Vortex

Use in the book

Arrian explains a whirlwind through a current blocked from straight escape, turning back and coiling upon itself. Cloud thickness, cold, or an opposing current can provide the obstruction. The vortex is thus an organized pattern arising from constrained movement in this explanation.

Places to read

1. I.29.2.6A blocked current coils into a whirl before issuing from the cloud.

Translation in this edition

“Whirl” suits the immediate description; “vortex” is a concise technical equivalent.

Use in the book

B 352 puts Strife at the lowest depth of a whirl and Love in the middle of an eddy. Things then join from different quarters; some remain unmixed because Strife still restrains them; its retreat to the outermost circle is incomplete. The geometry is therefore inseparable from an evolving process. One should not take a single line's location and impose it as the permanent address of a power throughout the system.

B 36's brief outward placement of Strife agrees with the broad movement of withdrawal, without proving exactly where that independent quotation belongs in B 352's continuous scene. B 31's shaking limbs describe disturbance, while B 51's “swiftly upward” preserves only a direction and speed. The latter has lost its subject and cannot responsibly furnish a complete account of ascent by a specified root.

In B 1152 the eddies receive the exile after successive expulsion through aither, sea, earth, and sunlight. The repeated motion connects the wanderer's experience to cosmic regions. It does not by itself identify that itinerary with the entire sequence of world-formation, or define an orbital path for a soul.

Places to read

1. B 35.3–132Whirl, depth, centre, and outer circle frame the incomplete retreat of Strife and advance of Love.
2. B 36Strife stands at the extreme edge as things come together.
3. B 31The limbs of a god are shaken in sequence.
4. B 51An isolated phrase preserves only swift upward motion.
5. B 115.9–12The wanderer is flung into the eddies of aither.

Translation in this edition

The translation's “whirl” and “eddy” preserve lexical variation. B 51 is only an adverbial fragment, so an inferred subject should never be inserted as if transmitted. Circular vocabulary here is not automatically interchangeable with every temporal use of “cycle.”