M & D Group Read (cont.)

[Smoke Teff]

Just wrote this while compiling my notes for ch. 14...

pp. 147-148
"Cornelius presently setting the Fork’d Support in the blowing dirt,
with some smoldering naval slow-match he carries in his teeth igniting
a giant full Dutch-ounce blast whose Ball ricochets off the rooftiles,
sending small  Slides of red fragments into the street a good ten feet
wide and short, windage calculations out here being matters more of
Sentiment than of Science."

An important moment, as see here the wind—which is often an authorless
force only observable through its effects in the material world, and
which is also associated elsewhere with the incomprehensible
divine—working to confound reason and mechanism (and violence, though
that seems more coincidental than purposeful)



On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 3:24 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, though also, understood another way, even in the case of smoak
> and fog we're not really seeing the wind--only its consequences. It's
> almost impossible to apprehend visually--and yet, what is it if not
> its material consequences? Kind of like one version/property of the
> God-like force invoked in M&D
>
> On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 3:05 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l