#i think the 'troubled souls' could also possibly recite well known voltas for the sake of having a mantra

[harpyface]

My thoughts on the volta do mar

In-game, the Volta do Mar method was created to travel through the pale, being first used in the first successful voyage into the pale. Apparently it took years to develop the method, a "strict psychological regimen imitating the creation process of poetry."

In real life, the volta do mar is a Portuguese (volta do mar is Portuguese for 'Return from the Sea') sailing practice of, in simple words, sailing further out into the sea to avoid sailing directly against the wind and then catching winds that then move in the correct direction (useful since portugal is slightly north of the equator, blah blah wind directions)

While watching a playthrough, Joyce's description of Lely's tattoos reminded me of this 'return from the sea' business. Lely's tattoos are a history of his service, but originally the tattoo was a custom of sailors "mark[ing] their bodies to map their travels." "The sailor's soul would use it to fly back home if they should die abroad. This is a sort of… contraption. To be reeled back in by." If a sailor died, their soul would 'return from the sea'(😮).

The pale is likened to the ocean many times in Disco Elysium, so these tattoos and the volta mantras are very similar. They are linked even more when we see that the tattoo custom was begun "right after the discovery of Insulinde," so the creation of voltas and the creation of this tradition kind of bookend the eighth expedition. Likening the irl volta do mar practice and this in game example got me thinking about how exactly in-game voltas are used and created.

(Interesting note, Joyce describes these tattoos as "the silver cord" linking the soul and home, whereas irl, the concept of the silver cord is supposed to link the soul and the body.)

Personally, the concept that is pale was hard enough for me to grasp (even with it being an established fictional concept with, like, words to describe it.) It's "the opposite of reality," it's a property that suspends other properties, and it can damage human minds. According to Joyce, dialectical materialists argue that "pale somehow *consists* of past information, that's degrading. That it's rarefied past, not rarefied matter."

"They call it the *blend-over of the self*. The pale does not only suspend the laws of physics, but also the laws of psychology, maybe History, even… The human mind becomes over-radiated by past."

We can assume that this 'blend-over of the self' is true because of the Paledriver, who is observably pale-radiated and lost in worlds in lives that her body hasn't lived.

Operating on this theory, the pale is made of information, and I would also like to argue that pale is made of not only past information, but also future information, and information about alternate timelines.

In the moralist vision quest, we hear entroponetic crosstalk of Kim from the future *and* arguably an alternate timeline if he ends up in the hospital and doesn't end up at the islet. So pale is basically all information and possibilities.

The only explicit example of a Volta do Mar is from the Insulindian Miracle thought, and it's song lyrics from What If by Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld. This thought establishes that voltas are 1) Taught in schools and 2) Repeated like mantras while travelling. The voltas aren't mentioned in Sacred and Terrible Air, by name at least. Zigi does sing Helvetti, by Kauko Röyhkä & Riku Mattila, in pale, but that's explicitly a song and not a poem, and obviously he doesn't need to resist the effects of the pale (and if fact doesn't want to drive away the pale, based on his reaction to Nilsen's 'Communism is white' speech when it started to ward off the surrounding pale.)

When Joyce says that the method is a "strict psychological regimen imitating the creation process of poetry," my thinking was that it can't be as simple as reciting poetry while travelling through the pale. It might be, but wouldn't the process *be* the process of creating poetry and not 'imitating' it? Of course, it could just be referencing the research it took for the explorers to be able to safely traverse the pale, but I wasn't satisfied with that.

(I'll admit, when I first began building this theory, I didn't know that we had an explicit example of a volta, and it stumped me for a bit, but I think it works still.)

I've seen interpretations in which the poetic nonsense of voltas force the person to focus on reality/on their own mind, to focus on the next word in the sequence. But using the real world volta do mar technique as a base, I started building my own theory by considering that the voltas mirror the technique of the irl volta do mar. Voltas would be  performed by a person going deeper into the pale (whether mentally or physically) in order to somehow escape the effects more easily.

Having already established that the pale is information, it makes sense that the way to manoeuvre it would be via words and concepts. Prior to remembering The Insulindian Miracle thought, my theory was that, instead of pilots being *taught* previously written mantras, they were taught to create poetry while immersed in the pale. The pilot's mind would then grasp the floating information that is pale to string the words together into a distinct phrase/poem, intentionally going deeper into the pale to get enough material to work with. With the resulting phrase, it would be grounding enough to bring the pilot back to reality.

However, all of that is irrelevant when you consider the volta that Harry was taught.

Or is it?

The Insulindian Miracle solution says that "you were taught it at school. It is one of the Volta do Mar mantras repeated on the voyage that lead to the discovery of the Insulindian isola." I could interpret it as saying that voltas are written in advance, or that *historical* voltas are taught in grade school, just like we're taught historical documents or literature. Maybe children of Revachol are taught about the voltas that the discoverers of their isola used simply for academic knowledge. 

And as Joyce says, the Volta do Mar is also used by "other troubled souls even to this day." Ordinary people may not have access to the bank of information that is the pale, but they do have their own troubling thoughts that they can pick words and concepts from to still go through the same process that I've described in order to calm themselves or relieve stress.

I do want to analyse Kim's Volta do Mar skill at a later time using all of this, but right now this is what I have to offer :)

(An excellent post that I was inspired by is about the connection between water and memories by @/57sfinest, which I would like to briefly reference at the end of all this analysis. Imagine it as a triangle, one point is the ocean that the sailor's souls would have to return from (or the irl ocean that the volta do mar was used for, if you like), the second point is the past and memories, and the third point is the pale, the "rarefied past." It's all connected.)

#is this anything maybe #tell me if theres any glaringly incorrect things or anything ive missed here pls #i have gone through so many interpretations of kims skill i have no idea #of course this whole theory only works if you believe that only historical voltas are taught in schools #and not pre written ones for general use #i think the 'troubled souls' could also possibly recite well known voltas for the sake of having a mantra #contains inconsistent capitalization #disco elysium #disco elysium meta #disco elysium spoilers #corvid creates