fimmtudagur, september 21, 2006

treadle

She wonders if all highways are the same at that moment in the evening when the clouds go chalky black but the sky is still blue, barely.

Once that moment was hours long in a fading summer, driving against the sun (against the stars, the moon) from Mývatn to Reykjavík. The clouds were black, but the sky, here and there, was a faded aquamarine. She could feel, out in the darkness to her right, the Vestfirðir passing like a spoke. The car was still and the black earth turned under its wheels like a great, flat disk.

No, that is wrong: the wheels of the car turned the disk of the earth, like the tread of a pit pony turning the wheel that drives the bellows that pumps the air to the miners, deep in a yet blacker night below.

2 ummæli:

Chris Sellers sagði...

Noble pony.

I like your image; I think the metaphor suggests something specific. To wit: who are the miners in the scenario? I think your heroine (with her car) is certainly the pit pony; the spinning disk of the world pumps the bellows.... Who labors deep below, beneath her feet? Who survives thanks to her constancy, able to work thanks to her work, in a night blacker than her own darkness? I know it is someone.

sterna sagði...

It is a very good question.

Did you know that pit ponies were imported from Iceland to the collieries of Britain? Most hauled, of course, and did not work a treadle like Agricola's horse in the print.

 
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