A million years later, I found a spoonful of time to read the responses. Thanks, everyone, ‘twas a most exhausting chapter to analyze; so many layers waiting to be peeled away, merely to uncover a wormhole into another dimension within…
To me, Mishio screams Thursday. Come the first of the week, I usually hop out of the bed quite refreshed. Thursday: not quite the weekend yet, the head feels as intelligent as a blunt shovel after having been buried beneath the usual avalanche of work, coffee loses its meaning...snore.
wayfriend wrote:
lurch wrote:And his agreement with the Lurker had been founded on a lie; the mistaken belief that he was the Pure One of jheherrin legend. He needed to redeem that falsehood" Wait a minute,,Feroce, jheherrin are creatures of the mud,,creatures of the left over cast off, waste, garbage dumped out by the demondim..So,,Pure One..to them, would denote a pretty rotten being..so leprosy plagued Covenant,,from their perspective,,yea,,could be The Pure One;kinda dark i kno,,but the story teller saying Covenant needed to redeem that falsehood.
This is a real interesting idea, that the "Pure One" is, relative to the
jheherrin, someone who is corrupt or at least diseased and "foul".
However, if you read the original passages in TPTP, I think it's clear that the
jheherrin knew what being "pure" was. "birthed without flaw ... impervious to the Maker and his making - unafraid," they said. Note how it's phrased in terms that are the
OPPOSITE of the
jheherrin condition - "impervious to the Maker", etc.
It's my inclination to believe that Covenant is, and always has been, the Pure One. Or, rather, the one who redeemed the
jheherrin and fulfilled their prophesy, anyway. I think that the
jheherrin assumed such a person must be pure, because of who they were -- they could not imagine anyone like themselves being effectual, and their image of themselves is filth. And I think that Covenant has exactly the same issue - he cannot imagine anyone like himself being the prophesied Pure One, or being so effectual as to help the
jheherrin just by being himself. So he always looks for other explanations to explain how the
jheherrin were saved, while ignoring the most obvious one -- it was him, exactly as the Feroce believe.
Interesting thoughts both, and the relativity of corruption. However, could there have been two Pure Ones, akin to the amount of non-destructive Ringwielders doubling itself? One cannot omit Foamfollower’s lava bath and how he deep-caamora’ed himself to the point of semi-rebirth; the bloke even acquired a novel, flawless skin worthy of beauty commercials. Thereafter he and his “pure heart” helped laugh the Despiser back into an ovum, saving the Land in the process.
lurch wrote:is a great metaphor for the " logic and reason" perspective on the human condition…
I wouldn’t associate the Haruheads with reason (they oftentimes act sans common sense), but a
binary logic, which is exactly the kind of state where a middle ground cannot be achieved between two extremes.
lurch wrote:rather than the Lurker thumping TC..Covenant is saving the Lurker
Inconveniently my cursor had alighted upon a certain letter t, and I had to blink and read the passage again to catch the correct meaning.
lurch wrote:Fascinating it is,,the singular gobbetting scene of Clyme, still reverberates more deeply within me ,,than the murder of Joan or any of the massive butchery to come.
Well, an underlying theme of necessary mercy circulated the depictions leading to Joan’s demise, in a fashion softening the outcome, but this? Sprang straight out of the bushes; almost as if in a fluffy-pink cuddly episode of Friendship Is Magic the characters abruptly began chainsaw-murdering one another. Both the unexpectedness and the grisliness rendered it effective. One tends to become desensitized in the middle of the throw-in-five-kitchen-sink battles, but here the author also managed to build a creepy atmosphere of tension to prelude the gobbeting. Guh.
wayfriend wrote:Well, nay is neigh, what horsies say. And Bahn is bon, good.
Bahn also denotes “train/track” in German, so what is he? Neigh-train? A locomotive in the shape of a horse?
Unfortunately haven’t had time to read the redemption essay yet. On my post-fest to-do list.
wayfriend wrote:This bit struck me. It's as if Covenant has bodily become a tool or a weapon which Clyme is weilding. An image which is repeated later in the lurker's pool.
Somehow, to me, this sharpens the idea that Covenant is an agent, as I said above. He exists to accomplish the Land's rescue. He's not a person with needs or emotional issues or even dignity at this point. I wish I could be more clear about what's in my head. But I see, in these scenes, Covenant being a vehicle, a delivery mechanism.
So, place a lightbulb into Covenant’s mouth and it’ll light the room…wield a Covenant to prepare delicious tentacle sushi... Didn’t SRD hint the same in the 2nd chronicles, though, when the Despiser pumped him full of venom, so that he might explode into an uncontrollable super-tornado of wild magic and thus break the arch? Isn’t this a “vessel” of a certain ilk as well? I have never bought the theory (unless SRD himself mentioned it somewhere) that TC’s the actual Creator; how would he have externalized the ochre-robed gaffer into the “real world” to fall as if dead afore a lush woman in her prime to get some most convenient mouth-to-mouth resuscitation from her; a person TC had never even faced before? But a Creator’s substitute, a steward, an inheritor of the role? As such, the Creator would then never have “abandoned” his terra firma, but ensured its continuity by planting this trinity of angsty anti-heroes within (each a guardian/agent/steward of some important aspect of universal standards)...also one must mull over the fact that:
What if Covenant had faced Ragnarökkr alone? Would he have been able to recreate the Earth without the two other points of the triangle?
wayfriend wrote:Is numbness relevant to Covenant's final confrontation with Foul?
Yes. One must be “numb” to embrace their own evil.
Now I’m beginning to reach the time of the day when analyzing philosophical fantasy becomes as easy as nailing water into the ceiling, and the bed appears most inviting. Besides, it's Thursday.
