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The Tvindmill
A Poem by Thorkild Bjørnvig
One has ones black moments,
when one asks oneself: What good does it do,
everything that’s written,
and hoped for,
appealing or harmful.
But then something happens.
Finally a tower is built,
which isn’t a tower of Babylon
which dispels and confuses
and never can be finished.
Not either a prestige- and lookout tower.
But a tower which gets wings
and uses just hat which all towers defy,
the only horizontal element,
the wind.
The wind -
in our technological world
the most useless of all
and at times the most harmful.
The wind, which whips up the sea,
so derricks capsize,
supertankers break
or drift onto rocks
and turns the ocean, the great maternal lap,
into a pool of poison for everything living.
The wind, which first dried the fruitful, but now loosens
the worn-out and poisoned soil,
whirls it up and away in dust storms
and leaves the sterile structures -
brings about the deadly erosion, which sweepingly uncovers
the hip socket and ribcase of the Earth.
The wind, which before drove all kinds of ships across the
ocean,
and still fills the sails, but now just for pleasure
or for the remote and destitute inshore fishermen,
and turned all kinds of mills -
now finally brought to use again.
What is Tvind? It is - among other things
the experiment,
supported by no government
counted by no politics -
Policy: "The Art of the Possible -"
imagine that the possible is so limited
and politics so designed
that it always, or almost always, just promotes
that which already has power.
The experiment,
grown from the basement and workshop
of the outhouse,
organized, taken seriously, realized,
of a magnitude never tried before.
Just like the old cathedrals,
built without compensation, by many,
skilled like unskilled -
built by one motive: Enthusiasm,
to prove
what is actually possible.
Small is beautiful,
but large now and then as well -
an ash, an oak, a Californian giant Redwood
a mill such as this
with cherubian wing span.
This is not a return
to a previous stage,
not either a result of a linear development -
but an elementary energy form,
the old millers’ technology
of canvas and wood
repeated on a higher level,
a spiral-like return.
It’s no fission of the nucleus,
whose strengths and rays,
otherwise there in near- or distant rings,
cosmic revolution
around the organic life -
now released threateningly
or killing, in its midst.
But an ingeniously created resistance
against the wind, wherever it comes from,
transformed into movement, transformed undestructively
to energy. In league with the wind,
with the breath of the earth, which carries
the pollen of the grain, and freshens up and spreads
paralyzing fogs
in the mind and in the air.
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