Roland, the signs, the wind

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

 > 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.  [emphasis added] <


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wind_deities

Perhaps - Blicero! - Norse mythology is relevant here.

 > * Njord, in Norse mythology, is the god of the winds.
     * The Four Dwarves or /dvärger/ (Norse dwarves), named Norori, 
Suori, Austri and Vestri
     * The four stags of Yggdrasil, personify the four winds. <

I know little about this, but maybe it's pertinent.


On 27.04.2016 17:51, Thomas Eckhardt 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.
>
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
>

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