M & D Group Read (cont.)

[Smoke Teff]

It feels thus far like the wind is often a multifaceted force that offers some real (but ultimately mysterious/nebulous in origins, intentions) influence in the world through & of the actions of humans. 

The wind is the unknown, the constant source of chaos and uncertainty, at various times head-on resistance or sail-boosting force. 

I would say some of my strongest conceptions of the wind in P are formed around the idea of the sensitive flame in GR—sometimes we don’t see or even feel the wind, only it’s effects on other things/people, some of which/whom are more consciously receptive to it and influenced by it than others. 

P makes it his own higher power. It has the real-world influence that is missing in the deistic God, without much of the anthropomorphizable authorship or intentions of the older monotheistic/Abrahamic God. 

Plus, the Wind conflates with, eg, the Fog and the Smoak and the Clouds in interesting ways. The Fog relates the wind to the material continuity of the water cycle that P evokes in M&D, GR, elsewhere. It is a global system, and any one measure of its activity and impact is by definition reductive. Sometimes it reveals (even if it reveals an inner madness after the Smoak clears), sometimes it obfuscates, sometimes it simply moves and changes. The constant-because-always-changing river in/of the sky. 

> On Feb 11, 2018, at 5:19 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Smoak keeps noticing the wind in M & D. Real thing to notice. 
> 
> Some thoughts. It is often a symbol for the divine, a divine presence, God speaking to Job out of the whirlwind, say.
> But that can't be, can it?, too operative here---unless the general windiness sorta can contain the notion of the religious 'freedoms', 
> the need for, circulating all over the Western world of the time, especially in the founding of America.? 
> 
> But closer to basic meanings I think of the phrase, 'the winds of change" which fits M & D fully, no?
> 
> And, in other readings I have been remind of the moral struggle in a late James novel, The Golden Bowl, in which the two
> main protagonists' struggle is metaphorized as 'beating against the wind" also reminding of the against the current metaphor of
> The Great Gatsby, which we know is alluded to in M & D. 
> 
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