Mike McCormack - Solar Bones

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

what was happening

same as when

that story started drifting towards us in mid-March, coming out of the middle distance with its unlikely news of viral infection and contamination, a whole city puking its guts up, the stuff of a B-movie apocalypse seventy miles up the road with

GP clinics and hospital wards across the city reporting a sudden spike in the number of people presenting with stomach ailments, complaining of cramps and vomiting with severe diarrhoea, a rise in numbers so wholly out of proportion with what might be expected for the time of year that initially an outbreak of food poisoning was suspected, an outbreak spread through the city from some large public event or gathering, but when an immediate investigation showed that the cases were evenly spread and did not appear to cluster in any geographic or demographic area it was clear that the source of the illness had to lie in something that was present without discrimination in all parts of the city, a conclusion which

prompted an immediate analysis of the city’s water supply and which quickly revealed that it was severely contaminated with the coliform Cryptosporidium, a viral parasite which originates in human faecal matter so that

I can’t understand it, what the hell were the city engineers doing

Darragh wanted to know from the other side of the world, his unshaven face filling the screen when he Skyped me that evening, his voice coming with that slight delay as it crossed the distance between us, since

I’ve been reading about it online — it looks like it could get very serious

it’s serious now

and it will all be on the heads of those engineers who fell asleep on the job, how could they have missed it and

Darragh’s voice had that note of hysteria to which it is prone whenever he has to grapple with the human slobberiness of the world, a gifted academic mind, or so Mairead tells me, but one that sometimes leaves him with little real notion of how the world actually works so that too often you have to listen to him in this mode, ranting on, sometimes in a language that’s difficult to grasp, so I said