Who Has Seen the Wind

The event the text is referring to is indeed, the death of Brian O’Connal’s dog. Brian is visiting Jappie’s grave and finds the Young Ben already there, in some shape or form. They’re mourning Jappie’s death and Brian realizes just how much he’s missed the dog, not just missed, but just being immensely saddened by the event, or as the book puts it, “an emptiness that wasn’t to be believed.”

The passage centers on Brian’s experience of the event and is one of the major events of the story, and contributes greatly to Brian’s life. The dog was originally gotten to replace Brian and his quirky view on god, so having the dog die could possibly be a metaphor of the death of the god-in-white boots image that Brian went by. That’d be a pretty big thing.

I think that Brian had placed a lot of faith in his dog, and maybe represented the prairies to some extent in the way of the dog being an animal that lived on the prairies with Brian. From this point on Brian became stronger friends with the Young Ben, which makes sense completely. I love how W.O. Mitchell describes the event aswell, not taking sides but just showing it how it is, with a very delicate nature.

The Agricultural Interior

In order to operate a farm, you have to be a crazyman, especially in the early 1900s before all this modern machinery started to get introduced. You had to sacrifice, and I mean sacrifice your overall sanity, earthly comfort, and thin skin for the privilege of being able to make something from nothing.

Once a person had started a farm, there were many, many things they had to constantly be thinking about to be able to keep their operation going. The farmer and their family had to be their own personal accountant, keeping track of purchases and making sure that they wouldn’t go overboard just to fall into horrible debt. This seemingly simple job needed the awareness of a few things. First, the farmer had to keep his eyes open to the ever-changing reality of earth. What was thriving? How much precipitation was coming down? Was it a dry year or a wet year? Failing to keep the mind open to these many factors would result in death to the crops, or not maximizing the potential of a farm.

Not maximizing the potential of a farm was a horrible thing. The farmer and his family had to feed themselves, and make a profit. Failing to submit to nature’s delicate conditions would result in hunger and a tiny profit. Most would rather be self-sufficient than depend on the relief that many relied on.

The main factors that a farmer has to pay attention to today are quite similar to what they were in the 1900s, albeit with less extreme of a risk. Today, farmers are shielded with the power of science through the mysterious power of being able to speak in the language of nature and be able to change the very particles that make up a seed to meet the typical farmer’s desire. The race of the farmer is also dying out. This is due to the gradual automation the trade has been experiencing, thus requiring less human muscle and sinew. To go into more detail, the general definition of a farm has changed! In the 1900s, I’d guess that it would be:

Farm – Area where a family of humans dwell and produce grains by working the ground and meat by bribing the animals, all for the community to eat.

Nowadays, it’d probably be something more along the lines of this:

Farm – Area owned by a corporation where employed workers operate machines and pump fertilizer into the ground to get the desired results.

The owner of the farm still has to worry about the same general stuff though. Pests still affect crops, and we can’t control precipitation. The trade of farming has changed a lot, and is due to change more, moving less from the family-run farm to the corporation-run farm. There are also new places like the community co-ops at Fort Whyte that support the traditional nature of farming. There are also farms where new-age hippies go to and try to revert almost fully to the olden ways of doing things, with the exceptions of computers and televisions.

Geographic Regions

If you’re considering moving, for personal or business reasons then I think that 
Canadian Lowlands would be a solid choice. There’s quite a bit here. For the young culture buffs that have just gotten out of high school, you can come here and attend the great University of Winnipeg and get involved in finding yourself through great teachings and real friends. There is a major uprising of musical talents in the Interior Plains, from the hip-hop of Brandon to the emotional rock of Winnipeg, you’re bound to get your needs met. During the summer, you and your new pals can take a weekend off and travel to one of the prairie’s many natural hotspots such as wandering around on beautiful flat farmland to swimming at one of the many beaches and hiking through gorgeous wilderness.

If you’re of the older crowd who’s already found what they want in life, and would be coming to Winnipeg for familial of business reasons, the Interior Plains has your needs met. You can join one of many Winnipeg’s downtown businesses, or snag a great house in a new development, or one of the more urban areas of Winnipeg complete with rows and rows of beautiful elm trees. You’ll find lots of social clubs and natural areas to satisfy the needs of your family’s soulful desires. You can’t really have it any better than the peaceful prairies.

The Idea of a Short Story

A short story is a way of telling a story, in a short form. It may be compared to a full-featured set of novels, like The Chronicles of Narnia, or the novella Franny and Zoey, but it’s a little bit different.

If ou will, allow me to put the image of a tree and bush in your head. In this image, they’re side by side. They live off of the same nutrients and sunlight. A tree has a large trunk and millions of beautiful, billowing leaves that have been growing for hundreds of years. The tree is old, and it has grown its roots deep so that the wind doesn’t topple it over.

Now take a bush. Bushes are spunky little bundles of growth that anyone could plant and it’d look great in a day. They’re still beautiful, going with the minimalist look, but they’re not nearly as large and complex (although you could argue that on a base level they both exist with the same complexity that nature exists with). It’s tiny, everyone can see that, but it provides something that the tree doesn’t. To see the beauty of the tree, you have to strain your neck and look in all directions, resulting in pain and a commitment! To see the beauty of the bush, all you have to do is commit to a quick flick of the neck in the general direction of the bush!

A short story works like a bush. It’s petite and easily digestible. The main concepts of a short story for the most part are relatively easy to work out. Most of the time, the plot is the backbone of a short story. The reason I think most short stories are plot driven is because the other option is to have a character-driven story, for which you need time and lots of paper.

The plot of a short story is composed of many things, including the story’s conflict. A conflict is the hook of the short story. Once you’ve grasped it, you’re probably not going to want to let go.

One method an author can use to describe characters, events and things in a short story is with imagery. Imagery is basically like writing a thousand words to compensate for a picture. The advantage of using imagery over putting actual images in the story is that the author then leaves a greater amount of content up to your imagination to discern and gets you to think more about the story.

All of these things are told through the author’s tone. For example, the general tone of the sublime short story Hey Come on Out was mysterious, ambiguous and earthly. The tone is how an author wants to tell the story, what side he or she is on.

Bushes come in many types. There are evergreen bushes that rarely cycle through the various colours of nature, there is the honeysuckle bush that provides you with a tasty snack every time you walk by. There is also the bush that has given a content little organism the sick pleasure of food, thus forcefully giving up the bushes life for it’s own. As you see, bushes can also be compared to the genre of a short story; in the way that there are many different types of them as there are short stories. In the sense of a short story, there’s mystery, fiction, horror along many others.

Brian’s Transformation in Who Has Seen the Wind

In short, the series of changes Brian Sean O’Connal experiences during Who Has Seen the Wind can be compiled into one big idea called “growing up”. What is growing up, is it conforming to the world around you and not asking questions? Or is it becoming a more mature person? In Who Has Seen the Wind, Brian grows and becomes more mature in some ways.

 

The book starts out very confusingly, which may be so because of how “undeveloped” Brian’s mind is. (But who’s to say what’s developed or not). He wonders and thinks about everything that flows through his mind. I think the thoughts of the young Brian were extrapolated by W.O. Mitchell’s wild imagination. It’s not that we don’t all have thoughts like the young Brian did, as we get older I think we just have to be more conscious to keep our mind open, but thoughts are still constantly flowing through your mind. To quote the book:

 

“Yep – ain’t ever empty – always thoughts into a fella’s head.”

“Not always,” Fat said.

“Jist try an’ not have any” Joe invited him.

 

The ways in which our awesome discussion group noticed that Brian was growing up was in how he was asking fewer questions as he grew older. You didn’t get as much of an in-depth view into his mind compared to when he was littler. I think I could safely say his imagination had been tamed a bit, for better and worse, maybe thinking more than imagining, since there was less obvious things to imagine.

 

When Brian was a child, he was a diamond in the rough per say. He wondered about the core of his being! He picked up ideas around from around him, for example the concept of god. Brian didn’t want god to be a large man who had an iron fist and caused suffering to whoever broke these rigid laws as told in church! Rather, he thought that he was a little prairie man in white boots that ate porridge!

 

In the latter half of the book he stopped wondering about things like that to some extent. I think he also became a more mature human being. He wondered less about great thoughts like god with white boots, and more about relationships he had with people, and things he could see. For example, the Ben, Uncle Sean and his Grandmother. Even if he may have stopped wondering about some subjects, he never lost his love of the prairie’s peaceful, ambiguous and wild nature.

 

I think we can all relate to wanting to feel something. The feeling that Brian continuously longed for was a combination of many things. It came up whenever something dramatic happened, like the death of his dog and the mutant cow. It also happened when his mind focused in on something with great beauty, like the dewdrop on the plant. It occured whenever he became really close to the world around him, or other living beings and how quickly things can change (death) with Brian having no control over it, close to god in my opinion. The key factor about the feeling was that Brian had no control over it! He kept longing for it but in the end only got it when he never would’ve expected it, which really says something.

 

I think that the feeling was a mixture of realization, grief, and something that touched Brian deep down inside.

 

Brian was quite close to the reality of birth and death as the novel painfully describes. In the end, he reflects on how much death he has experienced, so that’s also one of the things that were part of the transformation. This makes sense because when you lose someone that’s close to you, it challenges your view on reality since a part of you has been taken away. You have to make up for the empty space that would be left, and that would be quite the transformative experience.

 

Brian experiences the death of the baby pigeon, his dog, his dad, and his grandmother. The reason these things were so significant was how much he loved them all! He loved them all because he was searching for meaning in his life, trying to connect to the world around him in the best way he could. And when Brian placed his faith in those things, it in a sense became a part of him. From the unborn pigeon to his dad, losing those beings affected him in a pretty substantial way.

 

On the flipside he also was connected to birth. One of the reasons that Brian may have stopped wondering about god was when he found out how people are born, just like rabbits. I think death played a bigger part in his life than birth, although they are closely related.

 

wind     P   Pronunciation Key  (wnd)

n.

0.                  Moving air, especially a natural and perceptible movement of air parallel to or along the ground.

0.                  A movement of air generated artificially, as by bellows or a fan.

0.                  The direction from which a movement of air comes: The wind is north-northwest.

A movement of air coming from one of the four cardinal points of the compass: the four winds.

 

The definition of “wind” seems to mention movement quite a bit, which makes sense because essentially that’s what it is. The wind would be used as a metaphor for change, in fact it often is. Who Has Seen the Wind proves just how rich and meaningful the prairies are.

 

It’s awesome! I’ve seen some diagrams of the roots of prairie grass and it goes a few meters deep! They’ve grown strong over thousands of years, and thus they survive. During the book, Brian is trying to grow roots (find meaning), and the wind is a part of this. The winds of change are unpredictable, some examples being the deaths Brian experiences, and just the billions of changes in the incredibly descriptive nature of the book.

 

The prairie and the wind are tight friends. If they separated they just wouldn’t be the same, and greatly suffer. The prairie is like the wind’s brother. The prairie is the grass with the deep roots, the animals, the humanity contained on it and so on. I would think growing up on a farm would be quite a different experience than growing up in a city. In comparison to nature and the world and reality, we’re quite a small part of that. Brian was able to tap into this huge mystical world of the prairies and he grew quite strong from that. I think that’s one of the main reasons he became whom he ended up as in this ambiguous, poetic and complex novel.