V.V. 3--Time, place, and mirror-time

[O']

Thomas Eckhardt wrote:
> 
> The main characteristic of the wind in these chapters is that it doesn't care about humans or humanity. It just blows. It blows over the bums looking inside the V-Note: "All night the February wind would come barrelling down the wide keyway of Third Avenue, moving right over them all: the shavings, cutting oil, sludge of New York's lathe" (59) and over Charlie Parker: "Since the soul of Charlie Parker had dissolved away into a hostile March wind nearly a year ago (...)" (60) And, as you mentioned, it has "its own permanent gig" outside the bar at the very end of the chapter. The wind is not only inanimate, it is also permanent. It will still be blowing when everybody inside or outside the V-note bar is long dead and gone. I tend to think that this makes the vague correspondence between the sounds coming from Sphere's ivory horn and the wind a very high compliment for the musician.

Interesting, I read it just the other way round. Let me say,
the narrator does compliment his playing and I think the
links s~Z provided and the comments that jbor added recently
and all that critics have compiled from biographical scraps
and so forth all seem to add up to the common reading of
Sphere and his stoical statements about love and cool and
care, but I think there are some problems with this
generally accepted reading. One problem is that they rely on
all sorts of things that clash with the novel itself. The
symbolism in this novel is very important. One big one is
the Ivory sax. Why Ivory? I can't for the life of me explain
this one away by saying it's Monk's piano. Ivory? No one
plays an Ivory sax so it seems that TRP gave him an Ivory
sax not because of Coleman or Monk but because of what Ivory
symbolizes in the novel. 


Why wouldn't McClintic be subjected to the same inanimating
forces that affect the others? The description of him begins
with his "swinging his ass off" and his  "hard skin, as if
it were part of his skull: every vein and whisker on that
head stood out sharp and clear under the green baby spot:
you could see the twin lines running down from either side
of his lower lip, etched in by the force of his embouchure,
looking like extensions of his mustache." 

To compare Sphere's gig with the wind: In V. the wind  blows
through Man's lost and found faith,  his threadbare
community, his sense of sterility, of alienation, of being
alone, vulnerable to entropy, nihilism, despair. The wind,
indeed the entire cosmos is indifferent. But this Void, this
great big white hole, this un-wholeness, we might say
"anti-paranoid" universe is too much for anyone to stand for
long and so by a new paranoia, a stencilezed quest, not the
religious paranoia of the mythological quests of the past,
but of religious dimensions, man becomes a new JOB, a Man
caught in a new history, a history that is being controlled
by anti-human, anti-mythical, anti-natural, forces. Man
(Job) is now caught between cosmic indifference and a
conspiracy against life. 

I think the inanimate affects even Jazz here in V. An Ivory
sax is not what Coleman played. There is some Irony of
course, after reading GR, that he did play a plastic sax.


In any event, that's what I think right now, but I ain't
thinkin too good these days, so...

Will the wind ever remember/
The names it has blown in the past/
With its crutch, its old age, and its wisdom/
It whispers, no, this will be the last/
And the wind cries Mary...