That Insequent bit at the end.

Book 4 of the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

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lurch
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Post by lurch »

...well Peter,," dreamlike" is an over used descriptive, a cliche' if you will, by those who haven't gone there, haven't experienced the state of mind. By " dreamlike" what is meant is..free....The original surrealists used the term,,unencumbered..as in not weighed down,,free to rise or free of encumbrances ,,free of things that stop or prohibit,,,free..nothing holding you down.

So as a state of mind,,its a Free Mind,,not restricted, not held down or back.." Dreamlike" is supposedly our mind Free ofthe laws of reality...time and space.. ..I dream of flying, taking 20ft leaps effortlessly..free of gravity... So , to be able to free ones mind, ones thoughts, to take grand leaps effortlessly..is the Surreal State of mind. The author is suggesting ,,to be open to more possibilities than the right wrong, true false, yes no black white polar opposites habitual way of thinking and perceiving.

Right out of the starting gates of TLD, he has Linden free of Time and Space in her exaltation..in her state of mind..Thats a good beginning. The rest of the book can be seen as all things that encumber,,prohibit, impede , being in that state of mind.

The first step is then,,liberating your mind, your thought process and habits of perception , from what you've been taught about how it has to be. I'm not saying forget,,stop using etc..I'm saying,,learn how to free your mind of those encumbrances, those weights. Try to see 3 or 4 or 5 or more alternatives to every one possibility. Make it a habit to rif ( mentally expand on) what you hear in peoples conversations or what you read , etc etc,," Jam" with reality. It doesn't have to make sense..What counts is the exercise of freeing the mind from the mundane needs and wants.

Donaldson said in response to a question,,that the Imagination is like a muscle..One has to exercise it to keep it in shape, to keep it in good condition. Thats what I'm talking about. Start small work big. Jam or rif or improvise to the music you like to listen to. It doesn't matter if you sound bad. You are learning how to free your mind from the day to day needs of existence . Maybe you like to draw..exercise your " likes". You may find out you have no real talent to sing..or to play a guitar,,or draw, or paint,,but thru it all you are exercising your imagination, your creativity, and sooner or later, you will find your own personal Talent, you enjoy, and succeed at. Thats the goal. Achieving the Surreal state of mind is just the means to your peace of mind,, your " Wholeness',,your Truth..whatever you want to call it..Jeremiah's " talent" with spatial configurations suggests he will be quite the architect....a fitting metaphor of the new inhabitant of the new Land...building a frame of reference anew.

Surreal,,is a hybrid of...Sur and Real.. Sur in french I think..means ..extra,,more than,,beyond..So Surreal is just a label for ...going beyond the mundane,,. The polar opposite mundane reality of Black White,,is mixed , pondered, expanded apon,,,to create a More than, Extra reality of the Grey..the 3rd choice,, the possibilities, choices, not even conceived of.., Dream like,,where anything is possible...Trying to open your mind to any possibility gives perception to repeated words or concepts and with enough connections patterns emerge to tell us the Theme of a piece. And when a repetition all of a sudden stops , disappears, you have a challenge like Chapter 7 presents.. My mind was keen on the author's words, concepts and cadence. When it changed,,and with the word " riddle" near the beginning of the change..well,,I had him. In a way,, Chapter 7 is a test.. its a test on the reader..to see how well one can perceive other reality beyond the mundane printed word,,as the author put it,," Fortunately Liand- lost Liand-had taught her how to find the possibilities beneath the written surface of the wood, even when she had no enhanced discernment to guide her."...thats on pg 148 of chapter 7..Extra reality..Free your mind to it..and it will be yours....
If she withdrew from exaltation, she would be forced to think- And every thought led to fear and contradictions; to dilemmas for which she was unprepared.
pg4 TLD
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Post by wayfriend »

How happy can saving fifteen percent on car insurance make you?

Image

Happier than lurch explaining surrealism.

:D
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peter
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Post by peter »

Well I can proudly say that in making my notes on 'the riddle' I had actually written the quote from pg 148 noted above, so I must be at least combing the right area! But back on track, I guess the bonds that fetter one's mind are always self-imposed [already I think of examples to counter that statement, but let it stand] and thus 'freeing' ones mind has to be within the scope of any individual if one would but apply ones mind to it. [like wrestling out of a straight jacket I guess]. But minds are like horses - sometimes they can achieve more if restrained and directed tha if given unrestricted freedom.

[Wayfriend - as textbook a bit of 'surrealism' up there as ever graced the pages of a 'Dali' tutorial. All it was missing was a lobster ;) ]
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

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Post by wayfriend »

peter wrote:[Wayfriend - as textbook a bit of 'surrealism' up there as ever graced the pages of a 'Dali' tutorial. All it was missing was a lobster ;) ]
(The allusion might have been lost on a UKer. 1 2 3 ... Apologies.)
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peter
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Post by peter »

Missed allusions and muddled metaphors is the default state of the bulk of UK'ers the bulk of the time Wayfriend so no problem there :lol: .
The truth is a Lion and does not need protection. Once free it will look after itself.

....and the glory of the world becomes less than it was....
'Have we not served you well'
'Of course - you know you have.'
'Then let it end.'

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warchylde
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The insequent at the end

Post by warchylde »

At first I thought it was the manifestation/reincarnation of the combined knowledge of their race since they perished. But then it points to being the Ardent since he became the greatest among his race and he was known as the acolyte of Mahdoubt. Its as simple as that.

They're not wild magic, but their abilities and principles are based on and emulate wild magic.

The only reason they have beef with the Elohim is simple, the Elohim don't have to strive to gain power and knowledge while everything/one else does. the Elohim just are and don't intercede in the fate of the world but think they are equal to it....
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Post by wayfriend »

Welcome to the Watch, warchylde! (Drop by the Summonsing sometime and introduce yarsylfe.)

Yes, that's as fair an explanation of the rivalry as one could have.
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Re: The insequent at the end

Post by Vraith »

warchylde wrote: The only reason they have beef with the Elohim is simple, the Elohim don't have to strive to gain power and knowledge while everything/one else does. the Elohim just are and don't intercede in the fate of the world but think they are equal to it....
A good reason, and almost certainly part of it.
But there is another one, just as or even more important--
as high on the natural being/role/place scale as the Elo are, their arrogance and propensity for error is even higher. In short, they are pompous assholes. Ego trip, no luggage.
[spoiler]Sig-man, Libtard, Stupid piece of shit. change your text color to brown. Mr. Reliable, bullshit-slinging liarFucker-user.[/spoiler]
the difference between evidence and sources: whether they come from the horse's mouth or a horse's ass.
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
the hyperbole is a beauty...for we are then allowed to say a little more than the truth...and language is more efficient when it goes beyond reality than when it stops short of it.
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Post by Nerdanel »

That was a fascinating insight about the Insequent corresponding to the characters from the real world. (Could the army-defeating Vizard be Hile Troy? Also, I tend to lean for the Theomach (I think from "divine power (of creation)" ) as Jeremiah and the Ardent (I think from "argent", the color of wild magic, and "passionate", the state that calls forth wild magic), as Covenant. The Mahdoubt's name would refer to the self-doubts plaguing Linden ("my doubt" - I've seen "mah" used in online discussions to mean "my"). But I think those connections are probably more symbolism than anything real in the universe.

I think that in the same way that the Elohim are the stars, the Insequent are the caesures, retroactively inserted into the past. This would be why the Insequent don't exist in the first two Chronicles, just like the caesures don't, but appear now when time travel is undertaken. This would also be why the Insequent are associated with wild magic, as wild magic is needed to create caesures.

In the end it looks like the Insequent have been retconned again into something different. They are now more integrated with each other, and I suspect the fabric of the world too, rather than being lone anomalies disconnected from everything, including each other. This feels to me like SRD setting up plot points for the First Chronicles of Jeremiah, even if unintentionally. It's weird that something with as potentially far-reaching consequences as the Insequent changing is just dropped there without explanation or examination. You could easily have the Insequent with their extremely overpowered abilities form a threat powerful enough to overwhelm even our divine trio.
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Post by Mighara Sovmadhi »

There's a sort of error in the epilogue at this point. Covenant says something about the Insequent finally getting into the idea of acolytes, and then he makes a Timewarden-esque remark about how this must be the Acolyte (like, how could he know that?). However, in AATE, the Ardent explains that he is an acolyte of the Mahdoubt (he even uses the word) and then later says that there are other acolytes of the Mahdoubt.

Basically, the idea of the Insequent is to embody very precisely-conceived lore or insight. Their names are oblique references to this, of course. So what is the special lore of the Mahdoubt? What did she study to become who she is?

I think she studied Linden somehow, her possibility (the possibility of the outsiders to Time in general, and of such a person as Linden specifically), and thus her ability to travel through Time depends on shadowing Linden. That is, either the Mahdoubt must proceed in a linear fashion through Time, or she can switch herself to times Linden is in. Linden is, of course, the white gold, just as Covenant is, if in her own way; so by studying the kind of lore/power that Linden encodes/represents, the Mahdoubt would emulate white gold. So her title? The mother of doubt, perhaps: or, a mother who should doubt more...

The Theomach, I think, studied Covenant in some sense/way. That was where his special lore came from, his attempt to emulate the future Halfhand.

If, generally, the Insequent are analogous to the shadow on the heart of the Earth, this could be because they generally speaking study/learn from the temporal outsiders. The Ardent suggests this to some degree by speaking of the oracles that are monitoring Linden, and how the Insequent somehow know that "her need for death is great" in some elliptical fashion.

Given all this, these people would indeed be the perfect teachers for the saviors of the Land: like psychiatrists with long-term experience with specific patients, their vast analysis of Linden, Covenant, and Jeremiah (and presumably Roger and Joan, even Troy...) would be an immense resource for these people.
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Post by Mighara Sovmadhi »

Now of course one might wonder how in the world the Insequent could emulate the temporal outsiders such as to simulate wild magic in the first place. IIRC only Kasreyn, Loric, and Berek ever seem to have done anything with metal that was especially magically significant (yeah the rukhs were metal but that was just for show, so to speak; the metal didn't add to the magic it would seem...). The Vizard's immediate demesne included no indication of a forge, or anything to smelt metal with. The Mahdoubt didn't wear and gold or silver, to my memory. So IDK but I don't think the emulation comes from metal alloys of any kind.

What else does that leave? There is one type of being in the Land's world that is both obscurely stand-offish towards the Elohim and given to a special relationship with Time: the Ranyhyn. I could see the ancestors/first of the Insequent being devoted to the lore of those horses, lore that led them to learn of marrowmeld. White gold is compared to bone in a poem from the First Chrons (IIRC) and melting bones together would be similar to making a metal alloy, so maybe a marrowmeld ring made from a Ranyhyn would be capable of a "wan mimicry of wild magic."

Now if it's possible for the Insequent to pool their powers into one of their kind and to maintain their strictures across all time and space, there's a decent chance they're all linked to some specific magical thing. Also somehow the Elohim don't know the Insequents' true names, so this thing is probably somehow hidden from the Elohim. On the assumption that the Insequent generally emulate the outsiders to Time, let's say that they collectively have access to and are therefore linked to a marrowmeld construct designed based on the Insequent study of Jeremiah, and this construct is capable of cloaking the entire civilization on their true-name level, and which is internally cloaked from the Elohim.
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Post by Ur Dead »

Insequent like character

Was it an Insequent?

If the law of Life and Death was restored then the four talked about couldn't have made an appearance. They died.

As said in another thread.. I said:
It was the creator...
Go check it out..
He did appear in the last chronicles.
But only in reverse.
What's this silver looking ring doing on my finger?
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