Bakker and Emotion

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« Reply #15 on: May 14, 2013, 11:33:09 pm »
Quote from: Madness
+1 Auriga.

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« Reply #16 on: May 14, 2013, 11:33:14 pm »
Quote from: Callan S.
Quote from: Auriga
Quote from: Bakker User
*Possibly when Kellhus spares Cnaiur - I  think this has been touched upon by others
*The crucifixion/circumfixion and Serwe's death - could be delirium
*Momentarily, when Aurax nearly seduces him (with pheremones?) in the guise of Esmenet
*This is the most telling, I believe: when Esmi is pregnant and the Holy War is in Caraskand, she nearly falls down a chasm; Kellhus notes that the fall would have been fatal and, just before he saves her, feels lightheaded

You forgot the first scene where he feels emotion, when Serwë is raped by Cnaiur in front of him. He feels something move inside him, although he's not sure what it is. Father, what is this I am feeling? He's never felt empathy before, so he can't quite place it. After a while, the strange feeling - or rather a spark of feeling, a rough approximation of empathy that hasn't been fully bred out of the Dûnyain - is gone, and everything is like normal again.

I haven't read Neuropath, so I can't comment on that.
It's probably his feeling, but I read that part as him actually detecting the worlds feeling about the event. The world does feel this crime - his empathy is to have detected the worlds responce. Perhaps ignoring human emotion simply let the signal that is the worlds emotion slip through.

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« Reply #17 on: May 14, 2013, 11:33:19 pm »
Quote from: bbaztek
Quote from: Callan S.
Quote from: Auriga
It's probably his feeling, but I read that part as him actually detecting the worlds feeling about the event. The world does feel this crime - his empathy is to have detected the worlds responce. Perhaps ignoring human emotion simply let the signal that is the worlds emotion slip through.

Perhaps this also has to do with blindness, and how it makes one more receptive to the soul, or passion, of God. In the prologue when the creepy bard priest guy was touching that kid it even says "tears only fell from his blind eye".

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« Reply #18 on: May 14, 2013, 11:33:24 pm »
Quote from: Callan S.
I think alot may have been given away in that prologue somehow, so probably indeed!

Might be off topic, but I remember Akka paying off his child messenger runner, and an unaccountable sadness occurs when his hand brushes the childs hand in passing the coin to him.

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« Reply #19 on: May 14, 2013, 11:33:28 pm »
Quote from: lockesnow
Is he feeling emotion? or is he identifying a third party that is outraged?
Quote
Kellhus watched while the Scylvendi took her again. With her whimpers, her suffocated cries, it seemed the ground beneath slowly spun, as though stars had stopped their cycle and the earth had begun to wheel instead.
There was something . . . something here, he could sense. Something outraged. From what darkness had this come?
Something is happening to me, Father.

Bakker, R. Scott (2008-09-02). The Darkness that Comes Before (The Prince of Nothing) (p. 383). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.

But as always we should remember how much Kellhus' self-deceptions go.

Quote
Kellhus had refashioned himself over the past several weeks. The forest was no longer the stupefying cacophony it had once been. Sobel was a land of winter caribou, sable, beaver, and marten. Amber slumbered in her ground. Bare stone lay clean beneath her sky, and her lakes were silver with fish. There was nothing more, nothing worthy of awe or dread.

Bakker, R. Scott (2008-09-02). The Darkness that Comes Before (The Prince of Nothing) (p. 19). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.

Quote
From the heights, Kellhus looked south across the winter forests. Ishuäl lay somewhere behind him, hidden in the glacial mountains. Before him lay a pilgrimage through a world of men bound by arbitrary custom, by the endless repetition of tribal lies. He would come to them as one awake. He would shelter in the hollows of their ignorance, and through truth he would make them his instruments. He was Dûnyain, one of the Conditioned, and he would possess all peoples, all circumstances. He would come before.

Bakker, R. Scott (2008-09-02). The Darkness that Comes Before (The Prince of Nothing) (p. 20). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.

Kellhus is aware of how he has blinded and deafened himself to the world, and sleep through all its meanings, and the very next page he brags to himself how awake he is--one page after he's bragged about making himself asleep he brags about being awake.  Very deceived, he is. Which is it?

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« Reply #20 on: May 14, 2013, 11:33:33 pm »
Quote from: bbaztek
Quote from: lockesnow
Kellhus is aware of how he has blinded and deafened himself to the world, and sleep through all its meanings, and the very next page he brags to himself how awake he is--one page after he's bragged about making himself asleep he brags about being awake.  Very deceived, he is. Which is it?

I believe those passages indicate Kellhus had acclimated himself to the barrage of stimuli that overpowered his dunyain training when he first entered the wilderness around Ishual. Too lazy to look now but there's a line very early in about all that dunyain hoo-ha evaporating as he takes in the scenery and becomes engrossed in his surroundings. Curiously, this is also where he spends half a day looking at an innocuous twig (?) before resuming his course. WHAT DOES IT MEAN BAKKER YOU SLY DOG

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« Reply #21 on: May 14, 2013, 11:33:38 pm »
Quote from: Madness
Lol.

I too read Kellhus' emotional spontaneity as novel interactions with the world.

But as Callan and lockesnow have suggested, in light of, TAE, it's likely a third party, Fate/World, or God's objection.

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« Reply #22 on: May 14, 2013, 11:33:42 pm »
Quote from: Callan S.
I kind of read it as an autism he had to find a way around - but why? Why not be entrenched in a branching, infinite analysis web? What makes one path more green?

Quote from: bbaztek
Curiously, this is also where he spends half a day looking at an innocuous twig (?) before resuming his course. WHAT DOES IT MEAN BAKKER YOU SLY DOG
When he gets to Shimeh, the twig returns!

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« Reply #23 on: May 14, 2013, 11:33:47 pm »
Quote from: bbaztek
perhaps as kellhus strips away at his own personal darkness that comes before, or in other words the "local" movers of his soul, he is able to more clearly comprehend the prime mover, ie God. Because dunyain principle does not accommodate the existence of supernatural agencies, they might have underestimated the effect novel stimuli would have on a prodigy like Kellhus, and so Kellhus goes beyond just grasping the Absolute and actually enters a kind of communion with the God of Gods.

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« Reply #24 on: May 14, 2013, 11:33:51 pm »
Quote from: lockesnow
except he discards it all as lacking meaning, rather explicitly.

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« Reply #25 on: May 14, 2013, 11:33:58 pm »
Quote from: Madness
This passage always makes me share Curethan's thoughts that Kellhus could grasp the God of Gods as coming before everything:

"He saw not ceilings but distributions of hanging weights. He saw not walls but fears, a pageant of real and imagined enemies. He saw not a villa but a long-dead Imperial favor, the relic of a moribund race. Everywhere he turned, he apprehended the pillars among the pilasters, the ground beneath the scuffled floors...

Everywhere he looked, he saw what came before" (TTT, p307).

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« Reply #26 on: May 14, 2013, 11:34:06 pm »
Quote from: Wilshire
From that passage and a bit of interpolation I could see that conclusion.

Floor under the dirt -> Nonmen behind their creation -> -> God before his creation.


That which proceeds all creation would be that which comes before all the darkness... Grasping the Absolute would be the same as understanding the creator(s).

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« Reply #27 on: May 14, 2013, 11:34:11 pm »
Quote from: Callan S.
Quote from: lockesnow
except he discards it all as lacking meaning, rather explicitly.
The first, yes. The second twig - well, there was the mention of the dead branch of the twig - and its green branch. Also the rather heavy note that all trees in that area were dead.

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« Reply #28 on: May 14, 2013, 11:34:16 pm »
Quote from: bbaztek
Quote from: lockesnow
except he discards it all as lacking meaning, rather explicitly.

the prologue cracks the door open just a tad, the circumfix breakdown blows it wide open, and by book 3 he's talking to rocks and twigs.

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« Reply #29 on: May 14, 2013, 11:34:20 pm »
Quote from: Madness
Quote from: bbaztek
They might have underestimated the effect novel stimuli would have on a prodigy like Kellhus, and so Kellhus goes beyond just grasping the Absolute and actually enters a kind of communion with the God of Gods.

Didn't see this before when I was playing keep up before. +1

Though, I'm with Curethan, in that, WLW suggests that Kellhus believes or, at least, wants those around him to believe that that communion and grasping the Absolute are one in the same.