The Fanblade Fables
Fanblade Fables - and Baffles.
Fanblade reference: an early pre-cursor of the Large Hadron Collider ... and its 'Cern Zoo' accoutrements?
Please see: http://weirdmonger.blogdrive.com/archive/189.html
Some of those links are now defunct, but most work.
I'll try to find links to the missing ones in the meantime.
EDIT: Fanblade Five and Fanblade Seven don't work on that link above. I can't find Fanblade Five anywhere at all and I have discovered Fanblade Seven on my computer (now pasted below).
Fanblade Seven (2006)
Hiver Jawn cherished his father's bee-keeper's veil following the death of the child who was due to grow into Hiver Jawn's father.
A portrait kept by a ghost to commemorate another ghost straddles these potentialities of tangible existence destined to die prematurely before the portrait is painted. The likenesses were nevertheless perfect.
Parodices - the plural of paradox?
Too many things are singular.
Death, where are thy stings?
Is a fable that ends with a question honed purposively to its sharpest edge of fanblade, positively turned upon the lathe of didactic proverb, indeed finished?
A brand new FANBLADE FABLE at link immediately above.
In the land there were many large domestic cooler-fans - their fanblades spinning so frantically that nobody could see them as fanblades.
Within each fan's hub where the motor resided, there was also space enough for a new-born baby to be kept and only rarely taken out to be breast-fed, if at all. Close proximity with spinning fanblades would make the babies become more intelligent, more able to deal with the world. The belief was so strong that many babies were forced to spend as much time as possible within the purpose-built body of the fan's motor. Sometimes forever.
Necessary nursing or, as they called it, 'servicing' of the baby's body was managed, for some superstitious reason, between the spinning fanblades rather than via the housing at the back. Skilful avoidance of laceration worked in parallel with intravenous mock-fanblade vanes (known as 'veins') precisely timed with the fast-shuttering/shuttling configuration of the fanblades proper.
In the most extreme cases of this infantile care-policy, the fanblades were never switched off and the baby itself grew up within the wiggle-room of the slightly elasticated housing of the hub as well as being simultaneously weaned off an unfortunately hit-and-miss targetting of inward and outward bodily metabolisms.
The 'veins' - spinning in tune with the fanblades - had special 'baffles' inserted along the length of their inner 'rifled' circuits both to facilitate and resist, at the optimum moments, various flows of sustenance and slurry. Scientifically-contrived particles were triggered to collide at various crucial flashpoints - a 'process music' that the inhabitants of that land took for granted as the barely heard/whirred substructure of Beethoven's Ninth. A delightful resonance with the fanblades.
Until something went wrong, which it often did. For example, today, a piece of bread was dropped on a fan by a passing bird escaped from the aviary in Cern Zoo.
You see, the people often put the fans outside in the garden on extension-leads, because it got too cold and draughty to have them in the house.
So ends the Swiftian Fable with a moral regarding the Large Hadron Collider
NEW FANBLADE FABLE (2) at link immediately above.
New Fanblade Fable (2)
In those far-off-the-wall days, resistant baffles were built within the inner-tubes of the tyres on bicycle wheels. And the spinning spokes were fantail-flanged to mimic fanblades.
Brian loved pedalling around, thus fanning the otherwise stagnant air in his wake. Summers, in those ancient boyish days, were not only quite endless but also steeped in what sensitive souls like Brian called 'atmospheric doldrums'. Indeed, the sky formed its own version of the Sargasso Sea, reflecting* the sun-scorched countryside through which Brian's bike travelled in a circle to and from his family home.
*Reflections that the sky's intrinsic blueness turned from bleached-yellow into weedy green.
==================================
The world then needed more fanblades at every turn, so Hadron Colliders of various sizes were built all over the land in the same way as wind farms were once built at sea. For many years, there has been one such wind farm opposite where I live. Now derelict as its fanblades no longer turn. Tangled-up as they are in the sky.
Today, at Summer's end, the pedalling silhouettes of various increasingly breathless Brians on bikes gently pedal along the aging horizon of my hopes and dreams.
Not off-the-wall so much, as off-the-earth.
NEW FANBLADE FABLE (3) at link immediately above.
New Fanblade Fable (3)
The jaundiced ceiling bore the steady spinning of giant mosquito-wing fanblades that were synchronised-swimming in the smoky air of Gordon Desmond’s office in what he laughably called film-noir land.
GD was a grizzled curmudgeon who had grown into a singularity from two separate men at different ends of the age spectrum - perhaps father and son, one of whom had died, but he was never sure which one he truly was. He made a living from coining new words and absurd truths and other angles upon dubious existence – not only to discover ‘whodunnit?’ in this self-fabricated black-and-white film within which his slowly shuttling visions had made him live but also to summon human characters to his office that he could later write about as if they had never existed other than in the fiction he subsequently wrote.
“Hi, GD,” said a man-too-mean-to-be-me called Mack Hadrian. He had sailed into GD’s office as if he owned it. A deeply furrowed face with a line in lying that laid his soul open to the truth.
He continued, without waiting for GD even to acknowledge his presence: “You know they’ve started building the first collider for our city...”
GD now looked up at Mack Hadrian. He knew that the world had built a number of what were called colliders to stir the air from its endemic stagnancy. The only way to disperse the global climactic slow-down. Effectively, they were spinning fans that whirlpooled the air in a crop of tornado funnels, hoping at least to trigger further such spirals of storm elsewhere ... thus igniting a new-born airiness that everyone could breathe in perpetuo. Not that breathing was yet as difficult as it was feared to become if such measures were not taken. Called colliders in sarcastic reference to the very thing their fanblades mustn’t manage to do! A superstitious ‘baffle’ that had worked in many fields of human endeavour throughout history. If not obviously so.
“We need to discover,” said Hadrian, lighting a cigar, “who or what has been sabotaging many other colliders so at least this one where we live can work properly.”
GD knew there had been rumours of an underground movement called Cern Zoo that had sent ‘animals’ or ‘birds’ to drop foreign bodies into the colliders’ fan-systems elsewhere. A sort of wish-fulfilment of matter-over-mind in collision with mind-over-matter. Nobody really knew Cern Zoo’s motives, and how many levels of bluff at which it worked.
The ‘animals’ or ‘birds’ had resorted recently to dropping themselves suicidally into the fan-systems. But that was yet only hearsay.
GD looked quizzically at Hadrian. “Hmmm, you want me to investigate?”
“I’ll make it worth your while.”
At that moment GD’s office fan suddenly discombulated upon something extraneous - one blade's chance ricochet off the wall sending it into Hadrian’s head.
GD shrugged as he suddenly realised what was what regarding the contents of Hadrian’s head. Not a brain. But a tiny fan, itself now spluttering to a halt upon bone and bloody gristle.
GD’s job had apparently been done even before he started it. Pity nobody would now pay him. And he looked at the ceiling, sighing. “It’s gonna get real hot in here”, he thought, with the onset of a psychologically self-induced breathlessness.
New Fanblade Fable (4)
Meanwhile, the bird returned to the aviary at Cern Zoo to the sound of resounding cheeps.
And roars and lowings and squeaks and brays ... and silence from the snakes and insects.
Amazingly, one Zoo feature that was assumed to be ever silent broke into what could only be described as the screeching of chalk (or nails?) on an old-fashioned school blackboard. It was the crudely ‘drawn’ giant carved into the side of the limestone hill overlooking the zoo - a priapic landmark that the visitors took for granted as it had been positioned there for years on the upslope of the extraneous glance.
Loaves and fishes went missing, too, as the sound of hollow feet vanished in the opposite direction by which it was thought the bird had flown back. The pity was a drawing couldn’t fly. Even by the skin of its fingernails.
New Fanblade Fable (5)
The country pub had regulars ...that pub, you know, in the shadow of the chalk-giant who ever wielded his mighty 'hadron'.
One such regular was Susan. Not a bag-lady, but one that would have been a bag-lady without her spot here or without her inexplicable availability of wherewithal to cadge drinks, even to buy them for others on occasion. She not only sat in her inglenook-seat enshrined for so many years as her spot – she not only drank the drink, talked the talk, but also she wrote things out in long-hand. Some assumed them mindless doodlings, some others reportage of quaint character, others mere fictions.
Today, with few visitors, and even fewer regulars like Susan, she examined her prized ancient fountain pen. Filling and re-filling it from the black ink-pot that kept company with today’s tipple. It was a weighty-barrelled instrument that was heavenly-crafted to her bespoke handling and primed with fanblade fables just aching to be written out. Slightly whirring inside ... or was that her imagination?
She began to write...
“With the unspoken complicity of their keepers, the Cern Zoo animals left two by two, crossing the pebbly land towards the Collider that they knew as Nemo’s Ark...”
When writing, Susan lost all track of time. Regulars came, regulars went, but this regular that was herself remained, it seemed, a force forever. The spirit of ‘pub talk’ ... but in writing.
Self-devoured by inky ghosts in advance of splaying themselves in cantilevered articulations of blot or that were simply minced by spinning thought-processes before they even reached the paper...
...until forever stalled ... or she felt her own God’s loving arms around her, whispering sweetly in her ear: “Zoocern, Zoocern.” Her name she’d always spelt like that. Or was that imagination?
Her God, the ultimate devourer. The last five words unwritten.
A Fanblade Fable - by Bob Lock. At link immediately above.
Links for all the Fanblade Fables shown at link immediately above.
NEW FANBLADE FABLE (6) at link immediately above.
