Dumbledore's Unspeakable Word.

[GulPlum]

At 15:19 10/06/05 , Barry Arrowsmith wrote:

<snip>

>[Voldy] rapidly vacates Harry when Harry looks as if he is ready to accept 
>death. Understandable; Voldy's been avoiding it for years, actively trying 
>to death-proof himself in fact. The last thing he wants is for young 
>Potter to pop his clogs while Voldy still has his feet in 'em; that 
>wouldn't do at all. Could
>result in nasty and possibly terminal consequences. Best to avoid this
>potential unpleasantness and leave. This despite his taunting of DD to
>zap the conjoined duo and win the war. I have a sneaking suspicion that
>this wouldn't have worked and that both Voldy and DD knew it. 'Cos let's
>face it, DD would have done it otherwise - he has the whole WW to consider
>and the chance of securing a home win at the cost of one body would have
>been an opportunity not to be missed. Harry willingly accepting death seems
>to be something else entirely and Voldy wanted nothing to do with it.

While I agree to some extent with some of your conclusions, I disagree with 
the rationale.

Note that Voldy has never heard the second half of the prophecy (indeed, 
seeking it is what forced his hand to show himself!). Dumbledore has. As 
far as we know, he is the only person alive who knows the full text (for 
the record, although he has told the Order members that the prophecy 
exists, that it concerns Harry, and that harry's survival is imperative to 
his plans; I suspect that his "strict need to know" policy would have made 
him stop short of letting them know what it said) and he's not going to 
jeopardise that advantage (I must admit that one of my - many -  objections 
to the plot of OotP is why the hell he hadn't simply destroyed the bloody 
thing seeing as he has his own perfect record; as the most powerful wizard 
alive, I'm sure he could have concocted a harmless facsimile for Voldy to 
lust after).

Anyway, Voldy already had one AK bounce off the Potter brat 15 years 
earlier, not to mention that he lost out in a duel between them a year 
previously. There is no way on Earth that he's going to take the risk of 
facing up to the kid again with (Dark) Lord knows (not!) what consequences. 
And so, knowing the day is lost, he tries to get Dumbley-dore to do his 
dirty work for him.

Admittedly, his first reaction to learning that the prophecy orb had been 
destroyed was to chuck an AK Harry-wards, but in a typical JKR deus ex 
machina moment, Dumbley turns up just in time to lob a block of metal to 
intercept it, but then we all know that Voldy isn't the brightest bulb in 
the pack, nor has he read the list of Evil Overlord dos and don'ts. It's 
when he disappears from the "frozen fountain" that Dumbley looks 
"frightened" and it's then that he pulls off what he considers his master 
stroke, to possess the kid.

Although I disagree with your cynical misrepresentation of DD and his 
actions, I'm sure that yes, he'd have been prepared to sacrifice Harry if 
he thought he could gain anything by it. He knows the prophecy and thinks 
he knows what it means, namely that Harry has to be around to see Voldy go 
down. Perhaps he's "frightened" because he thinks this is that moment, that 
Voldy's found a away to take Harry out. We don't know all the ins and outs 
of Legilimency (Dumbley, on the other hand, we can assume, does), but it 
seems to me that the extended connection Harry and Voldy share wouldn't 
have left Voldy with much damage if Dumbley had acted on Harry's pleas and 
ended his suffering. I think that they key here is understanding what 
Dumbley was scared of (a parallel moment to that notorious "gleam" at the 
end of GoF).

In any event, to come back to what we're actually talking about, a 
willingness to lose it is hardly equivalent to "life" itself, in terms of 
any power that it may confer (or be of itself). So all in all, I simply 
don't understand what you're getting at with your rationale.

>Additionally - this love stuff. Now I don't claim to be an expert on the 
>subject,
>but - It's my understanding that it is a continuing emotion - by which I mean
>that (assuming he did) Harry loved Sirius *before* going to the MoM, *during*
>the Ministry fight and *after* his final curtain.

And life isn't a continuing force? Unlike emotions, life is or isn't 
present. You can't have a "little" life, or a lot of it. How many loving 
relationships (feel free to choose whichever definition you want) are based 
on a constant level of emotion? Different stimuli cause the *strength* of 
that emotion to wax and wane, and thinking of the "loved one" in times of 
danger is generally a pretty good stimulus to (in poetic terms) "fill the 
heart". Thinking of (indeed, willing on ) losing life is hardly conducive 
to increasing its power. Quite the contrary.

>It's unlikely that the emotion
>suddenly blossomed after he had been possessed, he'd got more immediate
>things on his mind - like Voldy. True, he does consider that one serendipitous
>consequence of this whole unfortunate affair will be a reunion with the 
>old mutt,
>but I contend that  this is some sort of confirmation that his Sirius 
>emotion was
>not new. However, if Harry loved Sirius all along and love is anathema to 
>Voldy,
>then Voldy shouldn't have been able to enter his mind at all because the love
>will be present even if not in the forefront of his mind.

Which is exactly the point. Thinking of the "mutt" *did* bring the love to 
the forefront of his mind! Considering this from the perspective of your 
argument, though, nothing at all in that scene increased Harry's "life 
force". if anything, the contrary is the case.

>As I pointed out in a recent post, DD regards death as an adjunct to life, 
>it's
>the next great adventure after you stop getting up in the morning and 
>scratching
>your bum. There is a continuity, one implies the other, one leads to the 
>other.
>Death is the end product of life. To a medieval churchman (and some a bit more
>recent) life is merely a preparation for death, for the afterlife. To deny 
>death is
>to negate the purpose of life. To deny purpose to life is to deny life itself.
>Conclusion: Voldy is anti-life and Harry is the expression of life.

Surely every child is the expression of life? Considering your heretofore 
evolutionary, deterministic, standpoint, every organism sees in its 
offspring the only possible way of "surviving" death (inasmuch as any 
mature organism is the sum of its genetic code plus experience). I agree 
that what Voldy is after is (to put it a slightly different way) a 
different kind of life, a life without death, a defiance of the natural 
order. But, in the natural order of things, love *is* life, in that "love" 
is the instinct which drives us (at least, some of us...) to find a mate, 
procreate and protect our young in order to maintain the species, 
considering that, of course, survival of the species is much more important 
than survival of any individual organism...

And that's where Voldy differs from the rest of us, and why I find it 
strange that anyone would even consider that he could ever have fathered a 
child...

>Um. Life as an emotion. How about 'joie de vivre'?

Except that the emotion remains "joie", not "vivre". I can as easily 
mention the "joy of gardening" but, having spent much of the last two weeks 
engaged in the said activity, I can heartily assure you that "gardening" is 
not an emotion, and for most of the time it certainly brought very little 
joy...

>I await your outrage.

Outrage, no. Complete incomprehension of your argument, maybe.

--
GulPlum AKA Richard, who's wondering whether he now agrees with Kneasy, 
except that it's by using a very specific and non-dictionary definition of 
"love" and a very specific and non-dictionary definition of "life"...