Friday, June 26, 2009

when propellers are like trees...

sonnier

"and there, beyond all this vastness of furnaces and clanging machinery, you will find at last the quiet, simple thing that all this is about: namely, the smooth column of steel, lying in cool and comfortable bearings and turning round and round with no sound - the propeller shaft. a passage in which you cannot quite stand upright conveys its great length to the tail of the ship.

think of a tree. the roots of a tree spread in a most complicated manner through the ground, extracting all kinds of necessary things. this nourishment passes, unified up the plain column of its trunk, and bursts out in the air into a countless multitude of leaves. so all the varying forces, the stresses, the resistances, proceeding from that welter of machinery, are unified into the simple rotation of this horizontal column: are conducted calmly along its length into the sea: and there burgeon suddenly into the white and glass-green foliage of the swirls, the tumbling currents, the enormously powerful jostling of crowded water which is a ships wake"

text: richard hughes, in hazard
image: keith sonnier, 1968

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1 Comments:

Blogger ArtSparker said...

Did I ask before if you knew the Richard Hughes book "The Spider's Palace"? Wonderfully weird.

5:49 PM  

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