M & D cont.

[alice malice]

The wind in Pynchon is there from the start, from V. and even moves
from novel to novel carrying characters and themes. On one level it
seems a music, a force unseen, a present absence, a haunting. Reminds
me most of Emily.

THE WIND.

Of all the sounds despatched abroad,
There's not a charge to me
Like that old measure in the boughs,
That phraseless melody

The wind does, working like a hand
Whose fingers brush the sky,
Then quiver down, with tufts of tune
Permitted gods and me.

When winds go round and round in bands,
And thrum upon the door,
And birds take places overhead,
To bear them orchestra,

I crave him grace, of summer boughs,
If such an outcast be,
He never heard that fleshless chant
Rise solemn in the tree,

As if some caravan of sound
On deserts, in the sky,
Had broken rank,
Then knit, and passed
In seamless company.

THE WIND tapped like a tired man,
And like a host, “Come in,”
I boldly answered; entered then
My residence within

A rapid, footless guest,        5
To offer whom a chair
Were as impossible as hand
A sofa to the air.

No bone had he to bind him,
His speech was like the push        10
Of numerous humming-birds at once

His countenance a billow,
His fingers, if he pass,
Let go a music, as of tunes
Blown tremulous in glass.        15

He visited, still flitting;
Then, like a timid man,
Again he tapped—’t was flurriedly—
And I became alone.

There came a wind like a bugle;
It quivered through the grass,
And a green chill upon the heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the windows and the doors
As from an emerald ghost;
The doom's electric moccasin
That very instant passed.
On a strange mob of panting trees,
And fences fled away,
And rivers where the houses ran
The living looked that day.
The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings whirled.
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the world!

On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 1:27 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think Wind, as an associative trope is used more in M & D than in some others.
>
> I do not think, yet, it carries much connotation of "divine
> afflatus"....whirlwind as god..
> I think, as in the ocean crossing it blows gothically over the great
> oceanic unknown...
> I think it is often the 'wind of the future' as the beating waves are
> always bringing us
> back to the past....
>
> At one level I suggest Pynchon 'sez' that Gatsbyian ending has been
> there from the beginning
> of the country--and before.
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l