Can someone explain TC's "bargain" to me?

[thewormoftheworld'send]

Re the point that TC had already decided to kill himself under Mt Thunder - I don't remember such a decision myself (but then it is many moons since I read LFB) - but if indeed it is the case I cannot see the point of his refering to the bargain later on the slopes of Mt Thunder after he had 'bottled out' or whatever, since by that time any bargains prior to this decision would be null and void.

What is "bottled out"?

[Vraith]

The stages of death thing seems very useful/fruitful to me. Especially since it is identical to stages of grief [the only difference being if you're going through it yourself, or in relation to someone else]. These bounce and play off each other nicely once the RL/Dream conflict is taken into account.
Also [though I'd have to do some research/re-reading to check this, see if it works], there seems to be a sort of "meta-bargaining" going on: he bargains about the stages on one level while going through them on another [the deal with the Rahnhyn, for instance, can be read as a "bargain about bargains,"]
These things keep spiraling back, stakes and intensity rising, as long as TC cares about the real/unreal distinction.

[thewormoftheworld'send]

The stages of death thing seems very useful/fruitful to me. Especially since it is identical to stages of grief [the only difference being if you're going through it yourself, or in relation to someone else]. These bounce and play off each other nicely once the RL/Dream conflict is taken into account.
Also [though I'd have to do some research/re-reading to check this, see if it works], there seems to be a sort of "meta-bargaining" going on: he bargains about the stages on one level while going through them on another [the deal with the Rahnhyn, for instance, can be read as a "bargain about bargains,"]
These things keep spiraling back, stakes and intensity rising, as long as TC cares about the real/unreal distinction.

Caring is the key, or else the whole thing collapses. I don't mean just the story, or the Arch of Time which is some kind of symbolic dream representation, or as Kant might put it, the a priori sensory manifold of Time itself for this dream. In collapsing the real distinction between the symbolic and the literal, the only psychological result could be insanity.

The Arch is not psychological, nor is it any mere dream-entity. But it's loss will result in insanity, a complete confusion of fantasy and reality.

[peter]

The Arch is not psychological, nor is it any mere dream-entity. But it's loss will result in insanity, a complete confusion of fantasy and reality.

For who?

[thewormoftheworld'send]

The Arch is not psychological, nor is it any mere dream-entity. But it's loss will result in insanity, a complete confusion of fantasy and reality.

For who?

For the "author" of this particular dream. Wasn't this Covenant's worry throughout the first Chrons? For example:

LFB -

"I've got a disease. An incurable disease. I've-I've got to figure out a way to keep from going crazy. Hell and blood! I don't want to lose my mind just because some perfectly decent character in a dream needs something from me that I can't produce."

[peter]

I won't pretend that you're not loosing me a bit here guys, but if I am getting any of this it is that TC is (in your oppinion) bargaining symbolically in the Land in ways that pertain literally to his condition/circumstances in the 'real world'. If this indeed is what you are getting at (and it may well not be so please correct me if I've got it all wrong) I'm not sure I agree with it - though as always I'm open to pusaison. The bargains, when all is said and done, still have to be coherent - either just in the Land (my stance) or indeed both in the Land AND in Covenant's real world (I think your stance) - although to expect coherence from TC at this stage of his existance may be asking a bit too much! So I return to my earlier question (and I'm sorry to harp on), if TC has decided to kill himself what then does it matter how it is acieved - either in the pursuit of heroics or otherwise. It seems to me that at this point 'all bets are off' wrt bargains.

I still maintain from my 'Land only stance re bargains', that TC' main bargaim - the master bargain if you will - is with the Old man/Creator and that all others are subsidiary to this.

[thewormoftheworld'send]

I won't pretend that you're not loosing me a bit here guys, but if I am getting any of this it is that TC is (in your oppinion) bargaining symbolically in the Land in ways that pertain literally to his condition/circumstances in the 'real world'. If this indeed is what you are getting at (and it may well not be so please correct me if I've got it all wrong) I'm not sure I agree with it - though as always I'm open to pusaison. The bargains, when all is said and done, still have to be coherent - either just in the Land (my stance) or indeed both in the Land AND in Covenant's real world (I think your stance) - although to expect coherence from TC at this stage of his existance may be asking a bit too much! So I return to my earlier question (and I'm sorry to harp on), if TC has decided to kill himself what then does it matter how it is acieved - either in the pursuit of heroics or otherwise. It seems to me that at this point 'all bets are off' wrt bargains.

I still maintain from my 'Land only stance re bargains', that TC' main bargaim - the master bargain if you will - is with the Old man/Creator and that all others are subsidiary to this.

I think the master bargain is Covenant's Unbelief, which involves getting through the delusion without going crazy.

[Vraith]

I won't pretend that you're not loosing me a bit here guys, but if I am getting any of this it is that TC is (in your oppinion) bargaining symbolically in the Land in ways that pertain literally to his condition/circumstances in the 'real world'. If this indeed is what you are getting at (and it may well not be so please correct me if I've got it all wrong) I'm not sure I agree with it - though as always I'm open to pusaison. The bargains, when all is said and done, still have to be coherent - either just in the Land (my stance) or indeed both in the Land AND in Covenant's real world (I think your stance) - although to expect coherence from TC at this stage of his existance may be asking a bit too much! So I return to my earlier question (and I'm sorry to harp on), if TC has decided to kill himself what then does it matter how it is acieved - either in the pursuit of heroics or otherwise. It seems to me that at this point 'all bets are off' wrt bargains.

I still maintain from my 'Land only stance re bargains', that TC' main bargaim - the master bargain if you will - is with the Old man/Creator and that all others are subsidiary to this.

Straight up suicide is an escape, a running away from the place that is [he believes] forcing him to make bargains so he can live in the real world, a leper. Heroic suicide though requires a different commitment.
Oh...I think I have a very very simplified analogy:
TC is like the child who believes [which they all do, at least for a while] "If I cover my eyes, you can't see me." All his bargains are hands over his eyes [unbelief], as long as they're covered, his "real" life is safe.
I hope that makes sense, I think it does [as I said, extremely simplified, though].

[peter]

Covenant's real world is a world without compromise - it is a survive or die place that only allows for his own needs to be met to the exclusion of all else. The Land threatens this by drawing him in, by making him care whether he wants to or not and by placing demands on him that fly in the face of his 'real world' needs. I don't see his unbelief as part of his bargain - it is integral to his very survival in terms of maintaining his sanity in the face of the concrete reality of an impossible world around him. One aspect of his bargain may be the accepting of the paradox of the Land even in the face of it's impossibility - and keeping this sepparate from his sanity ie in a different mental room as it were (Cartesian dualism pulls the same trick) but this would only be a small part of it. The bigger part would be the "I will go along with it, but I refuse to get involved because that would require my belief and you can't have that." Surely his bargains are rooted in the part of him that agrees to go forward with the thing and desighned to protect his unbelief rather than being part of it.

[wayfriend]

a bargain = an agreement = a covenant

SRD created Covenant to be a man who bargains by his very nature.

Unbelief is not a bargain, but it's a bargaining chip though. Initially, his bargains are to preserve his Unbelief. But Covenant gives up more and more Unbelief, and hence puts more of himself on the line, as his bargains progress.

[Vraith]

heh...I guess it wasn't as simple/clear as I thought.
The hands cover eyes to keep you from seeing/being seen.
The bargains to keep from believing/being believed in.
But the Land keeps putting the pressure on [someone's calling your name, footsteps are approaching].
He keeps renegotiating [as WF said].
The final solution is that the "fact" of the Land, and the "fact" of his leprosy are not the all-defining terms of existence. Bargaining with the Land, bargaining with leprosy both are futile...acknowledge, and move on.

[thewormoftheworld'send]

a bargain = an agreement = a covenant

SRD created Covenant to be a man who bargains by his very nature.

Unbelief is not a bargain, but it's a bargaining chip though. Initially, his bargains are to preserve his Unbelief. But Covenant gives up more and more Unbelief, and hence puts more of himself on the line, as his bargains progress.

Donaldson created a man who is impotent by his very nature due to leprosy. In the real world, impotence is sexual; in the Land, Covenant's impotence involves the inability to use magical powers. The entire dream or delusion of the Land represents Covenant's desire to destroy himself because he is powerless, impotent, in the real world, and he despises himself for this condition. He feels that this dream is indirectly trying to kill him in the real world by tempting him, a leper, to feel powerful. Covenant is bargaining with the part of himself that would die in order to feel powerful and potent again.

Covenant's mistake in his attempts at bargaining involve the contradiction of believing he can control a dream. Covenant himself asserted at one point in TIW that nobody can control dreams. And yet by bargaining he believes he can set the terms of the dream and in this way control it. He seems to think, at first, that control means keeping the bargain to himself. And at the end of TIW Covenant believes that revealing the bargain to Elena will also somehow control the dream. But attempting to control the dream only caused it to have more power over him, thus tempting him to assert his resources of wild magic.

What Covenant hasn't learned at this point is that the only way out is through the eye of the paradox, by sublimating powerlessness into caring.

[thewormoftheworld'send]

heh...I guess it wasn't as simple/clear as I thought.
The hands cover eyes to keep you from seeing/being seen.
The bargains to keep from believing/being believed in.
But the Land keeps putting the pressure on [someone's calling your name, footsteps are approaching].
He keeps renegotiating [as WF said].
The final solution is that the "fact" of the Land, and the "fact" of his leprosy are not the all-defining terms of existence. Bargaining with the Land, bargaining with leprosy both are futile...acknowledge, and move on.

It's strange that Covenant called it his bargain with the Ranyhyn. In fact, it was a direct order, not a bargain at all. It was an attempt to control the dream, and it failed because, as he said, nobody can control their dreams. Covenant should have heeded his own advice. I think calling it a bargain was one of Covenant's self-lies, as when he claimed to love Elena. He does not accept the fact or realize that lepers cannot love, and that "love" for him can only be another form of manipulation or control, another power-play. Or let's say, love for Covenant is only another passive-aggressive means of avoiding responsibility for his role in the dream, a passing-off of the helm of responsibility to the Ranyhyn and to Elena and thus destroying them with his falsehood.

In a true bargain there has to be more than one participant. So Covenant bargains with himself, or let's say, the part of himself that wants to live bargains with the part of himself that wants to destroy and be destroyed. He believes the Land is a delusion created by the latter. But the Land also puts this all in perspective through extremes, extreme beauty versus extreme ugliness and horror. Even though Covenant is a leper, in the end he learns that he is still human, he can choose to preserve beauty while at the same time preserving his life of leprosy in the real world.

[peter]

He does not accept the fact or realize that lepers cannot love

What?

[peter]

I just don't think this has to be complicated.
TC's bargains are as follows
i) With the Ranyhyn " I won't ride one of you if you will a) try to make reparation for me with a girl I ravaged and b) come and help me out if I really get into the sh*t.
ii) with himself " This place can't be real - but it can't not be real either. I'll accept this contradictory paradox as long as I can use whatever explanation I need to when I need to in order to preserve my sanity. ie I'll occupy the calm point at the center of the raging storm of impossibilities."
iii) With the Creator/Old man " I'll go forward with this - go where I am expected to go in order to emerge at the other side, but in return for this you must accept that I will NOT become an active part of it. To do so would compromise my disbelief.

I think this sums up TC's bargains aand thier relationship to each other. Why does it have to be more difficult than that?

[Vraith]

He does not accept the fact or realize that lepers cannot love

What?

Ditto on peter's "What?"
I enjoy your idiosyncratic ideas and thoughts almost without exception...but for the first time I have to say: Uh uh, no way. One of the primary lessons TC learns is precisely that they can.

[thewormoftheworld'send]

He does not accept the fact or realize that lepers cannot love

What?

Ditto on peter's "What?"
I enjoy your idiosyncratic ideas and thoughts almost without exception...but for the first time I have to say: Uh uh, no way. One of the primary lessons TC learns is precisely that they can.

Thanks, I guess it takes another 5w4 to appreciate a similar thinking style.

The lesson Covenant learns is that lepers can still care about things such as the Land.

But what is the issue with saying that lepers cannot love? I note a reaction to this idea that goes beyond the Chrons. It goes to the heart of what it means to start out human and then to lose the humanity within oneself to a dreadful illness. Leprosy is not like cancer or diabetes, it is a disease that has traditionally strong negaive social ramifications going back for probably a few millennia. This factor goes to the heart of why Donaldson 'gave' Covenant leprosy and not something else. Leprosy is not just a source of impotence - which is reflected in the Land as inability to use power - but also the love which goes along with marriage and commitment symbolized by the white gold ring. Observe -

LFB (revelation of his white gold ring to the Council) -

"I can't use it!" he shouted lornly, as if the ring were still a symbol of marriage, not a talisman of wild magic. "I'm a leper!"

The idea here is that Covenant is divorced (he can't use it) in many ways: from himself, from his wife, and from society. Thus a leper can't afford to have feelings. Feelings are not only vanished from non-existent nerve endings, emotional feelings are gone as well. Covenant, lepers, cannot afford to love, their very survival depends on a form of rigid self-denying stoicism. They lose that emotion just as certainly as they lose all other sensation, only for a different reason.

Thus the biggest lie (also a self-lie) of TIW was that Covenant loved his daughter Elena. He was aware of Elena's feelings toward him - the constant references to him as "beloved," not to mention the removal of her robe and passionate kiss - thus he feigned returning a type of fatherly love in order to manipulate Elena into being his proxy savior for the Land.

[thewormoftheworld'send]

Just think of Covenant's emotional life as neat and orderly, and controlled, as his living room.

Then consider the difference between love and caring. Love, the kind we're talking about here, is chaotic and unpredictable. Caring, however, is a far "gentler" emotion on the psyche. Covenant learned that he cannot love, he cannot afford to, he has to remain divorced from this feeling and lose it as he lost the capacity for sensation. But where Covenant cannot love, he can still care.

Edit - Someone may reply that Covenant has not lost the capacity for love, this would explain his constant internal battles against the emotional pull of the dream. That's true, Covenant regained all sensation - against his will - and thereafter it was a constant struggle to deny emotional feelings as well.

This was not an issue in the real world, where Covenant could "borrow" his strength and capacity for self-denial from society around him. But as long as Covenant in the Land remained true to his Unbelief, it is only the real world that had reality for him. Thus it remains true that Covenant, in the Land, had lost the capacity to love. Unbelief is also a form of stoic denial of emotion.

[Vraith]

It's stated, explicitly, and metaphorically, and quite often, especially early in the works, that TC is incapable of the physical aspects of love. Also the social ostracism/outcasting places large obstacles in the way [who can you love, if no one will accept your presence?] Those things, and the necessary discipline just to keep from rotting alive can easily, and predictably lead to [as you said]:

emotional feelings are gone as well. Covenant, lepers, cannot afford to love, their very survival depends on a form of rigid self-denying stoicism.

.

But I will not-so-humbly disagree that this is the necessary result. The simplest, surely. The safest? Very likely. The best? Not at all.
When we love, we are vulnerable. A leper who loves is probably the most vulnerable creature of all. S/he is also as close as I can imagine to transcendant [and that's all just real, actual world stuff]. I submit this is exactly what TC learned and achieved, in the end. The horrors visited upon the body, the physical necessities of survival can ravish and destroy us, and will physically. But emotionally the don't HAVE to. Three quotes, out of context but pertinent:
"Nevertheless"
"Still"
"There is also love in the world"
And me, modifying a famous one from elsewhere:
"Or what's a hero for?"

[thewormoftheworld'send]

It's stated, explicitly, and metaphorically, and quite often, especially early in the works, that TC is incapable of the physical aspects of love. Also the social ostracism/outcasting places large obstacles in the way [who can you love, if no one will accept your presence?] Those things, and the necessary discipline just to keep from rotting alive can easily, and predictably lead to [as you said]:

emotional feelings are gone as well. Covenant, lepers, cannot afford to love, their very survival depends on a form of rigid self-denying stoicism.

.

I'm guessing you hadn't read my second post yet. Because in that one I stated that Covenant's real-world social setting gave him a stronger capacity for self-denial. But it is also the case that Covenant, a priori to this negative social milieu, must selfishly deny himself love as a form of selfless chaotic passion. He must not only deny it, he must kill it just as dead as the nerves in his fingers and toes. His internal world must be as cold as the tips of his fingers, as emotionless as the rigid neatness of his living room. And so in a sense society is doing Covenant, and all lepers, a favor by ostracizing them.

The danger represented by the Land is that it is the complete opposite of the real world. Note this passage from LFB:

Atiaran stood behind her husband, massaging the heavy muscles of his shoulders and neck, and her eyes were full of pride and love. Something in her expression made Covenant feel that he came from a very poor world, where no one knew or cared about healing stoneware pots. He tried to tell himself that he was dreaming, but he did not want to listen.

Already, at this early stage in the game, the dream's emotional pull is having its effect on Covenant. A leper needs to come from a place where nobody knows or cares about healing stoneware pots. His very survival depends on it.

But I will not-so-humbly disagree that this is the necessary result. The simplest, surely. The safest? Very likely. The best? Not at all.
When we love, we are vulnerable. A leper who loves is probably the most vulnerable creature of all. S/he is also as close as I can imagine to transcendant [and that's all just real, actual world stuff]. I submit this is exactly what TC learned and achieved, in the end. The horrors visited upon the body, the physical necessities of survival can ravish and destroy us, and will physically. But emotionally the don't HAVE to. Three quotes, out of context but pertinent:
"Nevertheless"
"Still"
"There is also love in the world"
And me, modifying a famous one from elsewhere:
"Or what's a hero for?"

Covenant doesn't have to deny himself love. He also doesn't have to engage in VSE many times a day, or arrange his living room to limit the possibility of injury.

The "nevertheless" and "still" quotes pertained to caring, not loving. And Covenant refused the mantel of hero. It was never Covenant's goal to be a hero, but only to survive the dream. And finally he decided that if it required using wild magic to bring Foul's Creche down around his ears, so be it. It is possible for Covenant to do this while remaining an Unbeliever - that is what the "nevertheless" and "still" quotes pertained to in his debate with the Despiser. Many things are possible even without the capacity for love.