Roland, the signs, the wind

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Am 26.04.2016 um 14:45 schrieb David Morris:
> Sailboats veer into the wind in order to slow down or 
>stop.

I was wondering whether "veering into the wind" was a
nautical metaphor and implied working *against* the wind.

But from the comments it seems clear that it doesn't. What
is meant is to give in to the wind, to submit to its
force, to give up control, to be swept away.

It is difficult to get a grip on this passage. Some not
necessarily coherent thoughts can be found below:

"Once transected into the realm of Dominus Blicero, Roland
found that all the signs had turned against him. . . .
Lights he had studied so well as one of you, position and
movement, now gathered there at the opposite end, all in
dance . . . irrelevant dance. None of Blicero’s
traditional progress, no something new . . . alien. . .
Roland too became conscious of the wind, as his mortality
has never allowed him. Discovered it so...so joyful that
the arrow must veer into it. The wind had been blowing all
year long, year after year, but Roland had felt only the
secular wind...he means, only his personal wind.
Yet...Selena, the wind, the wind's everywhere..." (30)

This "veering into the wind", in my view,
is *not* necessarily positive. The joy is the joy of
submitting to a superior force, of giving up control, 
perhaps to a master (death, Blicero/Weissmann, fascism?)
  -- a familiar Pynchon trope.

We learn more about Feldspath on p. 237 to 239. Being
dead, it turns out, is not what he had hoped it would
be...

Ubiquity or omnipresence is commonly associated with
divine beings.

There are various winds, various forms of
force or control: a secular wind and its opposite -- what
would that be? a transcendental or religious wind? -- , a
personal wind and therefore presumably a collective wind
that Feldspath (why "the arrow"?)
now veers into. The collective wind or force is equated
with the transcendental wind.

Perhaps this has something to do
with Nazism? With Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History": 
"This storm is what we call progress."

http://www.barglow.com/angel_of_history.htm

"It's control. All these things arrive from one
difficulty: control. For the first time it was /inside/,
do you see. The control is put inside. No more need to
suffer passively under 'outside forces'---to veer into any
wind. As if..." (30)

No need anymore to submit to any outside force, the force
is now internalized, it has been put there (by whom?). 
Feldspath uses the guidance
system of the rocket as a metaphor for human society 
and/or the
individual, then for the economy (which is expanded upon 
on p. 238).


A few words on the wind in M&D, where it is even more
ubiquitous:

> On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 5:28 AM, Thomas Eckhardt
> <thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de 
<mailto:thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de>> wrote:
>
>     I remember a passage in M&D where the wind is 
described as magnetism
>     in reverse and linked to desire (or a reversal 
thereof).

I was referring to this:

"He has devis'd a sailing-Scheme, whereby Winds are
imagin'd to be forms of Gravity acting not vertically, but
laterally, along the Globe's Surface,--- a Ship to him is
the Paradigm of the Universe."

M&D, 220.

There are many winds in M&D, some of them natural forces:

On p. 263 "to work against the Wind" is associated with
defying death -- which fits the idea of the wind as a form 
of gravity.

A few minutes of glancing through the pages also yield the 
"Wind of Time" (203), "Winds
of Trade" and "Diplomatic Winds".

All different forces.


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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l