnels - the sleepers behind the seals of Pas.  Before his probably suicide attempt, Silk indicates that he is aware of his origins now and that he learned them in the time down below.  While we can say this is just a statement about humanity and the whorl, I think it is personal - he realizes that the things which control him (Mother Kypris) are using him like that dancing toy, that his enlightenment might be spurious and predetermined in that gnostic universe (how quickly the chalk of Silk for Calde goes up after his enlightenment - I've always felt this overdetermined beginning is part of that "clock work figure" of Silk and the whorl.  He realizes that he has very little freedom and it is all set up.
> 
> There is somewhere Silk says he sometimes doesn't even trust the Outsider. I found that quite interesting. 
> 
>>  However, Mamelta is swallowed by the giant fish
> 
> A pulp trope, even - have characters vanish without warning just when you thought you'd start knowing a bit more about them.
> 
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