M & D Group Read (cont.)

[David Morris]

In GR the Wind is also very prominent, especially in Spiritualist context.
I'm sure everyone knows that spirit and wind and breath are very close
cousins.  Wind is a force felt, but unseen (unless smoak or fog are
present).

David Morris

On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 12:28 PM Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
> >
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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