blimp

Funny how things have their words and words have their associations. I just saw a blimp overhead and thought blimp: American football, used cars, life insurance.

It didn't have to be that way. There are other words.

Dirigible. Steam and coal dust, soot and titanium steel. Materials handbooks. Celluloid, plastic when it was a sexy new thing and expensive, replacing horn and rubber.

Zeppelin. All of the immediately above and more, and in German. Fritz Lang, van der Graf, field marshals, black and white film, and, inevitably, an electrified bass line.

Airship. There is something evocative about the simple term airship. Or perhaps it is just that I know a story from the monastery at Clonmacnoise. The annals report that the monks were at prayer when a clattering was heard and the anchor of a ship was seen to have fallen from the sky, swung into the church and caught there, the fluke of the anchor under the altar. Amazed, the monks rushed outside and looked upward only to be yet more amazed to see that the anchor was at the end of a rope extending upward to a ship in full sail above the church. It is difficult to imagine their astonishment or, even, terror, for Clonmacnoise was one of those inland foundations established after the first assaults of the vikings pushed Irish monks ashore from their prior favorite haunts on offshore islands. In the middle of Ireland they must have though themselves impervious to maritime raiders, and yet here was a ship. Gazing up at the hull from beneath, they saw a man leap over the side and swim downward beside the rope as if the air offered to him the resistance of water. His cheeks were puffed out with the strain of holding his breath. Reaching the end of the rope, he strained at the anchor, but could not free it. The monks realized that he was on the point of drowning and lent their strength to the task. The anchor was freed, and the man then pushed off upward again swimming and was hauled aboard by his fellow crewmen. The airship then sailed off again.

It would have been totally different if it had been a blimp, I think.