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Date: Fri, 22 Aug 2003 11:13:22 -0700
From: maa32
Subject: (urth) IGJ p 100-103
There is a reason I always paraphrase quotes instead of looking them up. I
get distracted, especially in Short Sun, and then you guys have to suffer for
it. More Green is Urth from Aramini.
I have probably been accused of misrepresenting and bending the text to my own
vile purposes more than anyone on the list. Call it intellectual laziness
instead of willful difficulty. I don't want that to happen, nor do I want to
quote a whole three pages, so I am giving a page range this time.
I was looking up signs of hunger and after-meal sickness, but I never found
it. Instead, I would ask that anyone interested refer to pages 101-103 in In
Green's Jungles in their entirety.
To encapsulate my previous theories, the trees are the vanished Gods who
recombine with animals and people through blood to make the multilimbed
creatures of Green and Urth; the liana vines are primitive inhumu who have not
yet feasted on human blood; Green is Urth in the future; some of Horn left
Silk's body at the end of OBW when he sat under a tree, and the tree was
responsible for it. So far so bad. Now:
Chapter 6 of In Green's Jungles is entitled "The Guessing Game" Our humble
narrator goes and sits on a log, and suddenly he is recounting the end of the
affair of the man on Green in First Person instead of third.
p 102: "At time sit seemed to me that a thousand inhumi must have been lurking
beneath the water,and that the points of light I aw were their glittering
eyes, softened by ripples,; but every few minutes a dark shape would pass
among them like a floating log, and I would realize yet again that it was we,
not they, who populated the water.
Nor was that all I saw. Great hailress beasts, on two legs and four, and six,
came to the river to drink or to course our floating corpses as bears pursue
fish, and I recalled the strangely named bear with which He pen sheep had
exchanged blood, and wondered whether such bears sought carrion beside the
rivers of shadelow."
Over on page 103: "Without Oreb to remind me, I might very well forget to eat
and sleep. Sudden enlightenment can be wonderful, as wonderful as the sight
of hte Neighbor's light flashing through the dense foliage of the band had
been to me. But wonderful though it is, it is not the only way in which
understanding comes. A full day after that (I still remember how hungry I was
by then), when something moved in ...." [he mistakes his sword for a carrion
worm and it moves to his hand]
OK. So here we have the narrator sitting on a tree corpse and thinking about
his experience on Horn, then about 2, 4, and 6 legs after talking about a
blood transfusion. Also, we have the statement that when he thinks of the
trees floating by that it was "us" under the water.
Oreb reminds the narrator to eat and sleep, as if he doesn't want to naturally
anymore. I especially like how the blood assimilation of the native bear
makes the narrator think of legs doubling and tripling, which I have
maintained all along: trees eat people, spit out hybrid copies. Now, if a
hybrid of a tree and a man came about, could he live off of sunlight and eat
when he had to as well, or is he stuck with just one form of sustenance?
I really should stop; I have quite convinced myself that I will never convince
anybody else. Just be warned - if I am asked to look up anything in the book,
I am liable to start posting the same things over and over. I especially like
that the chapter starts with a discussion on enlightenment and is entitled
"The Guessing Game." Ha ha.
Sorry.
Marc Aramini
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