From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy@siebel.com>
Subject: RE: (whorl) Re: Horn dies
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 09:39:38 

Robski wrote:

> archy's cousin having t-y-p-e-d:

why thank you robert
perhaps i shd try writing that way and

...Naaah.

Anyway, Robert cites my list of resonances, and comments:

> I still think a lot of you are neglecting to factor in
> Big Daddy Pas in the final meltdown/merging of Horn and
> Silk at the series' denoument. 

I agree: in my case, because I'm simply not prepared to deal
with it yet. Pas' role changes so radically at the end of 
LONG that I'm not quite ready to deal with it, especially as
it merges into Silkhorn. (Other than the rather grotesque
obviousness of his being yet another Wolfe character who dies
and comes back from the dead.)


> In my opinion there's at least as much of him as the other
> two, if not more.

I dunno. The amalgam _talks_ like Silk.

**

Robert then cites this:
> "Where did you go, Oreb?"
> "Find god."
> "I see. Passilk? I think that's what the surgeon called 
> him. Did you find him, and is that why you returned to me?"
> "Find Silk." (OBW, 369)

Like many of Oreb's utterances, these allow of more than one
interpretation, but any good interpretation has to allow for
the presence of Scylla. What "god" would Scylla be looking
for? One that could help her with her little problem -- ideally,
the Mother, though perhaps she isn't yet aware that the Mother
exists as such. I would say the most obvious, if not necessarily
the best, intepretation is this: Scylla-in-Oreb went looking 
for a place where she could download ("Find god"), didn't find 
it, and returned to Silk{Pas}Horn.

> .. even Horn, ... claims that "Silk is an aspect of Pas now." 

Um... _who_ makes that claim? Isn't that Passilkhorn or 
whatever? And what does it mean in this case for Silk to be an
aspect of Pas? I might be wrong, but the impression I got (from 
the exchange with Kypris in _Exodus_) was that Pas was too 
damaged to completely resurrect from the hidden pieces -- perhaps
too many of them were lost. He couldn't build a complete or 
unified identity. So he wanted (or Kypris wanted it for him) to
upload Silk as a whole identity, and then merge the pieces of 
Pas into that. The resultant would, I think, actually be more
Silk than Pas -- Silk with bits of Pas merged in. [O'course, Pas 
being a very dominant person, this probably wouldn't be quite so
smooth...] 

> I'd therefore be a little more comfortable with Blattid's
> symbolic mix above if it cited Pas as father, Silk as son
> (since he's resurrected in the flesh), and Horn as Holy Ghost 

Then for heavens' sake, include it! I said, and you even quoted,

> ... I think all these resonances are 
> clearly there, but no one is a 'ruling metaphor.'

...which means that there is plenty of room for yet other
resonances, including the one you cite. Once put in front
of me, it's a perfectly obvious and good resonance. 

Observation, though: all three (Passilkhorn) have, in one
sense or another, died and been resurrected in the flesh, 
-- in the same flesh, in fact -- Silk's. I would hesitantly
suggest that no human character in Wolfe is likely to be
a strong representation of either the Father or the Spirit;
Catholicism and Christianity in general suggests that we
imitate Christ, not His altar-egoes.

[...sorry...]

I would say, then, that we look to the Outsider as always
the Father-figure in these books; various human characters
as Son-figures; and anything, but especially anything not-
human that seems to in some way dispense Grace (as Oreb) 
as Spirit-figures.

> And yet lest we take this Pas-Silk-Horn troika for
> something other than it really is--say, the literal
> embodiment of the Outsider--Wolfe gives us Quadrifons,
> perhaps, at least for the purposes of the SHORT SUN triptych,
> endorsing medieval theologian Peter Lombard's doctrine of
> quaternity, which posits God as a separate entity from the
> three persons of the Trinity.

_Most_ unlikely. As a Catholic, Wolfe is likely to buy into
large chunks of Thomism; in particular, one might check into
the Summa Contra Gentiles, sections 1.18ff., that God is His
own Essence and that Essence and Existence are one in God.

(Oy. Thomistic existentialism. Any Maritain fans in the 
audience? and if so, why?)

--Blattid


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