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Bakker LIV - Soul Sphincter


.H.

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I dreamt Bakker came to visit me and handed me a draft of the next book.

 

It had robot Terminators that were immune to magic, either because they were forged from metal mined in Anarcane ground or because they were covered in Aporetic script.  There was also stuff involving multiple timelines and shit that was probably fuzzy in the dream too rather than me not remembering. 

 

Which honestly makes me wonder - sure, aporetic armor wouldn't provide anymore protection than a simple chorae for anything vaguely human-sized.  But what about dragons?  Why isn't our Capslock friend decked out in Deathwing-style aporetic plates? 

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On 6/12/2018 at 3:30 PM, كالدب said:

A lot of this would have been solved with more of Kellhus' PoV. Not having his other than a couple of fairly opaque and symbolic chapters meant that we were always trying to guess his motivations - and when the only time we get them is in a monologue to other Dunyain, we accept that as something like a mirror of the first series, because that's the only basis we have. 

What it apparently should have been was one entity aping Dunyain talking to another entity aping Dunyain without either being aware of it until the last minute, but since we hadn't seen a whole lot of Shae, none of the Dunsult, and little of Kellhus, we had no context to accept this as fact. 

Thinking about this, Bakker didn't want to give us Kellhus chapters because I believe he thought it would've given the game away.  But imagine he did give us PoV chapters where it's just regular ol' super-logical Kellhus... but every now and then he misses something obvious and apparent to the reader, and these incongruities slowly add up and make us all go "hmm what is going on" - that would've been an interesting way to do it.  But it might also have been too difficult.  Like how GRRM complains about writing kids.

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I don't get the impression that Bakker really wanted to get into the details of chorae more than he had to. They're a compensating detail to explain why sorcerers don't just rule the Three Seas outright (especially since they already effectively rule High Ainon with the Scarlet Spires through their proxy). 

 

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On 6/17/2018 at 6:04 AM, ير بال said:

I dreamt Bakker came to visit me and handed me a draft of the next book.

 

It had robot Terminators that were immune to magic, either because they were forged from metal mined in Anarcane ground or because they were covered in Aporetic script.  There was also stuff involving multiple timelines and shit that was probably fuzzy in the dream too rather than me not remembering. 

 

Which honestly makes me wonder - sure, aporetic armor wouldn't provide anymore protection than a simple chorae for anything vaguely human-sized.  But what about dragons?  Why isn't our Capslock friend decked out in Deathwing-style aporetic plates? 

Actually it draws an interesting link - anarcane ground is where the gods have walked the earth and so dream lucidly, not allowing the semantic cracks that sorcerers use to invoke/provoke effects in less lucidly dreamed locations.

And Mimara contacted with something, some kind of divine being, through a chorae.

Do chorae in some way summon gods? They are called tears of god, as well.

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Well, if sorcery scars the World, then aporetic sorcery has to be holy because it un-scars it. Mimara just had to unlock its full power. 

Given the real threat of damnation and the awareness that schools like the Mandate and Scarlet Spires have of it, I feel like they haven't put enough creativity and effort into trapping their souls to avoid it. Or even just figuring out how to destroy their souls with sorcery, since a single searing burst of pain is much better than an eternity of it. 

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Ah, but if you know how to destroy a soul, would you not also know how to destroy a god?

Maybe? Anyway I think a theme is that the threat of eternal torture is just absolutely abstract - nobody gets it really. Unless you have an inverse fire you have no idea. The theme is, I think, that having really hard penalties doesn't really do anything about crime - it translates to real world incarceration systems quite well. Anyway, the schools of sorcery are complacent. The mandate even has the fact of it in their catchphrase and yet they just kind of ignore it.

I'm pretty sure the Mop is a storage area for knock off damnation avoidance - each skeleton in each tree is a Mangecca (sp?) member put into a kind of cryogenic slumber.

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On 6/16/2018 at 3:04 PM, ير بال said:

Which honestly makes me wonder - sure, aporetic armor wouldn't provide anymore protection than a simple chorae for anything vaguely human-sized.  But what about dragons?  Why isn't our Capslock friend decked out in Deathwing-style aporetic plates?

Wasn't that Sciborg's eternal question?

I think Bakker answered it somewhere, maybe Reddit or the thread here.

It was actually at TSA:

Quote

Mike mentioned this on TPB as the 'question of questions,' but I'm sure this in the books somewhere. Wracu find them painful, for reasons that are hotly contested. One interpretation involves the fact that it's not just places where atrocity wears thin the fabric of the onta. As Wutteat shows, it's beings as well. Wracu, some argue, are demonic in some respect.

Another interpretation turns on the way morality is intrinsic to the ontology of the World. If you look at Chorae as 'logic bombs' designed to obliterate violations of code, then you can chart antipathies to Chorae according to different kinds of violations. Thus the difference between Schoolmen and Cishaurim. Wracu are not simply Inchoroi abominations, they are Inchoroi abominations possessing souls. Like the Cishaurim, they do not so much violate the 'letter' as the 'spirit' of natural law. Chorae are 'ontological stressors' in the latter instance. 

They do sure still hold their own anyway, for the most part, without chorae.

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ok, this is big, I found the real ancient dunyain :P I haven't found anything on google relating dunyain and epicurus.. I was reading the italian wikipedia page about a lost latin work (~100B.C.) rediscovered in the middle ages.. I just went there by pure chance (link from Poggio Bracciolini only cause some friends kept mentioning him for a gag they made on high school and I had no idea who he was), the english version doesn't use these words.. Google translated it pretty well tho.

"it is a reference to personal responsibility and an incitement to mankind to become aware of reality, in which men from birth are victims of passions that they can not understand. The main source of the Lucrezian epos, in fact, is the Περὶ φύσεως of Epicurus. The author assumes the task of providing men with the tools to eliminate fears and to attain the ataraxia, or the absence of disturbance of the wise, the only one capable of achieving a rational victory over feelings."

 

I know I know really little about philosophy but this sounds awfully specific!! this guy wanted to be a dunyain!!

 

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura

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I would also point out these strong similarities:

Lucretius was himself a theist, and in his work he does not deny the existence of deities;[24][25] he simply argues that they did not create the universe, that they do not care about human affairs, and that they do not intervene in the world.

Lucretius maintained that he could free humankind from fear of the deities by demonstrating that all things occur by natural causes without any intervention by the deities.

from the italian one:

Lucretius encourages his friend to study the true rationality and promises to talk about the essence of reality as a whole and to reveal the origin of things. Then follows the eulogy of Epicurus, presented as the true master, superior to other men. He has the great merit of having freed humanity from the religious fear that comes from the belief in the possibility of a punishment of the soul after death and in a divine intervention in the events of the world. With his rational investigation of nature, he has shown that gods exist in "intermundia" (~between-worlds, the outside??), but have no interest in human affairs.  (is that you, Kellhus?)

To make his message more comprehensible,he uses the metaphor of the walls: these are nothing more than the concrete form of ignorance. Just the ignorant, along with the superstitious and the ones who love (actually who fell in love), are called "miserable", because they do not know the recta ratio.

In the relations with the body, the mind has supremacy on the soul: in fact, life subsists until the mind is whole, even if the organism is deprived of some of its limbs and of a large part of the soul. (this recalls something about the sranc and the tekne creations)

also from epicureanism wiki:

Epicurus believed that what he called "pleasure" (ἡδονή) was the greatest good, but that the way to attain such pleasure was to live modestly, to gain knowledge of the workings of the world, and to limit one's desires (definitely dunyain). This would lead one to attain a state of tranquility (ataraxia) (grasping the absolute) and freedom from fear as well as an absence of bodily pain (aponia) (those are dunyain prerogatives too). The combination of these two states constitutes happiness in its highest form.

 

 

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We asked bakker about connections to Greek and other ancient terminology and his answer was “meh I liked the sound of the werds and don’t really remember where the werds came from” so you’re putting in way more work than the author did. The pattern recognition circuits in your brain have been deliberately short circuited to do what you are doing, because the author is a troll and thinks it’s funny to treat you like that, but there is no there there, no matter how much “there” you find there.

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18 minutes ago, lokisnow said:

We asked bakker about connections to Greek and other ancient terminology and his answer was “meh I liked the sound of the werds and don’t really remember where the werds came from” so you’re putting in way more work than the author did. The pattern recognition circuits in your brain have been deliberately short circuited to do what you are doing, because the author is a troll and thinks it’s funny to treat you like that, but there is no there there, no matter how much “there” you find there.

:agree:

Bolded part is what we should replace the layers of revelation crap with.

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11 hours ago, lokisnow said:

We asked bakker about connections to Greek and other ancient terminology and his answer was “meh I liked the sound of the werds and don’t really remember where the werds came from” so you’re putting in way more work than the author did. The pattern recognition circuits in your brain have been deliberately short circuited to do what you are doing, because the author is a troll and thinks it’s funny to treat you like that, but there is no there there, no matter how much “there” you find there.

well, I certainly expected any argument to be stale and everything possible to say about the work being already told in all these posts about the second apocalypse but why keep postin about it then? :P

anyway I didn't simply recognize patterns but the same exact concepts and even words used in the book, I didn't need much, I simply read the wiki, not the original work :P

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On 6/17/2018 at 7:20 PM, Callan S. said:

Actually it draws an interesting link - anarcane ground is where the gods have walked the earth and so dream lucidly, not allowing the semantic cracks that sorcerers use to invoke/provoke effects in less lucidly dreamed locations.

And Mimara contacted with something, some kind of divine being, through a chorae.

Do chorae in some way summon gods? They are called tears of god, as well.

I think, in general, they function more as 'word of God', collapsing the sorcerous interpretation of the Real into its canonical form.  But Mimara's use of one of them to remove the risen creature in the tunnel, through invocation of her Judging Eye, is very interesting to that notion.

If the chorae 'fix' the world to its most prosaic level, as defined by the God's speech, rather than Sorcerer's blasphemy, then did the God looking through Mimara's eyes onto its own chorae allow it to actively meddle?  That is, to remove the Ciphrang despite it bringing its Hellish frame along?  If so...is the God conscious?  I've been thinking that it was more abstraction than anything else, but if it is intervening...

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