TSACast #13 Notes:
Today got away from me, as per usual. Notes are done - I just need to go through them, format for links, and find the quotes for our rambling paraphrasing over the episode. I'll try and get them done before work tomorrow - I'll edit this post - or do them piecemeal over the next couple days.
EDIT: I got some done tonight because it bothers me that they aren't done.
But yeah...
EDIT EDIT: And done
.
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Pat's Fantasy Hotlist: The Darkness The Comes Before Review-
The Prince of Nothing & The Aspect-Emperor by R. Scott Bakker: The Reviews That Come Before-
Geek's Guide to the Galaxy- PON/TAE Narrators:
DeVries/
Orton-
Wert's The Maps of R. Scott Bakker’s Second Apocalypse-
The Great Amazon Ordeal thread- MSJ mentions absurb ebook prices:
related comment by Bakker about Canadian "e-rights"/Pat mentioning that he
asked Overlook to put the ebooks on sale (doing the good work, thanks Pat!)
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New Recorded Books TGO Digital release-
Missing: FB/Duskweaver inception for TSACast - the thread where they talk about talking via podcast must be in the quoted portion of the forum and, therefore, seemingly immune to normal search methods...
- I bring up the "Prologue Prologue" in which Drusas Achamian claims:
I) To have had sexual congress with our Holy Empress on the eve of the First Holy War's triumph over the heathen Fanim at Shimeh.
II) To have learned certain secrets regarding our Holy Aspect-Emperor, to whit: That He is not the incarnation of the God of Gods but rather a son of the Dunyain, a secret sect devoted to the mastery of all things, body and spirit.
...
III) That our Holy Aspect-Emperor's war to prevent the resurrection of the No-God is false. Granted, this is merely implied, since the text was plainly written before the Great Ordeal.
- Embassy of Suicides:
"They said, 'The Aspect-Emperor bears you greetings, Great Satakhan, and asks that you send three emissaries to the Andiamine Heights to respond in kind.'"
...
"With that, the three men produced razors from their tongues and opened their own throats!" He made a tight, feline swiping motion with his left hand. "They killed themselves ... right there before us!
...
The Aspect-Emperor had sent us three suicides! That was the message to my father. 'Look! Look what I can do! Now tell me, Can you do the same?
- TWP - "The Warrior-Prophet Shall Come Before You:"
There was a moment of astonished silence, for the Kianene could scarce believe the bearded wretches before them could author so much woe. Then, before the first ritual declaration, the twelve men cried out, "Satephikos kana ta yerishi ankapharas!" in unison, then drew their knives and cut their own throats.
....
"Th-they said," the ashen-faced man stammered, "'the Warrior-Prophet shall... shall come before you...'"
...
When he demanded to know just who this Warrior-Prophet was, no one could answer him.
- Zsoronga quote regarding Kellhus fighting on "all fronts:"
"I think that's what the devil wanted! I think that was his trap. The provocation of rebuilding Auvanshei, followed by this mad diplomatic overture. Think of what would have happened, what a disaster it would have been, had we taken the field against his Zaudunyani hosts.
- Sorweel about the Aspect-Emperor:
For Sorweel's entire life, it seemed, the Aspect-Emperor had been an uneasy rumour from the South.
...
The Unification Wars. The Thousand Temples. All the innumerable nations of the Three Seas. And the coming of the False Prophet who preached the end of all things.
- MG offhand mentions the two dogs metaphor:
The Sakarpi tell of a man who had two puppies in his belly, the one adoring, the other savage. When the loving one nuzzled his heart, he became joyous, like the father of a newborn boy. But when the other gored it with sharp puppy teeth, he became desparate with sorrow. Those rare times the dogs left him in peace, he would tell people he was doomed. Bliss can be sipped a thousand times, he would say, whereas shame need only cut your throat once.
The Sakarpi called him Kensooras, "Between Dogs," a name that had since come to mean the melancholy suffered by suicides.
-
What does Kellhus/his children think of Sorweel?- Wilshire paraphrasing some of the
Excerpt - The Unholy Consult, Chapter Three (Summary).
- Blackstone mentions Porsparian wiping "spit" on Sorweel's face (TJE, p449, Small Canadian Paperback).
- GJ in and out somewhere there for a small moment (never returned to sign off) sounding like he's rooting through a fridge for beer
.
- Psatma's "Falling Disease:"
It began as it always did, with a curious buzzing in the ears, as though dragonflies swarmed about her head. Then the ground bucked and flopped like cloth thrown over a fish, and watercolour haloes swung about every living form. And she saw her, though she could not turn to look, a shadow woman, spoked in sun-silver, walking where everything and everyone exploded like clay urns, a silhouette so sharp it cut eyes sideways. A hand reached out and pressed the side of her hooded head, irresistibly gentle, forcing her cheek down to the pungent earth.
"Mother," she gasped.
The shadow held her, as though pinning her below unseen waters. "Be still, child."
...
- Yatwer in the Catacombs:
Silence. The very air seemed animate. The excavated hollows that surrounded them, hall after honeycombed hall, hummed with emptiness, the deadness of space. Watching her sisters, Nannaferi could see it slacken the last of their eyes, the comprehending, the standing underneath what they had lived the entirety of their shallow lives. The Goddess, not the name they used to sugar their lips, not the vague presence that tickled their vanity or itched the underbelly of their sins, but the Goddess, the Blood of Fertility, the monstrous, ageless Mother of Birth.
Here, lending her fury to the blood dark.
- Aside from these two quotes, I believe the only other time the Goddess explicitly expresses her agency is with Porsparian and Sorweel in WLW;
feel free to quote others I might have missed.
- Lmao - At 42m I bring up that we still have yet to talk about the titular “Judging Eye” character, Mimara, on the TJE Reread Cast.
- Quote by Achamian “maybe we don’t teach adult students because...:"
He hadn't the heart to tell her the truth: that the reason the sorcerous Schools were loath to take adults as students had to do with the way age seemed to diminish the ability to learn languages.
-
Missing quote: Mimara reflecting on not wanting to learn sorcery anymore (may be in WLW).
- Wilshire linked threads regarding Mimara's POV:
mimi's verbs/
Mimara- Lol @ MG's "fucking awesome!" regarding
Blood Meridian and its influence on TJE.
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Blood Meridian- Aporos quotes for those surprised like MG:
The Aporos is something I want to flesh out further in future books. The basic idea is this: the Quya first developed the Aporos in the prosecution of their own intercine wars, but it was quickly forbidden. The arrival of the Inchoroi allowed several renegade Quya to pursue their sorcerous interrogations, leading to the production of tens of thousands of Chorae, which were used throughout the Cuno-Inchoroi wars.
The Aporos possesses a contradictory, or negative, semantics, and as such is able only to undo the positive semantics of things like the Gnosis, Psukhe, Anagogis - even the Daimos. Aporetic Cants have no other effect. Salting is actually a kind of side effect. I would rather wait until TTT comes out before discussing the metaphysics - it has to do with the Mark.
After the disaster of Pir Pahal, the Inchoroi had seduced the practitioners of the Aporos, who had been forbidden from pursuing their art. Poisoned by knowledge, they devised the first of the Chorae to render their master immune to Cunoroi magic.
- Quote regarding Aporos notation from
Cuno-Inchoroi Wars TTT Glossary entry:
Overmatched by the Inchoroi and their weapons of light, the Nonmen of Viri were driven back with horrendous losses. Only Cu'jara-Cinmoi and his Ishroi Chariots saved them from utter destruction ... Eventually, all but the most powerful of the Inchoroi were overwhelmed by the valour, sorceries, and numbers of the host of Siol.
More terrible still were those few Inchoroi who ventured out into battle, hanging above the tumult, sweeping the earth with their weapons of light, apparently unaffected by the sorceries of the Ishroi. After the disaster at Pir Pahal, the Inchoroi had seduced the practitioners of the Aporos, who had been forbidden from pursuing their art. Poisoned by knowledg, they devised the first of the Chorae to render their masters immune to Cunoroi magic.
- Quote regarding "Grafts" from Pat's
R. Scott Bakker interview (part 2) (2011):
Is Aurang special amongst the Inchoroi in his ability to use Sorcery? Or were all Inchoroi, his brother included, amongst the Few?
The Inchoroi only possessed the Tekne when they arrived in Eärwa. All of the Inchoroi are the products of successive Graftings, species-wide rewrites of their genotype, meant to enhance various abilities and capacities, such as the ability to elicit certain sexual responses from their victims (via pheromone locks), or the capacity to ‘tune sensations’ and so explore the vagaries and vicissitudes of carnal pleasure. The addition of anthropomorphic vocal apparatuses is perhaps the most famous of these enhancements.
The Grafting that produced Aurang and Aurax was also devised during the age-long C no-Inchoroi Wars, one of many failed attempts to biologically redesign themselves to overcome the Nonmen. But they had been outrun by their debauchery by this time, and had lost any comprehensive understanding of the Tekne. The Graftings had become a matter of guesswork, more likely to kill than enhance those who received them. The Inchoroi filled the Wells of the Aborted with their own in those days.
Aurang and Aurax are two of six who survived the attempt to Graft the ability to see the onta.
- Mimara seeing the Chorae with the Eye:
The Judging Eye has opened.
She feels it leaning through her worldly eyes, pressing forward, throwing off the agony like rotted clothes, snuffing fact from sight, drawing out the sanctity and the sin. With terrible fixation it stares into the oblivion spilling from her palm...
And somehow, impossibly, passes through.
She blinks on the far side of contradiction, her face and shoulders pulled back in a warm wind, a breath, a premonition of summer rain. And she sees it, a point of luminous white, a certainty, shining out from the pit that blackens her grasp. A voice rises, a voice without word or tone, drowsy with compassion, and the light grows and grows, shrinking the abyss to a rind, to the false foil that it is, burning to dust, and the glory, the magnificence, shines forth, radiant, blinding...
And she holds all... In her hand she holds it!
A Tear of God.
- Quote about God’s time being not linear/Mimara pregnant all at once (WLW, p89):
"But I do know," Achamian hastily adds, "that the Judging Eye involves pregnant women."
Mimara gawks at him through tears. A cold hand has reached into her abdomen and scooped away all warring sensation.
"Pregnant..." she hears herself say. "Why?"
"I don't know." He has flecks of dead leaf in his hair, and she squelches the urge to fuss over him. "Perhaps because of the profundity of childbirth. The Outside inhabits us in many ways, none so onerous as when a women brings a new soul into the world."
She sees her mother posing before a mirror, her belly broad and low with the twins, Kel and Sammi.
"So what is the curse?" she fairly cries at Achamian. "Tell me, old fool!" She rebukes herself immediately afterward, knowing that the Wizard's honesty would wither as her desperation waxed. People punish desperation as much out of compassion as petty malice.
Achamian gnaws his bottom lip. "As far as I know," he begins with obvious and infuriating care, "those with the Judging Eye give birth to dead children."
He shrugs as if to say, See? You have nothing to fear...
Cold falls through her in sheets.
"What?"
A scowl knits his brow. "The Judging Eye is the eye of the Unborn... The eye that watches from the God's own vantage."
A cleft has opened about their path: a runoff that delivers them to a shallow ravine. They follow the stream that gurgles along its creases—the water is clear but seems black given the gloom. Monstrous elms pillar the embankments, their roots like great fists clenched about earth. The stream has wedged the trees far enough apart for white to glare through seams in the canopy. Here and there the water's meandering course has gnawed hollows beneath various trees. The company ducks beneath those that had fallen across the ravine, trees like stone whales.
"But I've had... had this... for as long as I can remember."
"Which is my point exactly," Achamian says, sounding far too much like someone taking heart in invented reasons. He frowns, an expression Mimara finds horribly endearing on his shaggy old features. "But things are always tricky where the Outside is concerned. Things do not... happen... as they happen here..."
"Riddles! Why do you constantly torture me with riddles?"
"I'm just saying that in a sense your life has already been lived—for the God or the Gods, that is..."
"Which means?"
"Nothing," he says, scowling.
"Tell me what it means!"
- Cleric's awesome exercise of sorcery in Cil-Aujas:
And beyond, in the distance, as though peering into a well without walls, she sees Cleric shining, afire in sorcerous light. Javelins explode like birds against the curve of his Wards. Sranc throng and heave before him, cut and rent by the glittering fury of his song. Three Bashrag close with him, stump-haired obscenities that lurch untouched through weaving geometries of incandescence, each bearing echoes of the absence that pockets her left breast. The Nonman leaps out of their monstrous reach, sails into the midst of more Sranc, his sword falling in an oblique arc. Sorcerous lines mirror his every stroke, and smoke spits from everything they trace. The very air seems to shriek. White light etches the pillared hollows of the gallery, the graven vaults, the panelled surfaces, revealing a floor clotted with hosts of Sranc, aisle after aisle, packed as thick as wind-tossed wheat...
And Cleric laughs and sings and exacts his dread toll, the last heir to Cil-Aujas.
- Mimara sees the slave pens of the Emwama:
She finds herself almost whispering in his ear. "Akka. Listen to me carefully. You remember what you said? About this place... blurring... into the Outside?"
"Yes. The treachery... the betrayal that led to its fall..."
"No. That's not it. It's this place. This very room! It's what they did - the Nonmen of Cil-Aujas... It's what they did to their human slaves!"
Generations bred for the sunless mines. Used up. Cast away like moaning rubbish. Ten thousand years of sightless torment.
- Lol - I mention something about Mimara seeing skeletons in the Emwama cages that line the wall; no such bones remain in the descriptions. Well, aside the "iron bones of a dragon" (WLW, p607).
- Quote about Yatwer being the goddess of slaves:
Somehow, simply thinking her name, Yatwer, had become a kind of premonition. And it shamed him. She was the Goddess of the weak, the enslaved, and now she was his.
- MG quote about "wandering into hell" (it's stretched out over a couple pages in my TJE starting on p509):
If Cil-Aujas indeed plumbed the World to its very limit, as he had told Mimara, might they not simply wander into the precincts of Hell?
-
To Madness... thread quote about "building up associations:"
Madness, regarding your comment on "the maddening combinations", is this just to say that while the series contains plenty of hints as to where the series is going, the sheer number of possibilities make it near-impossible to predict?
Bakker has clearly had a story he has wanted to tell... I don't think he's lying when he says he's had the end of TSTSNBN decided for years. But the man had the patience and the stamina to tell us PON first. With TJE and WLW, he has spent five books establishing associations in our mind, building up the world.
This all becomes increasingly clear in the sixth volume. I told Bakker I likened it to him establishing the toys in the sandbox. This is finally his chance to play around. I'm glad his writing has had the chance to grow just enough with each tale.
Truth - a lesser author would have just written TUC and TSTSNBN and that would have been it.
EDIT: To be clear, it's the way he uses all of these associations in combination... it's nothing less than a mind-fuck.
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Speculative Atrocity Tales- I believe Blackstone mentions an a show-down between the Orthodox Threesie and a Zaudunyani Judge in Caraskand; unfortunately for Blackstone's guess about Lord Soter, Mr. "Steely-Eyed" Zaudunyani Judge dies, though he is immediately avenged:
The man's sparkling gaze darted from Fustaras's eyes to the club, then back.
...
He hoisted the club high, then struck. The man fell to one knee. Blood trickled across his right temple and cheek; he raised two glistening fingers to Fustaras, as though to say, See...
Fustaras struck him again. The Judge fell to the cracked cobble.
- MSJ quote about "Seeds:"
"Ishual," Celmomas said, smiling at his own wit - or lack of it. He reached for his chalice of apple mead. "That's what I call it."
Seswatha shook his head. "Is it stocked with beer or with concubines?"
"Seeds," Celmomas replied, his eyes smiling over the rim of his cup.
- Sauglish Dream without Seswatha:
The Library of Sauglish burned beneath him in his Dream, its towers squat and monumental within garlands of flame. Dragons banked about might plumes of smoke. The glitter of sorcery sparked across the heights - the blind calligraphy of the Gnosis.
Its wings threshing the air, Skafra bared corroded teeth, shrieked out to the horizon, to the whirlwind roping black across the distant plains. A rumble deeper than a final heartbeat.
And Achamian hung unseen, an insubstantial witness... Alone.
Where? Where was Seswatha?
- MSJ is wrong about Celmomas being dead before the Advent of the No-God (fights the No-God):
In the spring of 2143 the No-God, summoned by means unknown, first drew breath.
...
Celmomas and his Second Ordeal were destroyed on the Fields of Eleneot in 2146.
- And though I've avoided finding this three separate times it came up in my notes because it is in WLW (MG, MSJ, and someone else bring it up separately over the course of the Cast), I relent because it will bug me that the notes are "incomplete" by my own frightening metric:
The Goddess smiles...
