Bakker XXIII: Priapic Godlings and Whoresome Folks

[Shryke]

The first time Kellhus uses the Cant of Transposition isn't he in a cave?

Yes.

I'm wondering if the restriction is more about distance then LOS.

I mean, Serwe's teleporting at the end of TWP isn't going from one place they can see to another they can see as I remember.

[jurble]

Why exactly should his teleportation have any sort of distance limitation? Any further and the lag between disappearance and arrival means the planet travels from beneath him, and he's floating in space?

[Larry of the Lawn]

"The Cant of Translocation, she went on to explain, could take them only the space of the horizon, less if her vision were obscured. The Cant's difficulty was such that she could successfully hold its meaning only after at least two watches of sleep. She was lucky, she said, if she could complete two Translocations a day, unlike her father, who could cross endless leagues in that time, stepping from horizon to horizon."

WLW 448

[Anatúrinbor]

I'm not sure I get it, if your vision is obscured you can't teleport beyond that?

[Sci-2]

I think Kellhus's ability to recall his surroundings is far better than his daughter[']s.

I suspect what is meant by "holding meaning" is something more than doing a math proof in your head. I mean you are either creating a wormhole or convincing your brain that space is an illusion.

[Callan S.]

The first time Kellhus uses the Cant of Transposition isn't he in a cave?

Good spotting!

It's technically limited to as far as the horizon; it's not indicated that it is limited to what you can actually see.

That really doesn't make much sense when you can do so in a cave - the horizon is just rock. If you can do so underneath rock, what does a horizon of rock matter?

[red snow]

Yes.

I'm wondering if the restriction is more about distance then LOS.

I mean, Serwe's teleporting at the end of TWP isn't going from one place they can see to another they can see as I remember.

I can easily imagine from a quantum physics point that the further you teleport the more impossible it becomes.

Why exactly should his teleportation have any sort of distance limitation? Any further and the lag between disappearance and arrival means the planet travels from beneath him, and he's floating in space?

This could also make sense as they maybe teleport in a straight line?

I'm not sure I get it, if your vision is obscured you can't teleport beyond that?

Could be Nightcrawler rules?

[SilentRoamer]

Sci-2 I see what you mean with regards to lack of clarity on 3rd inutterals < forgive my pun!

Therein lies part of the problem for me - I think with an intellect such as Kellhus who can perform the TFT then I see him being able to add more inutterals. For a non Dunyain Man of the Few holding even one inutteral is supposed to be extremely difficult. Holding 2 inutterals has been learned by Non Dunyain (discounting the theories there are secret Dunyain of which Saccarees is one.)

So if it is possible for non Dunyain intellects to manage a 2nd inutteral then why would Kellhus be so limited? So if Raw power comes from clarity of meaning and Complexity comes from additional inutterals then Kellhus in the TFT probability trance may be able to use all possibilities as current inutterals. Combine that level of complexity with the Raw power due to Kellhus almost perfect clarity of meaning.

Just my musings anyway!

Really loving this forum - I should definitely go read GRRM - have them all in epub and heard good things but after finishing WLW I am just re-reading Bakker first as I have a few questions I feel only a re-read will answer satisfactorily.

[Happy Ent]

The first time Kellhus uses the Cant of Transposition isn't he in a cave?

Isn’t this the first time Kellhus uses magic at all?

[Armitage]

Isn’t this the first time Kellhus uses magic at all?

There was the Cant of Calling he performed under Achamian's direction.

[Happy Ent]

There was the Cant of Calling he performed under Achamian's direction.

Pray, where?

[Anatúrinbor]

Could be Nightcrawler rules?

What's Nightcrawler rules?

[Gaston de Foix]

Pray, where?

In TTT, the scene when Kellhus talks to the Seswatha homonculus within Akka.

[red snow]

What's Nightcrawler rules?

He's one of the x-men. He can teleport but only to places he can see (or at least strongly visualise). Otherwise there's the risk he'll appear in the side of a wall or in someone. The further he teleports the more draining it is.

One feature of his teleporting that doesn't seem to be the case with bakker teleporting is that momentum is conserved eg if he teleports when falling he'd still hit the ground with the same force (although if he teleports so that he appears in the opposite direction he will travel upwards until gravity stops him)

[unJon]

In TTT, the scene when Kellhus talks to the Seswatha homonculus within Akka.

Isn't that before he knows any magic? I thought that was using whelming slash hypnosis. HE was asking when Kel first casts a spell in the series.

[Rhom]

Isn't that before he knows any magic? I thought that was using whelming slash hypnosis. HE was asking when Kel first casts a spell in the series.

That was my understanding as well.

[Gaston de Foix]

Isn't that before he knows any magic? I thought that was using whelming slash hypnosis. HE was asking when Kel first casts a spell in the series.

That's his first time. He used whelming to get Akka to teach him the words, and then successfully cast the spell.

[lokisnow]

I think Kellhus's ability to recall his surroundings is far better than his daughter[']s.

I suspect what is meant by "holding meaning" is something more than doing a math proof in your head. I mean you are either creating a wormhole or convincing your brain that space is an illusion.

Transposition is Soul becoming Place. I think it ties into the all are a pinprick part of one greater soul metaphysics and the transposition works for the same reasons that Serwe's heart worked.

Kellhus stepped back, focused his eyes on a point the size of a thumbnail held at arm’s length. What was one became many. What was soul became place.

Here.

Calling out from bones of things.

With three voices he sang, one utteral pitched to the world and two inutterals directed to the ground. What had been an ancient Cant of Calling became something far, far more…A Cant of Transposing.

Blue fractal lights mapped the air about him, cocooned him in brilliance. Through scribbling filaments he saw his father press himself upright, turn with his asps to the girded corridor. Anasûrimbor Moënghus … that he could look so pale in the light of his son!

Existence cringed before the whip of his voice. Space cracked. Here was pried into there. Beyond his father he saw Serwë, her blonde hair tied into a war-knot. He saw her leap out of the black …

Even as he toppled into one far greater.

Speaking of Serwe, I love the ambiguity here, yes it's definitely the-thing-called-serwe, but Kellhus internally calls her serwe, and the idea of Serwe (or her soul) leaping out of the great black to welcome her god and her husband into the outside is sort of delicious and a fun inversion to pull on the reader, of Kellhus and the reader both getting the inward and the outside mixed up.

Isn’t this the first time Kellhus uses magic at all?

iirc, this is the first time Kellhus uses magic on screen:

I’m here, Father. In the house you have prepared for me.

“You began,” Kellhus said, “contemplating what would become the Thousandfold Thought.”

“Yes,” Moënghus replied, a simple affirmation. Even as he said this, Kellhus sensed the changes—in acoustics, odours, even ambient temperature. The pitch-black corridor had opened onto a chamber of some kind. One where things still lived, and where things had died—many things.

“We have arrived,” his father said.

Kellhus spoke a sorcerous word and a point of light appeared, sheeting low-vaulted walls in illumination. Though ornate by Inrithi standards, the chamber was more austere than any he’d encountered since plumbing the darkness beneath Kyudea. The friezes that panelled the walls did not screen deeper carvings. They seemed more reserved in theme and content as well, as if the product of an older, more stolid age—though Kellhus decided it had more to do with the room’s function. It had been some kind of access chamber for the mansion’s ancient sewers.

he creates a light here, but when he entered Kyudea, Moenghus left him a lantern, which he uses up to that point, so Moenghus wanted Kellhus to use the light, to either distract him or blind him perhaps, or maybe Moenghus thought he needed it and did not assume Kellhus would possess magic yet, or at least entertained the possibility he may not.

I find it interesting there that Kellhus just 'decides' leaps to a conclusion, with no mention of inferences or branching possibilities. it's out of character with most of his other observations.

For instance at the beginning of the paragraph:

The Warrior-Prophet wandered the debris, a future mapped with each exhalation. His soul forked into the blackness of possibility, following the calculus of inference and association. Thoughts branching, shoot after shoot, until he filled the immediate world and struck beyond, down into the exhausted soil of the past, out across the ever-receding horizon of the future.

Cities burned. Entire nations took flight. A whirlwind walked …

But Kellhus is very unreliable and not internally consistent, these paragraphs are back to back, from Kellhus' internal narrative and he baldly contradicts himself from one moment to the next, with no internal awareness of it:

Ignoring the alternate passages, Kellhus continued following the track through the dust. It wound deep into the abandoned labyrinth, always descending. Save for the pitted remains of bronze arms, he found no artifacts, only chamber after florid chamber, each as ornate as the last. He passed through a vast library where scroll-racks towered higher than his lantern light could reach, and where queues and twining stairs—all exquisitely carved from living rock—loomed from the darkness as though from the ocean deeps. He did not pause, though he held out his lantern to each room he passed by or through: infirmaries, granaries, barracks, and personal apartments—warrens of them. Everything he saw, he pondered, knowing he understood nothing of the souls for whom these things were natural and immediate.

He crossed a vast processional gallery where sculptured events spilled from the walls, epic scenes of strife and passion: nude penitents prostrate before the court of a Nonman King, warriors striving against mobs of Sranc or Men. Though Moënghus’s trail often passed through these grand dioramas, Kellhus found himself walking around—heeding some voice from nowhere. Towering columns soared into the darkness, worked with arms gripping arms, twining upward and around, squared with bent-back wrists and open hands that cast the shadow of fingers. The ceilings remained cloaked in black obscurity. The silence was that of mighty hollows, at once oppressive and fragile, as though the clatter of a single stone might thunder.

Compare the two bolded sentences: Kellhus does not pause or swerve from his trek, he is pure mission; Kellhus wanders aimlessly driven by a darkness that comes before that he does not know.

Kellhus is not aware of this internal contradiction.

Compare the two underlined parts: Kellhus knows he cannot know the sculptures, now, suddenly, Kellhus knows them, passion, strife, who are kings etc.

Kellhus is not aware of this internal contradiction of not knowing and then of suddenly knowing. The knowledge is not the result of study, of chasing inferences down possibilities, the knowledge is just suddenly there.

[themerchant]

That's his first time. He used whelming to get Akka to teach him the words, and then successfully cast the spell.

Indeed, I think he wanted to know a cant of calling so he could "send dreams" to Saubon.

From memory he says the two lines seperately , then Kellhus repeats the utteral/inutteral combination, and akka notes his eyes flare for the first time.

[Armitage]

Pray, where?

It's just after Kellhus hypnotizes Akka and speaks with Seswatha. TTT, ch. 6, last scene:

Then, with a faint otherworldly smile upon his lips, Kellhus nodded, looked directly into his eyes, and repeated, “Iratisrineis lo ocoimenein loroi hapara,” but in a way that rumbled like trailing thunder.

For the first time Achamian saw Kellhus’s eyes glow. Like coals beneath the bellows.

I'd forgotten that he also creates a light under Kyudea.