Roland, the signs, the wind

[David Morris]

You:

"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)
[...]
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?

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Me:

I think in this case transcending mortality ("passing over") has allowed
the perception of a joyous wind (Spiritual?) that is contrasted with the
secular wind.

I think we all know that pnuema is Greek, translated as "spirit," "breath"
or "wind."  Like a magnetic field (nice MD connection.  Remember Ley
Lines?) or gravity, it is an invisible force and/or medium that one
occupies and navigates through.  As you point out, it can be
natural/spiritual or a man-made structure-environment.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
You:

"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).

-----------------------------------------------------
Me:

Right.  To escape the control of natural forces through technology.

David Morris


On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 10:51 AM, Thomas Eckhardt <
thomas.eckhardt at uni-bonn.de> wrote:

> 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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