Just finished TUC. Whoo wee bros that shit was bananas. Dude's a master of the "Illiadic" battle scenes - every great ordeal scene was crack - and after reading the Golgotterath assault in 2 sittings I felt exhausted. He lays the imagery pretty thick but occasionally a metaphor is just so vivid and precise for what he's describing that the image leaps right into my head, I can't say that happens with a lot of authors for me. Literally the only fiction I read anymore and had me absolutely riveted.
So. Can't say he delivered the goods about the G-string coming off, insofar as I thought he was gonna spell everything out.
Was Ajokli playing (literal) 4D chess to conquer both the Real and Hell? Or I guess Kellhus was going to take over Hell? But why would Ajokli give up eternity for the world? Were they one and the same after Kellhus got tied to the circumfix? If you really wanted to save the world why would you make a pact with literal fucking Satan?
Kellhus is not a man but a principle, but what principle is that? Deception, ie Ajokli? If the God of Gods is the void of death, and Ajokli represents that void "deceiving" itself into becoming something instead of nothing ("Let there be deceit, let there be desire"), which has its parallels with BBT in that consciousness is nothing but the consequence of the brain's "blindness", "ignorance" of its causal underpinning, did Kellhus mistake this originary self-deception as the Absolute? Makes sense though, doesn't it, since it is the darkness prior to the Logos (his love of Esmenet) that dooms him in the end?
And there are many references to how humanity, their lives, their customs and beliefs can only exist in this space opened up by this "deception" - of the impersonal, empty "what" of the void becoming a "who" in/through the soul - and indeed, the soul is co-essential with the abyss' self-negation. And yeah, since the No-God is the Absolute, the abyss before its bifurcation into subject/object, its screaming WHAT DO YOU SEE is nothing but the "what" hungering for predication, to be something.
So we have what, here, exactly, the very principle of reality's groundlessness, its being unable to see behind its own back, eventually undermined by that very fact - the spontaneity, the unaccountability of love arising from an unfathomable darkness?
Help me out here bros, man this shit is convoluted.
