Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2003 22:00:20 -0700
From: maa32 
Subject: (urth) green man

Well, I have always favored the idea that Silkhorn is the proto-green man, 
eaten (but spit out) by a tree and reconstituted with chloroplasts in his 
blood so that he never has to eat, but gets really sick in winter when the 
lighting isn't so good. (Through reverse endosymbiosis: tree eats man)  BUT 
... Silk isn't green.  Maybe it's like freckles - you need a few generations 
of good healthy chloroplasts to have them so prominent that people become 
green.  So I don't know.

Someone did make a fascinating claim: that Silk's power to change stories like 
he did with Fava could indeed have affected Severian's narrative: Silk didn't 
want to be in it so he changed it up, or Silk wound up in it somehow even 
though that's not how it really went.  What a neat power to have to solve all 
contradictions and paradoxes!  "Silk wanted it written that way 
subconsciously"  Talk about metanarrative abilities.  And he was "told" the 
story of Severian by his passion play in the chapter of In Green's Jungles 
where Silk tells his story of "the man on green" : a man with a wicked sword 
and a light, embued with power from an extraordinary, previous world-cycle 
source, clears out the trash of humanity and brings a big flood, and in that 
flood loses his light just as Severian lost the claw in Lake Diuturna.  So the 
passion play would tell him all about Severian through the odd mutable myth 
technique, which he could then mutate beyond all recognition at a whim or 
write himself into.

Marc Aramini



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