The Great Ordeal

[Steve 6,666]

Meetup for chapters 1 - 3

 

[Black&BlueCollarReader 28]

Is it Friday yet?????

[Steve 6,666]

CHAPTER 4 SPOILERS

 

Spoiler

 

Wow, I wasn't expecting so many revelations in chapter 4. The exchange between Proyas and The Place called Kellhus was intense.

Not to mention the buggering.

With Kellhus you never know whats real and what's a deception. Is he really mad or does he want everyone to think that?

 

 

[Steve 6,666]

Sneak peek for The Great Ordeal chapters 1 -  3 spoiler discussion. Will be live on YouTube Friday. If the sound is off please let me know!
 

 

[Black&BlueCollarReader 28]

@Steve 

Spoiler

So much to unwrap in that one!!! I also love the metaphorical flash back of Proyas falling from the tree and Akka attempting to save him. So good. And the "Place" called Kellhus?? Could that be symbolic of some religious institutions or religion in general?? Ugh....it's 9am here and to early to go down this rabbit hole. lol 

Spoiler

 

 

[drpuffnstuff 102]

16 hours ago, Steve said:

CHAPTER 4 SPOILERS

 

  Hide contents

 

Wow, I wasn't expecting so many revelations in chapter 4. The exchange between Proyas and The Place called Kellhus was intense.

Not to mention the buggering.

With Kellhus you never know whats real and what's a deception. Is he really mad or does he want everyone to think that?

 

 

Just between chapters 4 and 5 I feel like there is an hour or two to unpack lol.. 

Spoiler

Yes even when have a Khellus POV and the POV directly says that he is telling Proyas the truth.. There is still that doubt, and that same doubt the reader gets has crept into the 2 exalt generals to different degrees. Also the story about Sibawul and the Sons of Cepalor. The head that is still upon the pole, watching the butchering and buggering.. and then we finally get to the meat of the Dunyain. 

 

[Steve 6,666]

@Katerina @drpuffnstuff For tomorrow's meetup. Don't forget about daylight savings time in the U.S.

 

[Katerina 65]

13 hours ago, Steve said:

@Katerina @drpuffnstuff For tomorrow's meetup. Don't forget about daylight savings time in the U.S.

 

Thanks for the reminder. I would totally have showed up an hour later.

[Frank 290]

On 3/3/2023 at 4:58 PM, Steve said:

Meetup for chapters 1 - 3

•On a first read, I often worry if everything will satisfactorilly tie together. Once the author establishes trust, sometimes within a page or two, I transition to doubting my memory to make appropriate connections. On subsequent rereads, rather than playing plot detective regarding the skein, I can marvel at the threads, luxuriate in the prose and befriend the characters.

The Great Ordeal Chapter 1-3 musings:

Spoiler

• Prologue: Momemn starts, "For all the tumult of the Unification Wars, for all the rigours of motherhood and imperial station, Anasûrimbor Esmenet had never ceased to read." Esmenet learns from the past, but can't escape her own. Anasûrimbor Esmenet knows "Power does not make safe. History murders the children of weak rulers." She is a fascinating, conflicted character, guilt-ridden yet determined, both weak and strong like all humans. @Katerina, she too is probably my favorite character. @Steve, "I love Esmenet," and feared she would die. On the flip side, @drpuffnstuff gravely notes her "damnable" history, for she burned a city as retribution for her sin and shame of selling her first daughter. Esmenet is the best and the worst at the same time, everything all at once, a contradiction where opposites are true, like the Dûnyain Logos of her husband.  R. Scott Bakker's writing brings Momemn and it's history vividly and viscerally alive, all 5 senses keened, through his concise, precise words. The author's depiction of humanity is unflattering, yet somehow affirming. Knowledge is power.
• "Because you fear not damnation. Because there is a head on a pole behind you. “And what was your reply?” The living shall not haunt the dead." Kellhus POV finally, or is it? Second person perspective, RSB utilizes all three. Bakker drops you in the middle (of a war, your mad mind, who knows) as if you wake from a crazy dream: confused disorientated, scared and scarred. Kellhus bladed fingers, ripping open babies, slurping insides, WtF.
• @Steve on a Sprint mentioned Bakker is killing his Kindle reading speed. I definitely can't speed through either. Like grisled GMO, "race of lovers" (go Daniel) Sranc meat, it's an all-day chew and then some. I feel like a glacier barely scraping the surface. 
• Repeated phrases, Maithenet is dead, head on a pole, etc. Word salads of meat and peaches in many iterations, add a few thin slices from the "cairns of fish-white (sranc) carcasses, gathering flies and carrion birds" for garnish, yummy.
• @DrPuffnStuff, coincidences? Cnaiür found Kellhus on grave. Bakker is detailed, yet truth is still coin flip.
• Proyas, "Out—he needed out! But like a beetle in the husk of a beehive" Here Proyas is another Dunyain's child toy, like Kelmomas' literal beetle to start the Aspect-Emperor.

The Great Ordeal Chapter 1-3 quotes:

Spoiler

 

What Has Come Before …
"An Ark, vast and golden, toppled from the void ... And from it crawled the dread and monstrous Inchoroi, a race who had come to seal the world against the Heavens, and so save the obscenities they called their souls." "Schoolmen of Mangaecca, who coveted secrets above all else, ...Min-Uroikas was found—occupied. The fools discovered and awakened the last two surviving Inchoroi, Aurax and Aurang" "Schoolmen learned that damnation, .. that the world could be shut against the judgment of Heaven."

CHAPTER ONE Aörsi
• "Only now could (Kellhus) witness a faithful soul, an adoring soul (@Katrina "poor Proyas, last 30 years shattered"), thrash in mortal crisis." "In so many ways, Proyas was the most reliable of all those he had yoked to his will —the perfect instrument. And he was a cripple for it." "Kellhus gazed not at a man so much as a heap of warring signals: distress and conviction; accusation and self-loathing. He smiled the smile that Proyas unwittingly begged him not to smile," a narcissistic smirk from a sadistic puppeteer, "“We are the antithesis of the God, not the reflection.” Confusion. Confusion was ever the herald of genuine insight. As the Greater Proyas churned, a chorus of discordant voices, the Lesser Proyas found himself that song, a clamour that he could only conceive as one. When those voices at last embraced one another—he would find himself remade." "It festered. ...And the God? What did it mean for the God of Gods to be called an “it”?"
• "It was an irony so mad as to be an absurdity, that so many would forfeit their lives sooner than their beliefs. It was ardour, of course. It was loyalty and the simple hunger for the security of the Same. But more than anything, it was ignorance that delivered conviction beyond the pale of disputation. Ignorance of questions. Ignorance of alternatives. No tyranny was so complete as blindness. So with each of these sessions Kellhus merely raised more questions and posed more contradictory answers, and watched the once solitary track he had cut into Proyas vanish into the trampled earth of possibility …" Bakker not the biggest fan of religious fanaticism, it seems.

CHAPTER TWO Injor-Niyas; Sorweel.and shame
• Sorweel "was Narindar, as Zsoronga had said, an assassin of the Hundred. The Mother of Birth herself had anointed him, hiding him from the unnatural scrutiny of the Anasûrimbor, .."
Sorwa's shame @Katrina:
"So (Serwa & Moënghus) baited him, laughed and tormented. They played games—endless games! —all of them meant to shame, to infuriate!" "Shame is a great power. ...making foam of our heart, ... but shame occupies us whole, fills our shrinking skin." "Threads of seed branching hot across knuckled shame. His father flapping as a vexed goose—afire. His mother grey as stone. His seed! His nation! The smell of shit and shit and shit—"
• Sorweel "resumed the place the Anasûrimbor had reserved him, the station of shame and hate."
• Sorweel, "cramps of shame and humiliation, and he could do little more than dwell on preposterous and petty schemes to secure revenge." "felt all the more at sea learning facts such as these. His ignorance was smaller without them." "Sorweel knew that Moënghus meant to kill him—here and now if he could. “Is that the Dûnyain in you, Serri? Or is it Mother?” “I said, no.”" Esmenet as an epithet.

CHAPTER THREE Momemn
• "Kellhus would often chide Esmenet .... "Dispense your authority as milk, and they will come racing as kittens … Nothing makes Men so meek as ambition.”"
• Kelmomas, "To cuddle snuggle-warm in Mother’s arms, to whisper knives hot in her ear"
• Naree, "the girl’s petty cruelties, her peevish need to humiliate" "immediately began keening in terror, but not for Empress—that would come later—but for understanding that once the rapists left, the executioner always followed."
• "An empire of his soul … This was what his father’s Thousandfold Thought had made."
• "Known that his wife and children would die. ... “The World is a granary, Proyas … The fact that his heart would also crash into ruin. “And we are the bread.”"
• "He found himself standing face-to-face with Coithus Saubon … The “Desert Lion” in the flesh, blinking at him as he had when they stood in the glare of the Carathay so very long ago. His counterpart … “Proyas …” Even his nemesis" "perhaps that was what he wanted to believe—a kinder, more naive reality." @Daniel, The enemy of my enemy is my friend, "He's waiting for you outside?" "the man called Proyas had not waited at all … The Greater Proyas had." "Saubon regarded him with a kind of gloating pity." Believer-King of Caraskand, "King Coithus Saubon scowled; “He told me you would be waiting here … for me.” Proyas blinked. “What? You mean he … he …” The Norsirai Exalt-General ..... “He told me to be kind.”"

 

@Black&BlueCollarReader, "Bakker is back to bending my brain in this one."

 

[Frank 290]

On 3/7/2023 at 8:34 PM, Steve said:

CHAPTER 4 SPOILERS

 

  Hide contents

 

Wow, I wasn't expecting so many revelations in chapter 4. The exchange between Proyas and The Place called Kellhus was intense.

Not to mention the buggering.

With Kellhus you never know whats real and what's a deception. Is he really mad or does he want everyone to think that?

Wow indeed @Steve, so many revelations and ultra intense.

Spoiler

"And the stars revolve about the Nail of Heaven like clouds hurried across winter skies."
The mini-section to start chapter 4 made me dizzy and I was floored repeatedly from there. It was almost too much at times, and not just the "violent embrace." Kellhus' madness has been mentioned in multiple "What Has Come Before …"s, so I feel I should believe, or at least am lead to, yet don't. 

An overwhelming chapter.

[Frank 290]

On 3/8/2023 at 9:02 AM, Black&BlueCollarReader said:

@Steve 

  Reveal hidden contents

So much to unwrap in that one!!! I also love the metaphorical flash back of Proyas falling from the tree and Akka attempting to save him. So good. And the "Place" called Kellhus?? Could that be symbolic of some religious institutions or religion in general?? Ugh....it's 9am here and to early to go down this rabbit hole. lol 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

Excellent observations, @Black&BlueCollarReader

Spoiler

The metaphorical flashback has so many layers illustrating Proyas' fall from grace: the infallibility and arrogance of youth, Akka's love and guidance, Kellhus' Godly limb of security and purpose snapping free sending Proyas into freefall, etc. Kellhus is the "Place" where people now go to worship, a human shrine.

Ruminating over, discussing these great books, makes the reading even more rewarding. This community is a treasure.

[Frank 290]

On 3/8/2023 at 1:08 PM, drpuffnstuff said:

Just between chapters 4 and 5 I feel like there is an hour or two to unpack lol.. 

  Hide contents

Yes even when have a Khellus POV and the POV directly says that he is telling Proyas the truth.. There is still that doubt, and that same doubt the reader gets has crept into the 2 exalt generals to different degrees. Also the story about Sibawul and the Sons of Cepalor. The head that is still upon the pole, watching the butchering and buggering.. and then we finally get to the meat of the Dunyain. 

I can see your mischievious smile while typed that last line. 😇 Holy shit, @drpuffnstuff. I need to breathe. It's no wonder you keep re-reading this work of wonder. This is what I didn't know I've been waiting for, that you've known all along (your self-restraint is astounding). I joked about therapy before, but this shit is real, too much, no, give me more. It would have been a whole lot quicker, and only a few words shorter, to highlight the whole bloody chapter. Incredible. While Bakker is certainly correct that certainty is folly, I'm certain this is just the tip of the iceberg and I'm a

Spoiler

"Pebble(s) from an ocean, but nothing else." 

Exhaled.

[Frank 290]

On 3/11/2023 at 4:21 PM, Steve said:

@Katerina @drpuffnstuff For tomorrow's meetup. Don't forget about daylight savings time in the U.S.

 

When I'm tired or distracted, Bakker's prose is merely great, but when I'm alert and in a headspace to fully commit, my mind is often cosmically blown. This is the series' apogee so far. Brilliance.

The Great Ordeal Chapters 4-7 musings:

Spoiler

 

CHAPTER FOUR Aörsi 
° "And the stars revolve about the Nail of Heaven like clouds hurried across winter skies." I'm instantly dizzy. My head is spinning from up in the clouds down in the gutter, then around again. The dark and disturbing string of events gets worse and worse. Doom incarnate. Carne, flesh. Coming full circle, Chapter 7 ends, "But the vertiginous gyre had returned, engulfing him in its dread turn." R. Scott Bakker has written a masterpiece.
• Who is Kellhus taking to? The no-god, the devil, the outside, his mad self, undoubtedly someone or something unconsidered? My head may as well be on a pole for all the good it's doing me. @Daniel: Remember the processional journey from Kiyuth to Momemn lined with trophy heads on poles when Kellhus went from an obscure Prince of Nothing to the Holy Aspect-Emperor of a New Empire spanning the entirety of the Three Seas.
• When did RSB meet my family?
• More Advanced Human Studies from Professor Bakker, "Nothing is more simple than complication become habit. What was effortless, thoughtless, had to become fraught with doubt and toil. As it should." Kellhus' Dûnyain Logos process is as captivating as it depraved.
° Kellhus, "Achamian.....The teacher you renounced …” … “He is the prophet you sought all along.”"  Achamian, the prophet of the past, from the past.
• "It's the meat!" Sizzling lamb, slaughtered meat, children of sheep used and abused for 'Higher' selfish purpose. Innuendo is everywhere, yet not gratuitous. RSB packs so much power in few words, Rape is asserting nonconsensual power. Deep sob. Proyas' meet-up with Kellhus turned catastrophically into a meat-up from Kellhus. The "violent embrace" is disturbingly graphic and offensively extreme, though R. Scott Bakker doesn't offend. Unbelievable. Bakker's word play, his total command over his text is masterful, while Kellhus playing absolute Lord and master commader over Proyas, his hateful, subjective torture, is no fucking joke. With Bakker, words, actions, everything is connected and somehow ties together. This is the high point of the series so far, absolutely, no doubt @Steve, but also the lowest. Impressive, depressive.

CHAPTER FIVE Ishuäl
• The whale mothers are even more uncomfortable. So true and soul-crushing, @Katerina. Tongueless screams. Arched insemination like shitting dogs. How can people do this to their fellow sojourners? Maybe the Dûnyain aren't human (witness Kellhus' superhuman strength holding Cnaiür over a cliff) but monsters, though that seems a cope out, an othering, a justification.
• This is worse than the violent attack. Proyas could at least leave, though he won't because it's easier to impossibly keep his lost faith and soldier on for his abuser than face the truth.
• "“Anasûrimbor,” the boy replied. “Anasûrimbor Koringhus.”" Decades have passed since Kellhus first left Ishuäl. He must have returned unbeknownst to play father, lower case this time.

CHAPTER SIX Momemn
• The little terror Anasûrimbor Kelmomas is play stalking the White-Luck Warrior and plotting to kill his own sister Anasûrimbor Theliopa for the audicity of being observant and astute. He's pathological, so why I am I so excited when he returns? @drpuffnstuff "child serial killer". At the end of the chapter has the predator become the prey?

CHAPTER SEVEN Ishterebinth
• Esmenet's pride versus the pride of her half-Dûnyain (except Moënghus) lion cubs. She's a house cat raising the Kings and Queens of the jungle. @Steve "Imagine raising half-Dûnyain?"
• Nonman Harapior, Lord Torturer, hiding from the gods, then in walks Sorweel, the anointed one and given a new head and soul. @Daniel "Yatwer has collected a few pawns on her benjuka plate."
• Repitition of themes, expressions, objects, words, often recontextualized but still connected. 1+1=1, Yatwar, Goddess of Fertility, deeply plowed soil, hoe, rising from earth, etc. 
• Notes from @Daniel: Sons of Cephalor behind their 'leader' Sibawûl te Nurwul (@Katrina Yes. How?) enter Wreoleth, "the fabled Larder-of-Men," slave pit for Min-Uroikas, protected from sranc, the granary of man, only to trap themselves ala Saubon at Caraskand during the First Holy War. Yatwer took White-Luck Warrior's youth and gave him strength. The WLW (from Ajokli) killed, placed under a bed and assumed the identity of the Narindar. Three Seas darkness: no feasts, celebrations, birthday parties or even temporary respite. Grimdark.

 

The Great Ordeal Chapters 4-7 quotes:

Spoiler

 

What Has Come Before …
"For years Moënghus walked the innumerable paths of the Probability Trance, plotting future after future, searching for the thread of act and consequence that would save the world. For years he crafted his Thousandfold Thought. Moënghus knew, and so prepared the way for his Dûnyain-born son, Kellhus. He sent out his world-born son, Maithanet, to seize the Thousand Temples from within, so that he might craft the First Holy War, the weapon Kellhus would need to seize absolute power, and so unite the Three Seas against the doom that was their future. What he did not know, could not know, was that Kellhus would see further than him, think beyond his Thousandfold Thought … That he would go mad."

CHAPTER FOUR Aörsi
• "“Meat” soon became the term of choice, at once generic and visceral, a symbolic condensation of both the fact of their obscenity and the point. To eat was to dominate, to conquer as they needed to conquer. But it was horror as well,"
• "There was a head upon the pole behind him. To remake Men, Kellhus had come understand, one had to recover what was most simple in them—what was basic. The greatest poets eulogized childhood, extolled those who found innocence untrammelled within. But without exception they seized only on the simplicities that flattered and consoled, ignoring all the ways children resemble beasts. Animals were by far the better metaphor. Men did not so much remain children at heart, as they remained brutes, a collection of reflexes, violent, direct, blind to all the nuances that made men Men. To remake Men, one had to tear down their trust in complication, force them to shelter in instinct and reflex, reduce them to what was animal."
• "He, and he alone, was the Place, the point of maximal convergence." "The infinite could only be experienced in butchered approximation, he said, and communicated with rank fraudulence. “Men are bent on clarity and proportion, even when there is none to be found,” he explained. “They offer up broken visions, Proyas, and call them perfect and whole.”
• "“A deceiver,” the Place said. “False …” “No—” “I am Dûnyain, a Son of Ishuäl. I am the product of a monstrous decision made two thousand years ago, a decision to breed Men as Men breed cattle and dogs, to remake them in the image of intellect …” "“I was sent forth to hunt down and kill my father,” the Place said, “who had been sent out before me …” He paused to brush a greying lock from the man’s brow. “When I discovered the weakness of Men, I understood that my father would command enormous power … that I would need the strength of nations to overcome him.”"
"Pebbles from an ocean, but nothing else. Like all other survivors, he was perpetually stranded, forever thrown. “My father had anticipated this, had known that the trial of my journey would transform me, that the assassin who had departed Ishuäl would arrive his disciple.” Petulant fury. Toddler defiance. “No! This canno—!” “But there was something he failed to realize …” Swollen indecision. Hope reaching out through anguish and asphyxiation, clutching for the reversal that would return everything to what had been. “What? What?” “That my trial would drive me mad.”"
• "Then the insertion. The stench of feces and sizzling lamb. The cough that was really a sob … Deep … until all that remained was one place, the congress of Greater Souls." It seized the man, lifted him from his feet. It used him as he had never been used before. There was a head upon a pole behind him."
• All souls wander. No matter what track they follow, it is never their own." "Faith is as inescapable as Men are small.....Faith. Faith alone binds him to what was and what will be—..... Proyas had believed in Anasûrimbor Kellhus" "Faith was... the triumph of conceit over terror. The most blessed ignorance. And it was no more." "If terror had been a plaything for him as a boy, a thing to be baited and teased, it was out of ignorance far more than for courage, the preposterous assurance that nothing truly untoward could happen to him. Tyrûmmas’s watery death would ignite the pyre beneath that confidence, teach him the terror of terror." "And now he fell once again." "It all seemed … frail, fraught with a simmering licentiousness, as if there were a greater Ordeal beyond the one he could see."
• "intelligent as he was, a kind of barbaric immodesty had always characterized Coithus Saubon, a vulgar need to lord over those who were his equals. Even in the presence of their Holy Aspect-Emperor, his inclination was to smirk. Now the first spark of genuine alarm humbled his gaze." "Some Men are like this. They would rather scoff, turn aside the plea they hear in other voices to better disguise the penury of their own." "“This is theatre!” Saubon cried, throwing wide his strapped arms. “Can’t you see? We are all mummers here! All of us!" ""He buggered you?” Saubon cried out." "And he realized that even though he had been the one to suffer their Aspect-Emperor’s violent embrace, it was Saubon who would be the most grievously tested … The one most pitted against the bigotries of his soul." “It’s the Meat,” he muttered on a sob. Without warning he leapt, batted the platter and its morsels across the gloomy interior. “This accursed Meat!”" "They both could feel it, the taint of the meat, a cruel and vicious spring coiled within their every thought and breath. The meat. The Meat. Yesss. “Think, Brother …” Saubon said. “What else could it be?” They had no choice but to believe. Faith is inescapable … and nowhere more so than in the commission of some mighty sin. “We stand so close …” Proyas murmured. Only its object varies … the in what. “Lean into the oar, Brother,” Saubon said, his voice rent between dread and ferocity. “Golgotterath will decide.” Be it God … Man. “Yes …” Proyas said on a shudder. “Golgotterath.” Or nothing."

CHAPTER FIVE Ishuäl
• "And when her gaze flinches, she sees that this crime is no aberration, but rather an inevitable and extreme implication of what rules the whole. Everywhere she looks she sees it with heart-scratching clarity, rising like bruises beneath the world’s tender skin. Craft. Cunning. The devious pitch of intellect, domineering, devoid of compassion or humility … And the will—the blasphemous will most of all. The deranged hunger to become God. ....The Whale-mothers, tongueless and screaming … The lean men arched like shitting dogs. She sees the unspeakable evil that is the Shortest Path. “This place … The Dûnyain … Th-they … They are evil …” .... "Suddenly she sees Him, her stepfather, Anasûrimbor Kellhus I, the Holy Aspect-Emperor, high on his throne, wreathed in darkness and fury, a malignant cancer cast across the far corners of the world … Doom incarnate. Suddenly she sees the Truth of the old Wizard’s terror. A Dûnyain ruled the World —a Dûnyain!" “My mother!” she cries, seeing her flicker like a candle flame beneath the rising night. “Akka! We have to find her! Warn her!” "so long has it been since anything abstract has pierced the Qirri’s numbing swaddle. The Wizard was right. The very World … The World already hangs from the gibbet …"

CHAPTER SIX Momemn
• "He was Narindar, the boy reasoned. A famed Missionary of the evil Four-Horned Brother. Perhaps his knowledge was divine." “A Vessel of Ajokli.” The Librarian (Nikussis) need tell (Anasûrimbor Kelmomas) nothing of Ajokli. The Thief. The Murderer. The Grinning God." The Trickster.
•"For the sake of simple ignorance, every victim assumed themselves the hero," 
• "He had wandered into the house of Hate; he had maimed a beetle presuming to teach a lesson. And now Hate had wandered into his house presuming to teach in turn. He’s here … the voice murmured. We delivered Him to Mother. Issiral. The Four-Horned Brother stalked the halls of the Andiamine Heights. And in his soul’s eye he could see Him standing opposite, Immortal Malice, smoking with the density of Creation …" "he realized that she saw nothing for limits that were all her own." We are limit of what we can see. "He lay larval in her embrace. With every breath he hewed nearer oblivion, face numb, head thick with recent sobs, his eyes two scratches soothed. Gratitude held him … His own Unerring Grace. That night he dreamed the same dream of the Narindar. This time the man took two instant strides to stand immediately below the grill, leapt, and skewered his eye."

CHAPTER SEVEN Ishterebinth
Lies are but clouds, giants that blow and rage only to pass, always to pass. But the Truth is the sky, everlasting and elusive, a shelter in the day, an abyss in the night. —The Limping Pilgrim, ASANSIUS
• "Anasûrimbor Serwa was too real to suffer such as him. His shadow laboured on the horizon of what she willed" "For even the stoniest of Nonman had long been broken into sand and loam. drawing two breaths, She poured her voice in pitchers, sang to what was sodden. exhaling one. She laid her hoe to his ground, and set her seed deep."

 

Acknowledgments
R. Scott Bakker, "Kellhus I am not."

[Steve 6,666]

So many great quotes and observations @Frank!

Spoiler

When Kellhus was referred to as a Place I didn’t even think of it as a shrine or a place for worship 🤯

 

[Frank 290]

The Great Ordeal, chapters 8-11 musings:

Spoiler

• “"You despair,” Saubon grated in his ear, “because like a child you thought that Truth alone could save the World …”" Wow, the most gut-punching line comes from King Saubon, whom R. Scott Bakker named Coitus (the jokes make themselves).
• Place is a focus. Ancestral homes becoming refuges, prisons and tombs like Ishuäl (A Dûnyain survival story for two millenia) and Ishterebinth, also Dagliash and a Place called Kellhus.
° "Give them dirt, and they will multiply. —AÖRSI PROVERB" True of sranc or an Aspect-Emperor.righteous follower.
• Name Game: weal - a red, swollen mark left on flesh by a blow or pressure. Sorweel = Sore-Weal?
• ♥️:  @Steve The thing called Steve returns, or has he? Is Mimara seeing the boy and Survivor through the Judging Eye or revenge? @drpuffnstuff  Sranc impulse based on 'love'. RSB had no editor for the last two (originally one) books. Yatwer's many pawns: Psatma Nanaferi, White-Luck Warrior, Sorweel (chosen, though not a previous follower) and maybe the Judging Eye. Daniel answers a few of the million questions, and asks a million more. 😛 Seriously, thanks for guiding us "out of the woods" (too soon, @Katerina?)

The Great Ordeal, chapters 8-11 quotes:

Spoiler

Chapter 8 Ishuäl
• "What was cunning was wicked also: they could do naught but bare their souls to the Judging Eye. And even if the Eye failed, she had swooned for the evil visited upon the Whale Mothers. There could be no undoing the foul umbrage stamped into her heart. If she could not see, she would hate." “Can’t you see? That room—the bones of the Whale Mothers!—that is the truth of what Kellhus has done to my mother—to your wife! He has made a tool of her womb, a bauble of her heart! What greater crime, greater monstrosity, could there be?”" "Only this man, Drusas Achamian, had truly loved her, truly sacrificed for her. Only he had extended the dignity that was her due, and she had been tricked into betraying him."
• "The Siege and Fall of Ishuäl … The loss: a mere place. What was this compared to the revelation that accompanied it? That which comes after could determine that which comes before … The impossible made manifest. The world was an arrow with one and only one direction, or so they had believed. Only the Logos, only reason and reflection could bend the world’s inexorable course. Thus the Dûnyain and their hallowed mission: to perfect the Logos, to grasp the origins of thought, bend the arrow into a perfect circle, and so attain the Absolute … Become a self-moving soul. Free. But the Shriekers and their Singers cared nothing for their doctrine—only for their extinction." 
• "“In the Fathering?” .... “She thinks us obscene.” “But why?” “Because the Brethren make tools of all things, even wombs.”"
• Achamian, "And in the mad way of so many small revelations he understood that she was the reason he had accepted Nautzera’s mission all those years ago. Esmenet. She was the reason he had gambled Inrau’s life and soul—and lost."
• Sranc "possessed no compassion, no remorse or shame or communal ambition. Again, like the Dûnyain."
CHAPTER NINE Ishterebinth
• "Ishterebinth has fallen to Golgotterath!"  "A stork battled in the chute’s throat, then was gone. “Because only Fate,” Oinaral Lastborn said, “can redeem the piteous soul of my Race.”"
• "But why?” Sorweel cried. “Why should I believe your myth over the living decree of Yatwer? Why should I doubt the Almighty Goddess that stalks me daily, raises me up, shelters me from evil? You heard my confession: her spit has baffled his eye, allowed me to sow lies where all other men stand exposed! And yet you claim that he, my father’s murderer has the truer vision?”"
• “Because it means the Anasûrimbor is almost certainly your Saviour.” And there it was. The Amiolas need not blot his sense of breathing. The Mother-of-Birth had doomed him to assassinate a Living Prophet, the true Saviour."
• Oinaral Lastborn the ancient Siqu “And so the Weal becomes the Dolour, so the Intact become the Erratic."
• "It amazed Sorweel that this underworld could be so similar to his own. Men forever ornamented their words with more words, claiming to be moved by compassion, eloquence, and reason, when in sooth the station of the speaker was their only care. ....Nonmen's utter contempt for things convenient." "The ghouls had chiselled their souls into their walls for naught. They had remade the Mountain in their image for naught. They had presumed they could render the spirit material, make of it something hard as stone, all for naught."
CHAPTER TEN Dagliash 
• "Coupling and killing had been kicked from places once allotted in their souls, as if, in eating their foe, they were becoming him."
• "He had often wondered at the contradiction of these sermons, the way the humility they preached never failed to provoke displays of wild and vicious pride, … .... righteousness, the knowledge that they could exact from others what had been taken from them. But even this, Proyas now knew, had been another flattering lie, another conceit, another provocation to savagery. Righteousness had been what he wanted all along. Kellhus had said as much himself. If wisdom had truly been what he wanted, he would have never turned out Achamian."
• "Their Holy Aspect-Emperor .... regarded them .....as though he in fact stood everywhere ...their beloved Warrior-Prophet’s bearded face, a thousand thousand aspects"
CHAPTER ELEVEN Momemn
Bonfires shed no daylight. —SCYLVENDI PROVERB
• Anasûrimbor Kelmomas, "And the Narindar was striding back the way he came, glowering into emptiness, taking vacant bites of the apple as he approached. .... Only at that moment did he truly understand the dread proportion of his circumstance. Everything has already happened …" 

Chapters 12 and 13 next. "Who knows" what will happen. Drink.

[Steve 6,666]

For tomorrow:

 

 

[Katerina 65]

21 hours ago, Frank said:

The Great Ordeal, chapters 8-11 musings:

  Reveal hidden contents

• “"You despair,” Saubon grated in his ear, “because like a child you thought that Truth alone could save the World …”" Wow, the most gut-punching line comes from King Saubon, whom R. Scott Bakker named Coitus (the jokes make themselves).
• Place is a focus. Ancestral homes becoming refuges, prisons and tombs like Ishuäl (A Dûnyain survival story for two millenia) and Ishterebinth, also Dagliash and a Place called Kellhus.
° "Give them dirt, and they will multiply. —AÖRSI PROVERB" True of sranc or an Aspect-Emperor.righteous follower.
• Name Game: weal - a red, swollen mark left on flesh by a blow or pressure. Sorweel = Sore-Weal?
• ♥️:  @Steve The thing called Steve returns, or has he? Is Mimara seeing the boy and Survivor through the Judging Eye or revenge? @drpuffnstuff  Sranc impulse based on 'love'. RSB had no editor for the last two (originally one) books. Yatwer's many pawns: Psatma Nanaferi, White-Luck Warrior, Sorweel (chosen, though not a previous follower) and maybe the Judging Eye. Daniel answers a few of the million questions, and asks a million more. 😛 Seriously, thanks for guiding us "out of the woods" (too soon, @Katerina?)

 

Spoiler

I have wondered a few times if Saubon’s last name is just a coincidence or if I should read more into it😁. 
I don’t think Mimara has looked at Koringhus and the boy with the Eye, but I believe that her indiscriminate hatred of the Dunyain comes from it.

 

[Frank 290]

13 hours ago, Katerina said:

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I have wondered a few times if Saubon’s last name is just a coincidence or if I should read more into it😁. 
I don’t think Mimara has looked at Koringhus and the boy with the Eye, but I believe that her indiscriminate hatred of the Dunyain comes from it.

Thanks for another kind reply, @Katerina. It's the 6th book and I'm just picking up on ...
Chapters 12 & 13 spoilers

Spoiler

Saubon's family name. With R. Scott Bakker ("Kellhus I am not") and the Aspect (written more frequently, perspective is everything) -Emperor, every word is written, said and done for a purpose, an "end". Coitus Saubon is a smirking hypocrite. Hatred bloodies a heart and "muddies" an eye, even, I agree, an unused Judging Eye. Chapter 12, at least for the first third, had me as confused and conflicted as Sorweel. Things are upside down, turned on their "cauldron". The Sky is under a Weeping Mountain, a man-boy and non-man are being Hauled 'down' on a 'ship' out of water into Oblivion. 

Wow, it's a whole lot. One hell of a book, my favorite so far. You, @Steve and @drpuffnstuff have so much to chew on. I look forward to watching, am very happy to read along with the podcast and discuss here. Hope the weekend is treating you well. Cheers.