Date: Fri, 29 Mar 2002 19:55:26 -0700
From: maa32 
Subject: (urth) for Dan'l: why Blue=Urth?

Dan'l asked why the scheme I have proposed for trees must include blue as 
urth.
For me, it makes better use of the trees: they serve as creators instead of 
shadowy figures that just lurk there.  If blue is urth, it explains the wall 
seawrack sees under the sea as Nessus' wall, it explains how the trees on the 
moon evolved and killed the colonists there, eventually returning to Urth to 
see it wiped out.  In other words, it presents a whole future history and 
jives up all those little points like Hoof calling Lune Green, and lets us 
understand how the old Scylla could know where the new Scylla had sent 
Seawrack.  Note that the saltier sea and the darker lighting of Urth as 
opposed to Blue are rectified by the coming of the new sun, making it the same 
as Blue's setting, and making those comments actually important.  It makes 
symbolic sense of the Hoof going on and on about making an anchor in that 
chapter with the travel: an anchor keeps you in one place.  With time travel, 
we can explain how Silk will show up in Inclito's mother's story: in one of 
his dreams.  The trees and their instant speciation provide for the changes 
evolutionarily from men to neighbors: they have appeared before, and they are 
reborn with the colonists.  It explains why they come back: the trees make a 
new generation from Horn's DNA after he falls into the pit (on an island of 
trees). Why would they respect Horn otherwise?  He is like their father - it 
explains why they like him.  If the neighbors have time-bending properties (or 
the trees)then we can reconcile the two big green and blue planets as one and 
show how man will eventually become the green man (and it matches the green 
man's own access to the corridors of time).  There are just too many 
similarities (like the distances) to completely ignore, no matter how many 
porblems Gene throws in there.  Also,Krait says the biggest puzzles are the 
most obvious ones.  This really stuck with me for some reason.  The absolute 
biggest puzzle is how the heck Blue could be Urth, even though so many of the 
things are the same about it.  In other words, I would be overlooking a lot of 
little clues if I simply said the trees where completely alien trees that had 
nothing to do with the terraforming of Lune.  And if they don't "make" 
vanished people, then why are they the gods of the vanished people, and what 
do they have to do with them?  And if they do make vanished people, then I 
have proposed a hybridizing mechanism that will produce them.  In other words, 
I don't know what to do with the trees except to try to mold them into the 
mythos of Lune and to provide a means for the rationalization of the changes 
in the animal life of urth and to reconcile the obvious time "paradox": you 
can't go to Blue and Urth at the same time if they are the same place - I 
think this is the big paradox that Krait is foreshadowing.  I think Gene put 
in all these little clues that hint that Blue is Urth but then totally screwed 
us over with the ambiguous math of the system.  Perhaps you can't ever 
determine with 100% certainty that blue is urth, but you can sure try like 
hell and seem to make some progress towards it using the clues in the book.

 Later, a multi-limbed vanished person jumps out of the sea who Horn claims 
might be immortal.  First I thought this was Severian, who was under the sea 
and got eaten by a tree.  Horn indicates that we can should try to figure out 
what was really going on there; but we don't have enough information about 
somebody who could be "favored by their gods with immortality" unless we can 
apply Urth to it: Severian.  This is right after he realizes that the island 
he was just on was made entirely of trees covered with things like lianas, in 
Chapter 6 of OBW. "I do not know how such a monstrous thing came to be, but I 
have thought about it again and again, and at last settled on the explanation 
that I offer here.  If you find a better one, I congratulate you." (94 SFBC).  
This sounds like Wolfe making a meta-textual statement: I present this 
solution, but can you find another plausible one I have have designed into the 
text?  He does this a lot with the location of Urth and Blue as well: Silk 
says don't look at his words, he wishes he could make you see that the sky 
feels like the same sky. (I'm looking for that exact quote now in Return to 
the Whorl, but it is evading me).

Another bit of evidence supporting that inhuma are kind of like trees is that 
you can bury them and they won't die.

Here is the trees that are eating trees section: "Green is great in the sky.  
Like th eye of a devil, people say; but the truth for me is that it is so 
large that I look up at it and think on other days, and fancy sometimes that I 
can smell the rot, and see the trees that are eating trees that are eating 
trees.  I never hear the wild song of the wind without recalling other days 
still. ... Time is a sea greater than our sea.  You knew that long before I 
went away.  I have learned it here.  Its tides batter down all walls, and what 
the tides of time batter down is never rebuilt.  Not larger.  Not smaller.  
Never as it was." (92)SFBC OBW Chapter 6 Seawrack.  The green is lune 
hypothesis explains the skeletons of Silk's "friends" on Green in the tower 
far away from all other human access: they are the colonists of Lune who held 
out in their stronghold against the strange life they had made to adapt to 
Lune, which began to take on their attributes.  This is where the neighbors 
got space technology, then came to earth.

I think that we aren't making full use of the trees if we don't apply the 
plant hybridization theme to them - and I think that lets us rationalize the 
appearance of new species on the planet.  In any case, the descriptions of the 
vanished people indicate that they exist in a different sort of place - 
perhaps that difference could include a time differential.  This is my 
question - why are we so opposed to the ability of the vanished people to 
travel through time, when they can obviously come whenever they want from 
"somewhere else"?  Isn't time travel the best solution?  If it's a higher 
dimension, doesn't that entail some kind of power over time in our dimension, 
anyway?

I don't know if this makes any sense ... it just seems like the trees work as 
a real key to allow blue to be urth.
Marc Aramini



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