A Humble Bewilderment of Love
On one of those April days, when the reddish willow branches, having lost the silver fluff of inflorescences, had not yet acquired long greyish-green leaves, when the melting snow exposed the poor land of the north, pushing yellow dandelions to the low sun, when the sky is blessedly transparent, I was wandered around a dilapidated building of sturdy pre-revolutionary brick, on the outskirts of a provincial town, one of those forced to exist in the shadow of a great neighbour, having earned only a couple of lines in a guidebook.
The power station was built in good faith, in a year before the start of the first great war. The river, blocked by a dam with an arched bridge, spilled among the still bare banks.
A reflection of a bird's flock returning home flickered in the space of water, barely free of ice. The day was clear and sad. The voices echoing in the boundless dome of the sky were ringing the same way.
One of the walls has crumbled, revealing the faded copper of old machinery, grown into a half-broken floor tiles. Moss climbed along the damp walls of the former miracle of technology, the turbine hall of a hydroelectric power station, erected on the rapids at a time when electricity was a mysterious force designed to transform the world.
Turbine blades, full of lichens, resemble petrified skeletons of dinosaurs. The perfect symmetry of interweaved faience insulators reminded me of a honeycomb. Many of them have crashed, but the pattern of the spheres remained almost untouched, designed to fill the space as reasonably as possible, not allowing the machine to lose the will to work laid in it.
This message is alien to the machine itself, which does not possess reason, but any industrial building or mechanism, albeit almost merged with nature, is stamped by the human desire to rule.
The dangling wires expose their bronze or steel guts, swaying under the sea wind. The long-abandoned station seems to be a part of the coastal landscape, almost a rock. However, once inside, you notice its artificial origin.
A person trying to calculate how many faience insulators will fit in the limited space of the electrical panel will use a Gaussian formula. A bee sculpting its honeycomb does the same process instinctively.
The genius of mathematics calculation is as natural as the action of a bee, as the exact number of a dandelion’s petals, as the only possible way to return to the north in spring.
It is also the only possible way to a heavenly space, to the bliss of love for the world around us, equally containing the marble chips of the ancient faience of the electrical insulator and a grasshopper, a watchman of darkness.
In our latitudes, April is still cold for insects, but after a couple of weeks, the first clumsy butterflies will flutter over the dandelions growing in the glades. In the spring, nature is awkward, always a little strange, not yet developed, dreamily looking into the world, promising to be beautiful.
The best thing that can happen in the spring is not what has already happened but what must surely come next week, on the next page.
Spring is quietly doing its business, gilding glass fragments in the large windows of the former turbine hall, letting the green glimpses of the future foliage peek through the tight branches of willow growing on the electric, as it is called here, pond.
Sparrows, having recovered after winter, chirp in the arches of the bridge, but nothing stirs up quiet water. Nothing can revive dead turbine blades or move forward the rusted arrow on the overgrown sensor.
What remains is to draw in a dust a vector diagram of the resonance of currents, to yearn for someone who has left, to wait for life, where the willow will soon lower the branches into an electric pond, where transparent butterflies will be replaced by painted ones, where the forgotten engine room will rise from sleep.
The world will complete its promise, but for now, I will remain a little grey-eyed chrysalis with the short name of a flower or planet, the awkward goddess of early spring, the blessed perplexed Flora.
Comments