Heavy Steps (4)

First, that mysterious ‘thing’ appeared more distantly on my bungalow-house’s Gunfleet Sands horizon than my photo above indicates.  It’s been there a few weeks: something I spotted on my near-daily constitutional between Holland-on-Sea and Clacton.  I compared it to many things HERE ... but in truth it’s probably some sort of crane because I have since realised the nature of it in a wider context.  The North Sea, day by day, has indeed since then become peppered with more strange contraptions, crane things and non-crane things, some small, some large, some stubby pins of striated silhouette along the horizon, some things moving positions between one day and the next, some stubbornly fixed ... the whole expanse turning into tantamount to a giant deep-flooded building-site.

I now gather via some news-osmosis that they are building a wind farm out there.  How does one gather the wind, though? Reap it? Rape seed oil it?  Where’s the wind’s stockpile of winter feed for the cruel months ahead?  One of the contraptions out at sea does indeed look like a giant ploughshare, another one a giant (although tiny to me on the shore) feeding-trough (full of mussel stew?).  Over the years, I’ve heard the wind moaning down my chimney like a beast of burden troubled by its berth in the sky ... by its need to be milked.  The sea’s waves themselves are configured in my imagination like giant lemmings, finishing each of their lives upon the edge of the present moment in a collapsing spray ... escaping the windfarmers and their cull. But the more I think of it the more my thoughts touch the blurred margins of fiction, a fiction that is possibly realler than truth, as most fictions surely are. Shorely are.  I laugh as...

...once upon time, a windfarmer, who had recently been billeted in the next door bungalow-house to mine (mysteriously replacing my previous neighbour without weather warning or explanation other than convenience of the state machine), spoke to me not only of the state farming the winds as they were but manufacturing more winds than were naturally formed by the weather – a gusty cycle of fronts, the first set of perpetual-motions known to man.  Farming methods that blow into existence the wind that it later farms, one feeding the other leading to a huge time-frame of wind and winter: tossing what I’ve always seen as the living, breathing ‘sea-monster’ into a set of furious moods that eventually become a single mood that we, as people, will soon share by shore or ploughshare.  My new neighbour was worried and hoped I would write about it on my blog so that everyone would then know the repercussions of farmly flatulence that was about to bring every stink-gull home to roost from the funnels of sea-stench, a stench previously disguised by careful godly weather-systems that had the human good at heart, ie. benign weather-systems that would soon be swept away by state-kindled miasma and force ten farts.

The heavy footprints of new beasts of burden rearing from new-born monster waves to trample our real arable and dairy farms with the cloven hoofs of gale and stink-gull. This must be stopped!  Halt the wind farms, I say! Before it is too late.  Let’s live instead in a better fiction than this, a fiction which art our true heaven. Not, I claim, a heaven becalmed upon a Sargasso Sea, as such, but one at least beached upon a balm-breezy death that we can favour with our eager anticipation for its softly flighted glider-angels.  Rather that, I say, than fear for a storm-tossed death of utter nothingness mis-fictioned with imaginary fright-hurricanes in turn sown with braying hoof-herds .... and croaking stink-gulls, fishy Lovecraftian tentacles hanging from their beaks.

(this story was written today and first published here)