Dune Club Session 2 Qs

Moving our related clump of questions on the constitution to the summary before Q&A was totally the right balance and the way to go. Awesome. And I posted fewer than 15 times this time :) though they were fatter posts.

Great session. Thank you so much guys.

Magnus D. Magnus

“The Mother of Chaos was born in a sea” and immersion in the sea cures Farok of his Jihad. What is FH saying about religious fervor and human nature that water and chaos can heal us? That extremists should take a bath?

Lucas Fehr

The Bene Gesserit program created Paul, their kwisatz haderach... But they can't control him. So why do Gaius Helen wants the bloodline to continue through Paul and Alia? When, obvious, the child wouldn't be controlled by the Bene Gesserit, ergo they wouldn't have any control of the continuing of the bloodline.

...so yeah. I think Farok is me.

So, like Farok I feel old, tired, and wiser, and I have some bitterness about my experience. I also used to wonder as our government got more and more invasive (Patriot Act, NSA, TSA, etc) whether I even would do something against them if I had the opportunity. Like maybe in some fantasy if a conspirator working against our empire came to me for some help I could offer, would my Scytale have a poison dart for me? I get the impression Farok is too tired to care at the end.

But then 9/11 happened, two years too late but on the same month and with the same general detail of "terror from the sky". And I found myself swept off to invade Iraq in 2003. When Farok talks about seeing a sea for the first time, I remember when we got liberty to go to the beach in Kuwait City and swim in the Persian Gulf, and thinking to myself I'd never seen water so clear and so beautiful. There was a thriving reef there, and I was swimming among jellyfish and sea stars and all of that. And when I finally got sent home I felt like there was no reason for me having even been sent overseas in the first place. I too looked at my "emperor" that I once followed for dubious reason in scorn. I too took a dip in a foreign sea and the memory of it is very strong for me. Farok implies it was a baptism for him. I can't say that was my experience but I see the parallel.

Farok's story haunts me. The reason is because I feel like I've lived it. I enlisted in the Marines in 1999 and among my reasons was because when I was a kid I'd read Nostradamus quatrain 72, Century X about "The year 1999 and the seventh month / From the sky will come a great king of terror". I had some notion that there would be another world war, and being male and of an age to be subject to the draft, I thought it'd be better to join on my own and not be forced into a press of young men being stuffed into the various services against their will. I'd end up with some rank when things finally happened and all that, was my idea.

Great questions everyone! See you today at 3:30 Pm pst

DanikaXIX

In over twelve years of the Jihad, and of running the Universe, Paul seems even more stuck than when he was a fugitive on the sands of Arrakis. On page 80, he asks himself "How did I set this in motion?" He then says that it had "set itself in motion...it was in the genes..." How does this kind of thinking, of already feeling limited and stuck in his prescience, go anywhere but failure, compared to Farok's interaction with the sea during the Jihad on page 62, of how he was "healed of the Jihad" after going into the sea? Hola from Miami :D

Paul clearly knows that Hayt, is bait, his demise, but he doesn't reject him or send him away. Does Paul have any free will or is his action of accepting Hayt part of what Paul has seen for himself and what needs to happen? In page 93, Paul brings up the tarot, and how he used it to forecast things to come. Paul mentions that "the tarot worked for him as well as against him", which brings up the question why does he use it in the first place and why it has great importance. How is the Tarot important with the type of abilities Paul possesses and his future? How is the Tarot important in this book and in the rest of the series? Which Tarot do they use in the book?

Why does the Dune tarot conflict with Paul’s prescience? Would someone using the deck that had no talent for reading tarot have the same effect as someone who had real abilities? Do any illustrated versions of the deck exist?

Please explain Zensunni philosophy and how that would work/enhance with mentat capabilities.

MAN how the FUCK are they gonna make this a movie? The second chapter in this session is about a council meeting that is implied to last a few hours but we read almost NONE of the dialogue - it's the structure of the book is interpersonal perspective gazing, not plot... Paul says he must "disengage" from slipping into time, but then disassociates into the universe for almost 3 pages. I trust Denis but I honestly feel like this story is incapable of existing outside of the book medium. But regardless, your work is the morning star of this reality.

The Letter F

I love the theme of transition or transformation of the body for the sake of prescience that FH weaves throughout this series. First we have the navigators, who have willingly evolved into freaky tank-dwelling fish things, then we have Hayt / Zombie Duncan coming back again and again (essentially against his will), then the transition of Leto II, who did what Paul feared most to bring about the "golden path". This series is definitely in the realm of body horror.