Solar Bones. Mike McCormackЧитать онлайн книгу.
the wing mirrors off the cars parked on either side of her while the flatbed behind carried something that was dismantled in sections and tied down on both sides with ratchet straps and chains, something that at first sight appeared to be the luminous bones of some massive, extinct creature, now disinterred, with its ribs gathered into a neat bundle around the thick stump of a massive spinal column which time and the elements had polished to such a cool ceramic gloss that if I were to leave my hand on it I would have been surprised if it felt like anything other than glass, and it was only when the whole thing had passed by completely and I saw the back of the trailer hung with caution tape and hazard decals that I recognised the load as a wind turbine which had been completely broken down with the vanes and conical tower separated from the nacelle and stacked lengthwise along the trailer but with enough corrosion around the flanges on the base sections to indicate that this turbine had recently been taken apart as a working project, faulty or redundant or obsolete in some way or other, possibly
burning oil
as my father might have said
so I stood there watching it pass, thinking there was something sorrowful in seeing this felled machine being hauled through our little village out here on the Western Seaboard, something in me recognising this as a clear instance of the world forfeiting one of its better ideas, as if something for which there was once justified hope had proven to be a failure and the world had given up on some precious dream of itself, one of its better destinies, and I was not the only one who’d stood to stare at its passing because three doors up, on Morrison’s corner, an old man had stopped in mid-stride and was standing with both hands planted down on the boss of his stick, looking on as the trailer made its careful way through the village, while across the street a few others stood and stared on in spite of themselves, generating a stillness which held for a long moment as the low-loader rumbled by, crossing the square and down the street before turning out of sight beyond the church and off out the Westport road before people became aware of themselves and were now looking at each other querulously and laughing as if they had succumbed to some childish foolery in the middle of the day while, standing across the street from them I wondered where this fallen turbine might be going to, at the same time thinking it was surely a mistake to believe that such things ever go anywhere at all or, more accurately, that there is a place to where such things could go, as stillness and stasis was the very nature of these constructs, much like myself at that moment, stuck as I was in a renewal of that same old anxiety I had experienced as a nine-year-old in the hayshed looking at that diesel engine, the component parts of the world spread across the floor except that now
four decades on
when the idea has come a patient arc through my life I now understood that if I saw the dismantled tractor as the beginning of the world, the chaotic genesis which drew it together and assembled it from disparate parts, then this wind turbine was its end, a destiny it had been forced to give up on, a dream of itself shelved or aborted or miscarried, an old idea which echoed
a radio programme I listened to a while back in which a panel of experts discussed the future of these wind turbines, weighing their environmental impact against whatever their energy efficiency was, the argument going back and forth between various critics and advocates but making little real headway until the topic was turned over to the listeners who by and large, one after another, echoed what had already been said except for one woman, whose hesitant voice cut across the strident tones of the debate when she phoned in to say that
she was living under a hill planted with several of these turbines and whatever about their environmental impact or their worth as a source of clean energy she herself had developed something of a spiritual regard for them as she had only to stand at her back door and look up towards them for a few minutes every day and she could easily believe there was something sacred about them because, grouped and silhouetted against the horizon, their blades stark against the sky, were they not vividly evocative of Christ’s end on Calvary, crucified without honour, thieves to the left and right of him and, when turning, weren’t they almost prayerful, the hum of their dynamo and their ceaseless rhythm so freely generated by the breeze which was of course nothing less than God’s breath across the land, their turning so evocative of all those Buddhist prayer wheels she had met during her years of travel in India and Tibet and it was surely the case also that only machines built to so large a scale and of such pristine alloys could bridge the span between heaven and earth with their song on our account and
was she alone in these thoughts she wondered or
did anyone else have similar feelings about these machines, this technology
which of course they didn’t, or if they did they chose that moment to keep it to themselves so that after a few garbled comments with which the radio host laboured hopelessly to place some practical or common sense on her remarks, her contribution to the debate was excused as a quasi-artistic outburst, more in the nature of mystical reverie than reasoned argument, definitely idiosyncratic in a way which allowed it to be harmlessly set aside after a few more words of praise were levied on its heartfelt eloquence and the obvious depth of the woman’s feelings
something similar to what I felt that day in the middle of Louisburgh, standing on the sidewalk watching the dismantled turbine being hauled through the main street on its bier without fanfare or procession, the whole thing so lonely and monumental it might well have been God himself or some essential aspect of him being hauled through our little village on the edge of the world, death or some massive redundancy finally caught up with him so that now he was being carted off to some final interment or breakers yard beyond our jurisdiction, some place where the gods were dismantled and broken down for parts or disposed of completely, possibly loaded onto a barge and towed offshore by a salvage tug, out beyond the continental shelf to be weighed down and sunk in some mid-Atlantic abyssal, down between tectonic plates, all these redundant gods lying crushed and frozen in the blackest depths with no surface marker to show where they lie, out of sight and out of mind, among those things in the world that are
burning oil
in some way or other
all of which
reminds me, should I ever forget, that my childhood ability to get ahead of myself and reason to apocalyptic ends has remained intact over four decades and needs only the smallest prompt for it to renew itself once more and for me to get swept away in such yawing deliriums of collapse that I might lose my footing on the ground entirely and spin off into some dark orbit which takes me further and further away from home and into the deepest realms of space, a strange mindset for an engineer whose natural incline is towards the stable construct and not
this circular dreamtime of chaos which
gives such warp and drift to this day so that
it is clear from these stories in the papers that the idea of collapse
needs some expanding beyond the image of things toppling and falling down – plunging masonry, timber, metal, glass – the engineer’s concept of collapse, buildings and bridges staggered before crumbling to the ground and raising up clouds of dust because, from what’s written here about the global economic catastrophe, all this talk of virus and contagion, it is now clear to me that there are other types of chaos beyond the material satisfactions of things falling down since, it appears, out there in the ideal realm of finance and currency, economic constructs come apart in a different way or at least
in ways specific to the things they are, abstract structures succumbing to intensely rarefied viruses which attack worth and values and the confidence which underpin them, swelling them beyond their optimal range to the point where they overbalance and eventually topple the whole thing during the still hours of the night so that we wake the following morning to a world remade in some new way unlikely to be to our benefit and of course
all this is only clear in hindsight
as if every toppled edifice creates both the light and lens through which the disaster itself can properly be seen, the ashes and vacated space becoming the imaginative standpoint from which the whole thing is now clearly visible for those with eyes to see because up to the moment the whole thing came down it was never clear to me
or anyone else