No thought.

The boy extinguished.

Only a place.

This place.

...

I have been legion

...

Now I understand

His intellect flailed, found purchase, and grasped. He could sense wild cause sweep around him in statistical tides. Touch him and leave him untouched.

I am a man. I stand apart from these things.

In these two quotes, from the end and beginning of the first book, respectively, describe a contradiction.  In the first quote, during his boyhood training, it is the absence of assertion of personhood, "the boy extinguished," that demonstrates Kellhus ability to master circumstance, in the second quote, during the prologue journey, it is the assertion of personhood, "I am a man," that demonstrates Kellhus ability to master circumstance.

Will you resolve this contradiction?

I have noticed that throughout all five novels, forms of the word incandescent occur only during the onscreen utilization of sorcery.

I have noted one exception:

“What do you know of Shimeh?” Kellhus asked.

The walls shivered beneath a fierce succession of gusts, and the flame twirled with abrupt incandescence. The hanging pelts lightly rocked to and fro. Leweth looked about, his brow furrowed, as though he strained to hear someone.

“It’s a long way off, Kellhus, through dangerous lands.”

Are forms of the word incandescent reserved for uses of sorcery?

In the quoted scene, is sorcery occurring that Kellhus and the reader may otherwise be unaware of?

If so, will you elaborate on what Kellhus (and possibly readers) may have missed in this scene?

Why was the rape of omindalea removed from the published appendix and is this entry still valid as it was when you posted it to the old forum?

(The internet doesn't forget... It remembers!)


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

You are about to begin reading R. Scott Bakker’s new novel, The Unholy Consult. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice— they won’t hear you otherwise—“ I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Scott Bakker’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

Find the most comfortable position: seated, stretched out, curled up, or lying flat. Flat on your back, on your side, on your stomach. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in the rocker, the deck chair, on the hassock. In the hammock, if you have a hammock. On top of your bed, of course, or in the bed. You can even stand on your hands, head down, in the yoga position. With the book upside down, naturally.

Of course, the ideal position for reading is something you can never find. In the old days they used to read standing up, at a lectern. People were accustomed to standing on their feet, without moving. They rested like that when they were tired of horseback riding. Nobody ever thought of reading on horseback; and yet now, the idea of sitting in the saddle, the book propped against the horse’s mane, or maybe tied to the horse’s ear with a special harness, seems attractive to you. With your feet in the stirrups, you should feel quite comfortable for reading; having your feet up is the first condition for enjoying a read.

Well, what are you waiting for? Stretch your legs, go ahead and put your feet on a cushion, on two cushions , on the arms of the sofa, on the wings of the chair, on the coffee table, on the desk, on the piano, on the globe. Take your shoes off first. If you want to, put your feet up; if not, put them back. Now don’t stand there with your shoes in one hand and the book in the other.

Adjust the light so you won’t strain your eyes. Do it now, because once you’re absorbed in reading there will be no budging you. Make sure the page isn’t in shadow, a clotting of black letters on a gray background, uniform as a pack of mice; but be careful that the light cast on it isn’t too strong, doesn’t glare on the cruel white of the paper, gnawing at the shadows of the letters as in a southern noonday. Try to foresee now everything that might make you interrupt your reading. Cigarettes within reach, if you smoke, and the ashtray. Anything else? Do you have to pee? All right, you know best.

It’s not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You’re the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs. What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn’t serious.

So, then, you noticed in an email that The Unholy Consult had appeared, the new book by Scott Bakker, who hadn’t published for several years. You went to his house and read the volume. Good for you.

In his window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through his house past the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves , trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered.

With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:

the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages,

the Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success,

the Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment,

the Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case,

the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,

the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,

the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time To Reread and the Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It’s Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.

With a zigzag dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Books Whose Author Or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Not New (for you or in general) and New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new).

All this simply means that, having rapidly glanced over the titles of the volumes displayed in the house, you have turned toward a stack of The Unholy Consult fresh off the printer, you have grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the author so that your right to read it can be established.

You cast another bewildered look at the books around you (or, rather: it was the books that looked at you , with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him), and out you went.

You derive a special pleasure from an un-published book, and it isn’t only a book you are reading early but its novelty as well, which could also be merely that of an object fresh from the factory, the youthful bloom of new books, which lasts until the dust jacket begins to yellow, until a veil of smog settles on the top edge, until the binding becomes dog-eared, in the rapid autumn of libraries. No, you hope always to encounter true newness, which, having been new once, will continue to be so. Having read the freshly published book, you will take possession of this newness at the first moment, without having to pursue it, to chase it. Will it happen this time? You never can tell. Let’s see how it begins.

Perhaps you started leafing through the book already, tell me























































WHAT DO YOU SEE?






















































In other words, it’s better for you to restrain your impatience and wait to open the book at home. Now. Yes, you are in your room, calm; you open the book to page one, no, to the last page, first you want to see how long it is. It’s not too long, fortunately. Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the novels of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no more than a hundred years.

You turn the book over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the jacket, generic phrases that don’t say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the book itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the book, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the book, too, this reading around it before reading inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new book, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the reading of the book.

So here you are now, ready to attack the first lines of the first page. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the author. No. You don’t recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary , he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself. Here, however, he seems to have absolutely no connection with all the rest he has written, at least as far as you can recall . Are you disappointed? Let’s see. Perhaps at first you feel a bit lost, as when a person appears who, from the name, you identified with a certain face, and you try to make the features you are seeing tally with those you had in mind, and it won’t work. But then you go on and you realize that the book is readable nevertheless, independently of what you expected of the author, it’s the book in itself that arouses your curiosity; in fact , on sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is.

(with apologies to Italo Calvino)

Here's a question, is the process of being an elju possibly similar to the process of being a Mandate Schoolmen? 

Does Kosotor dream the dreams of Nil'giccas?

It just makes me wonder, how could someone become an elju, remember things for another, unless there was something, 'written' so to speak on the soul of the prospective elju.  How can an elju remember unless they remember.

I think we're being thrown by the translation for elju being book.  That word 'book' puts me in mind of the elju becoming a book by doing a lot of reading.  But the nonmen don't seem to have much in the way of writing, and they can't really create an  'oral' tradition to instruct an elju when they can't remember it to tell the elju.

That sort of suggests that an elju has to 'learn' or imprint from contact with the nonman's soul.  Why the soul?  Because RSB is assiduous at never using the words brain or mind, in Earwa all thought originates in and is stored upon the Parchment of the soul.  And the soul it seems is connected to the hearts and eyes of men and nonmen.

So what's the one method we're certain of that imprints memories from one soul onto the soul of another?

The Grasping of Seswatha's Heart.

of course, this begs the question, 'how do you grasp the heart of a living man or nonman?' and in answer to that, perhaps we should look to the circumfix...

The What has come Before (that comes before) at the start of TTT sparked an idea.  It emphasizes the "nothing" that the Mandate finds.

This made me think that Achamian is something of a Prince of Nothing, himself. 


As is Cnaiur, when his Utemot/People/Ground/Identity are destroyed by the machinations of the Dunyain, he is no longer of the People, he stands apart and mimics being of the People, even though he is chieftan of the Utemot, he is not of the Utemot, he is more or less a Prince of Nothing.

And of course the literal text that tells us Kellhus is a Prince of Nothing.

Throughout her entire life she’d looked upon things and people that stood apart. She was Esmenet, and that was her bowl, the Emperor’s silver, the Shriah’s man, the God’s ground, and so on. She stood here, and those things there. No longer. Everything, it seemed, radiated the warmth of his skin. The ground beneath her bare feet. The mat beneath her buttocks. And for a mad instant, she was certain that if she raised her fingers to her cheek, she would feel the soft curls of a flaxen beard, that if she turned to her left, she would see Esmenet hovering motionless over her rice bowl.

Somehow, everything had become here, and everything here had become him.

Kellhus!

Bakker, R. Scott (2008-09-02). The Warrior Prophet: The Prince of Nothing, Book Two (Kindle Locations 7344-7349). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.

This occurs just moments after Kellhus scrapes clean the parchment of the Tusk (let's just bracket and ignore that Kellhus thought a few pages earlier that he scraped Serwe's soul clean as though it were parchment and that Serwe's perspective believes she has been supernaturally healed after that event).

This occurs just moments after Esmenet sees Kellhus haloes for the first time (though she doesn't describe them as haloes).

Note that this is the best explanation we have so far for how Kellhus does what he does with Serwe's heart.  What Esmenet experiences here is that she becomes Kellhus for a moment, that they are the same (we're even cued by the text to think of Esmenet's heart, her beating heart is her only connection to her physical body in this moment). 

And in this presentation as Esemenet sees it, we are presented with a dialectic, thesis, "Everything had become here;" antithesis, "and everything here had become him;" synthesis, "Kellhus!"

Or as presented before the author simplified it, "She stood here, and those things there.;" antithesis, "Everything, it seemed, radiated the warmth of his skin;" synthesis, "if she turned to her left, she would see Esmenet hovering motionless over her rice bowl."

Esmenet has her world rocked because the otherness of things is refuted and in accepting the refutation she becomes Kellhus for a moment.

The text continues:

She breathed in. Her heart battered her breast.

He scraped the passage clean!

In a single exhalation, it seemed, a lifetime of condemnation slipped from her, and she felt shriven, truly shriven. One breath and she was absolved! She experienced a kind of lucidity, as though her thoughts had been cleansed like water strained through bright white cloth. She thought she should cry, but the sunlight was too sharp, the air too clear for weeping.

Everything was so certain.

He scraped the passage clean!

Then she thought of Achamian.

Bakker, R. Scott (2008-09-02). The Warrior Prophet: The Prince of Nothing, Book Two (Kindle Locations 7349-7356). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.

Note that Achamian seemingly collapses this connection between Esmenet and Kellhus, in a sense it indicates why Kellhus needs Serwe to die rather than Esmenet, because Serwe can maintain the synthesis longer, 'is she strong enough?' and Esmenet's connection is disrupted by her connection to Achamian

Also there's a suggestion here that Esmenet is experiencing Kellhus' thoughts, 'a kind of lucidity, as though her thoughts had been cleansed like water strained through bright white cloth,' and Kellhus is nothing if not "certain."

And note the experience Esmenet goes through in her 'single exhalation.'  She is absolved.  The timeline/dialectic here is, "Kellhus erases"  "Esmenet is absolved" "Kellhus rewrites Esmenet" (I'm taking the archaic root of shriven which is related to 'to write', which is probably an absurd reach by any standard).

I don't think Kellhus realizes what really happens for Esmenet, he thinks she suddenly sees him as a god because he deepened his voice and looked at her with a different expression, but Esmenet sees him as a God because she experiences what it is like to be Kellhus.

And there's also the possibility that Kellhus in this moment really does 'heal' Esmenet's soul, perhaps that is the answer to the dialectic of esmenet, the synthesis, if you will. 

Esmenet Stands Apart from all things not Esmenet, Kellhus is all things in one including Esmenet, Esmenet is absolved/forgiven/shriven/healed.

But it's momentary at best, she later thinks that she cannot rinse away the sin, as she experiences the sin rinsing away when she's unified with all things/Kellhus.