From: "Robert Borski" <rborski@charter.net>
Subject: (whorl) Re: Horn dies
Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 21:46:58 

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

<Which lets us mix the symbolism in yet another way -- Horn is very much
Silk's spiritual son; after the death on Green, the son and the father are
one in a rather literal way.>

<Or: ... Horn-the-Son ascends into Hell (green) and dies there, then
reunites with Silk-the-Father. Or: Horn-the-Son must ascend into the Whorl
so that the Silkhorn-the-Spirit might return and bring the blessing of corn.
Or:... The point being that I think all these resonances are clearly there,
but no one is a 'ruling metaphor.'>

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

Witness the following exchange between Oreb and Horn:

"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)

It sure seems likely to me that M'to, as someone in the direct employ of
Mainframe, would be a little better informed to comment on this than any one
else, and even Horn, at one point in IGJ, claims that "Silk is an aspect of
Pas now." (202)

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 (since it's his spirit that's tossed into the
mix). That Pas has been redeemed by the incorporation of Silk seems
irrefutable; we get the sense of a similar transformation in his daughter,
who for most of the series is known by the name of a monster (Scylla), but
goes to her grave on Urth named as a saint (Cilinia).

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.

Robert Borski









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