Dark Partner

In addition to the repressed material, the unconscious contains all those psychic components that have fallen below the threshold, as well as subliminal sense-perceptions. Moreover, we know, from abundant experience as well as for theoretical reasons, that besides this the unconscious contains all the material that has not yet reached the threshold of consciousness. These are the seeds of future contents. Equally we have every reason to suppose that the unconscious is never quiescent in the sense of being inactive, but presumably is ceaselessly engaged in the grouping and regrouping of so-called unconscious fantasies. This activity should be thought of as relatively autonomous only in pathological cases; normally it is coordinated with consciousness in a compensatory relationship.

-- CG Jung, “The Structure of the Unconscious,” appendix in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW7, par. 445




THE STORY OF SAINT ORAN

Oran may may have already been on the Isle of the Druids when Columba and his 12 companions arrived in 563 A.D. to found the Abbey of Iona.

At first, the abbey construction fares badly. Each day’s work is leveled overnight by some disturbed spirit. Columba sets up a watch to observe what happens at night, but each person set to the task is found dead the next day amid the fallen timbers.

Columba decides to do the vigil himself and sits alone at the site in the howling cold dark. In the middle of the night, a great and terrible being in the shape of a half-woman, half-fish comes to Columba from the surrounding waters. Columba asks the apparition what is repelling his efforts to build at Iona and the fish-woman says she does not know, but that it would continue to happen until one of his men offered themselves to be buried alive in a grave seven times as deep as a man’s length.

Lots are cast and Oran is chosen (other accounts say he volunteered) and he lay down in the footers and was buried. No wind rises up that night to spoil the work and the construction proceeds without incident.

After three days and nights Columba became curious to know how his follower had fared and ordered him dug up. The monks excavate the spot where Oran had been sacrificed, finally uncovering his face. Oran’s eyes pop open, and staring right at Columba he declares, "There is no wonder in death, and hell is not as it is reported. In fact, the way you think it is is not the way it is at all." Horrified, the saint had Oran buried again at all haste, crying "Uir! Uir! air beul Odhrain" or "Earth, earth on Oran’s mouth!" (The saying "chaidh uir air suil Odhrain" or "Earth went over Oran’s eye" is still widely heard in the Highlands and Hebrides.


Despite the frightful encounter, Columba dedicated the monestary’s graveyard to Oran (Reilig Odhrain) and honored Oran’s sacrifice by saying that no man may access the angels of Iona but through Oran. The bones of many Scottish, Irish and Norwegian kings were sent to Oran’s graveyard; Duncan and Macbeth are interred in the St. Oran chapel at the center of the graveyard.





ENERGY FROM THE RESTLESS SEA: A RENEWABLE SOURCE, AND CLEAN, BUT NOT WITHOUT ITS CRITICSE
Heather Timmons
New York Times, August 3, 2006

NEWCASTLE, England - There is more riding the waves here than surfers, thanks to a growing number of scientists, engineers and investors.

A group of entrepreneurs is harnessing the perpetual motion of the ocean and turning it into a commodity in high demand: energy. Right now, machines of various shapes and sizes are being tested off shores from the North Sea to the Pacific -- one may even be coming to the East River in New York State this fall -- to see how they capture waves and tides and create marine energy.

The industry is still in its infancy, but it is gaining attention, much because of the persistence of marine energy inventors, like Dean R. Corren, who have doggedly lugged their wave and tidal prototypes around the world, even during the years when money and interest dried up. Mr. Corren, trim and cerebral, is a scientist who has long advocated green energy and pushed through numerous conservation measures when he was chairman of the public energy utility for the city of Burlington, Vt.

Another believer in the technology is Max Carcas, head of business development for Ocean Power Delivery of Edinburgh. ''In the long run, this could become one of the most competitive sources of energy,'' said Mr. Carcas.

His company manufactures the Pelamis, a snakelike wave energy machine the size of a passenger train, which generates energy by absorbing waves as they undulate on the ocean surface.

With high oil prices, dwindling fuel supplies and a growing pressure to reduce global warming, governments and utilities have high hopes for tidal energy. The challenge now is turning an accumulation of research into a viable commercial enterprise, which for many years has proved elusive.

No one contends that generating energy from the oceans is a preposterous idea. After all, the ''fuel'' is free and sustainable, and the process does not generate pollution or emissions.

Moreover, it is not just oceans that could be tapped; the regular flow of tides in bodies of water linked to oceans, like the East River, hold promise too. In fact, it seemed like such a sensible idea that inventors started making the first wave of such generators centuries ago. Many operated like dams, trapping water and then releasing it after the tides fell. But they were outmoded with the rise of steam engines and other more efficient fuel sources.

Ocean energy had a brief revival when oil prices rose in the 1970's, and prototypes were tested in Europe and China. But financing dried up when oil prices were low in the 1990's, and advances in wind turbines and other renewable energy elbowed out tidal projects.

These days, wave power designs vary from machines that look like corks bobbing in the ocean to devices that resemble snakes pointing into waves. There are shoreline machines that cling, like limpets, to rocks.

Tidal power machines, in contrast, often come in the form of turbines, which look like underwater windmills, and generate energy by spinning as tides move in and out; some inventors also are testing concrete-and-steel machines that lie on the seabed and pipe pressurized water back to the shore.

Even big commercial power companies are joining the action. General Electric; Norsk Hydro, a Norwegian company; and the Germany power giant Eon have recently pledged money for new projects or investments in tiny marine energy companies.

''It is an untapped renewable energy source,'' said Mark Huang, senior vice president for technology finance in General Electric's media and communications business, which is financing marine projects. ''There is no where to go but up,'' Mr. Huang said.

... A handful of commercial projects are also in the works, including the world's first ''wave farm,'' as the fields of machines are known, being installed off the north coast of Portugal. A field of tidal turbines is also being built off the shore of Tromso, Norway.

Britain could generate up to 20 percent of the electricity it needs from waves and tides, according to an estimate by a government-financed group here called the Carbon Trust. That is about 12,000 megawatts a day at current usage, or three times what Britain's largest power plant produces now.

... One research center here in Newcastle is putting marine devices to the test in a wave pool, and another is deploying them in the roiling ocean off the Orkneys, the low islands off northernmost Scotland. The Scottish government has pledged to generate 18 percent of its energy from renewable resources by 2010 ...




SILENT PARTNER

August 17

My silent partner in this
blue enterprise is a
relentless patron and
idea-man, offering up
wave after wave for
me to mount and ride
upon this fevered fish of song
toward shores too dark
yet for a name:
His lunar tide grows
in my bright eye, the way
that dreams profuse
when you write them down:
I stand here on the same
damn shore, straining
to hear my mother’s voice
in the shells of history.
& slowly become aware
how this wave today is
so lushly curved, swelling
like a nutsack’s womb,
aching up toward full
& then collapsing down
the shore in a choiring,
angelic boom, the basso
of old man Dick who
flukes behind the anima
who called my ears to sea
when my dam sang
over me when I was
so young, so boundless,
a cathedralled ecstasy:
My silent partner works
a deep-sea farm where
he harnesses the motion
of deep things to my songs,
dowsing leys of of first fire
from squid squink into
my pen’s black ink,
hurling up a voltage
which amps the heart’s
whole grid, a triune uteral
where balls and head floor
and roof my soul’s casbah,
my vowels thrice enwombed
in salt’s unsaid brogue: He
whispers so deep in my
history that words are worlds
formed in black history
in the out and inner reaches
of God’s space: I paddle
on a coffin back to home
and my silent partner’s
in the box, Oran’s skull
perhaps or the cinders
of the first book Brendan
burnt protesting fantasy
as false: Oh this is my
box, I never travel without
my box: Home of the family
jewels and devil crest:
House of the pussy-slish
of sweet muse swash
connubling every
bedded and morning here
where I fuck the metaphors
with all the abandon I
once fucked their
hairy pinkest
metaphors for so
many soggy black years:
This scrawl belongs to
the day man, but what
plots its motion is
a trade secret of his
partner, a spice route
hidden in a magic map
scrolled helter-skelter
underneath my brain,
like an inverse language
lurking beneath the
stairs of the singer’s tongue
almost articulate
but never quite:
My silent partner whispers
me to trade in a strange
familiar coin, an lucre
so old and new as to shout
of alien worlds beyond
the reach of dime-store
rhymes: My black book’s
an old boat & a pagan
coffin to boot and
yet the tide is far
far colder, older, a
smoulder of first days:
My voice is hoarse
of mortal days damaged by
the immortal fray; yet I
oar on with bare hands
cupping blue immensity,
each song a happy dram
of the infinite my silent
partner distills in the
quim of the hottest thrall:
I’m just a lost speck
paddling home
with the sea’s harvest in
an empty box, a
shipwrecked man my
dark partner sails,
happy, wild, free,
wealthy in all that
mythic mother
poured so vast and
deep in me
when I was inside Thee
yesterday, today,
tomorrow I pray too: