Roland, the signs, the wind

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Breath, yes:

"The Rocket creating its own great wind . . . no wind without both, 
Rocket and atmosphere . . . but inside the venturi, breath-furious and 
blazing breath-always flows at the same unchanging speed . . . can't you 
really see?" (454)

https://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0703&msg=116179

On a different note:

Does this passage strike anyone as wilfully opaque? The first-time 
reader has no idea that the "realm of Dominus Blicero" is the realm of 
death, not to mention that Blicero is Weissmann. She/He has no idea that 
Roland Feldspath is an expert for the guidance system of the V-2, and 
that the rocket at some point had an internal guidance system. We learn 
about these things only much later.

 >    "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..."
 >
 >     "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)

Also re the wind: What was that about "you can't run a war on gusts of 
emotion" (quoted from memory)?
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l