Solar Bones. Mike McCormack
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mechanisms which deployed with
clamps and blades and spikes
all those pressures and tensions which sunder flesh and bone, all the ways of engineered anguish which quickly lost me in my attempt to fathom exactly what sort of imagination lay behind such a machine with all its evident ingenuity, most especially that awful alignment by which the body weight of the accused slowly but inevitably overcame the strength needed to uphold it and the gradual downward pressure collapsed it eventually, impaling it slowly, these thoughts going through my mind when I heard the woman standing beside me say in an American accent
it’s all about sex isn’t it, they were obsessed with it
something I had not noticed but which now, with the idea prompted, seemed obvious enough, the true origin and object of all this pressured penetrating and tearing and now, with these images clear in my head and this woman looking at me from over her tissue, it appeared also that I had assented to something more than the truth of her proposition
fucking bridge construction, Mairead wailed, when she stumbled upon all this and even if
the encounter never quite delivered on all the shameless fucking it promised in those first charged moments among the exhibits, even if it was something genuinely tender over the course of a few days in a small hotel in the workers’ suburb of Žižkov, an erotic interlude which at the time I both held dear and was ashamed of in one and the same moment, grateful in many ways but relieved that we took leave of each other with no intention whatsoever of further meetings or keeping in touch so that it was
bridge building, Mairead choked
the story of another man from another age, something remem- bered
standing here in this kitchen
only because it is woven into that memorial arc which curves from childhood to the present moment, gathering up memories of that time with my father on our farm, a skein of connections I am not likely to unravel at this moment for fear they might banish forever the image of all those agricultural implements and machines which were kept around the barns during my childhood and which my father would take apart on the floor of the hayshed, simple constructs from an age when the world understood itself differently
ploughs, harrows and scufflers
pounds, shillings and pence
rough-hewn, vernacular instruments that were primitively crude compared to the lathed elegance of the one true machine around which all the energy and work on the farm centred – the farm’s soul in many ways – the grey Massey Ferguson 35 my father bought at an agricultural show in Westport in the late sixties, paying four hundred and eighty pounds for it, a machine he was forever tinkering with, always scrutinising some part of its engine, peering into it, standing back from it and cleaning his hands on an old rag after having made some adjustment to its workings, a memory so clear to me now
here in this kitchen
that I could reach out and touch it with my hand
man and machine
same as they were
the day I came home from school and walked into the hayshed to find him standing over the engine completely broken down and laid out on the concrete floor that was dusted with hayseed, piece by piece along its length
cylinder head, pistons, crankshaft
to where I stood in the doorway in my school trousers and jumper, terrified at the sight because to one side lay the body of the 35, gutted of its most essential parts and forlorn now, its components ordered across the floor in such a way as to make clear not only the sequence of its dismantlement but also the reverse order in which it would be restored to the full working harmonic of itself and my father standing over the whole thing, sighting through a narrow length of fuel line, blowing through it till he was satisfied that it was clean through its length before he laid it on the floor, giving it its proper place in the sequence and explaining to me, saying simply
it was burning oil
as if this were some viral malfunction likely to spread from the machine itself and infect the world’s wider mechanism, throwing the universe itself out of kilter to bring it crashing down through the heavens because I knew well that this dismantlement went beyond a fitter’s examination of a diesel engine, well beyond stripping out the carburettor to clear the jets – once again my father had succumbed to the temptation to take something apart just to see how it was put together, to know intimately what it was he had put his faith in as
he stood over this altar of disassembly with nothing in his hand but a single, open-end spanner which he waved over the assemblage as if it were a gesture of forgiveness and when he told me that this single tool was capable of breaking down the entire tractor, dismantling the whole thing to its smallest component and that it was then sufficient in itself to put it back together again without need of any other instrument my fear only deepened as I recoiled at the thought that something so complex and highly achieved as this tractor engine could prove so vulnerable, so easily collapsed and taken apart by this single tool and so frightened was I by this fact it would be years afterwards before I could acknowledge the engineering elegance of it all and see it as my father did – something graceful and beautifully conceived, not the instrument of chaos it presented itself as to my childish imagination and
this may have been my first moment of anxious worry about the world, the first instance of my mind spiralling beyond the immediate environs of
hearth, home and parish, towards
the wider world beyond
way beyond
since looking at those engine parts spread across the floor my imagination took fright and soared to some wider, cataclysmic conclusion about how the universe itself was bolted and screwed together, believing I saw here how heaven and earth could come unhinged when some essential cottering pin was tapped out which would undo the whole vast assemblage of stars and galaxies in their wheeling rotations and send them plummeting through the void of space towards some final ruin out on the furthest mearing of the universe and even if my fear at that specific moment did not run to such complete detail, only such cosmic awareness could account for the waves of anxiety that gripped me as I stood over those engine parts on the hayshed floor
soul sick with an anxiety which
was not soothed one bit the following day when my father drove the tractor out of the hayshed with a clear spout of smoke blurting from the exhaust as it bounced down the narrow mucky road and into the field beyond where it took off into the distance, my father perched up on the seat, getting smaller and smaller in the dim light before man and machine disappeared into a dip in the land as we watched from the gable of the house – Onnie, my mother in her housecoat and Eithne clutching the Polaroid camera which seldom left her hands, a present from visiting Yanks –
he’s like a child with that thing, my mother said
until he was gone from sight as completely as if they had been rubbed from the world and even if the tractor’s successful restoration did not surprise me neither did it do anything to rid me of the gnawing conviction that nothing less than the essential balance and smooth running of the universe’s mechanism had now been tampered with in some way that might eventually prove fatal to us all and it is no exaggeration to say that
the sight of that engine spread over the floor would stand to me forever as proof of a world which was a lot less stable and unified than my childish imagination had held it to be, the world now a rickety thing of chance components bolted together in the dark, the whole construct humming closer to collapse than I had ever suspected, a child’s fear that sometimes, to this day, takes hold of me and draws me back to that hay barn, just as it did a few years ago when
I was in the village and standing outside Kenny’s shop with a carton of milk and a newspaper in my hand, standing on the pavement watching
a huge low-loader pass up the main street, a long, growling beast of a machine hauling itself along in low gear with the driver high up in the cab over the wheels, taking her carefully through the narrow street, making