The image of the wind is used by Benjamin in the Theses on the Philosophy of History to explain the disunity of history as experienced by the subject living historically:

"A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating … This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet … But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." (Walter Benjamin, Thesis IX, Theses on the Philosophy of History).

I mention Walter Benjamin because the theory that he attempts to draw an analogy between the individual's historical mindset of their place in a progressive civilisation and a painting (by Klee) in which an angel has his eyes staring, mouth open and wings spread. This struggle with time, understood as progress, is commonplace in Derieva's poety. In particular, Derieva seems to frequently return to the issue of the individual within the fatalistic situation, entrenched within a modern chaotic world. We are the "pawns" left on the earth, an earth which appears to be a persistent and "imperceptible threat." (Derieva, Part 3, At the Intersection). In Benjamin's Theses, the angel is not a heavenly or theological actress but the rather vulnerable, well-intentioned individual of a modern progressive society. In the representation, with the individual's eyes glancing at the past, her mouth wide open with astonishment, the past is distancing itself from her very existence, with her wings wide open. The wings represent the innocent yet essential component of the angel, through which she cannot be separated from the storm of progress. The wings, then lend this "melancholy character" a historical picture, which it battles to overcome but always struggles with. Like a bird attempting to fly in gale-force wind, the angels ability to completely separate herself from the storm of progress would be to sever her wings. As the angel is stuck with the wings which are unable to challenge the storm, the individual sits within a base condition which finds it difficult to challenge progress. Benjamin already explains that paradise would force the angel to fall blindly into the future whilst simultaneously being ripped from the contemplation of a past (hence, the astonishment). Indeed, as with Benjamin's works, although the individual is understood as unplanned, blind to the future and melancholic, and unable to pull her from the storm, hope is retained. In Derieva's "What Kind of Thing is Time," it is written: "I must climb out of here not backward/and not forward, but upward. Upward, on lines of verse" as if to say, in order to be human, one must break with the traditional conception of time. This is a condition of both hope and despair.