The Leviathan of modernity - of facts that swiftly become fictions - is somewhat connected to Pasteur's doctrine of germs (prev.) Germs are the "facts" that Man the scientist is combatting. However, this is also a fiction, since a natural environment is simply one where germs flourish and breakdown organic matter on the prairies, in the forests and ponds.
This fiction is like a gigantic hospital. Francis Stevens' The Citadel of Fear seems to presage this, with the "hospital hush" of the lost Aztec lake-city of Tlapallan. Fifteen years on from Colin O'Hara's escape, his erstwhile friend and frankly fiendish Archer Kennedy's scientific replication is taking shape.
Before going into the rest of the book in more detail, my eye was caught by Blue Sandford's Euston station underground protest at the HS2 speed link to the Highlands. Investigation revealed her to be the daughter of eccentric environmentalist and Scottish aristocratic Roc, who owns the island of Gometra off Mull.
I was frankly appalled by what I read on Gometra.org and here quote an extract.
When people talk about being carbon neutral, they are not usually talking about drawdown (removal) of the cumulative historical forcing..
Forcing is the trapping of excess heat in CO2, methane.. Much of this drawdown will need to be provided by ceasing livestock husbandry..(gometra.org)
This is like saying that a very small Scottish island with free-ranging farmed herds and off-grid electricity isn't necessarily "green".
So ludicrous an assertion is that that it could be he's a 5th columnist, more likely an eccentric coot especially going by the names of his flock. Blue and Laser are the two in the tunnel; then there's N.S.S.for No Sheep Shagging ( known affectionately as Nessie) and Punt (to commemorate his Cambridge Alma Mater).
What he's really doing is using "facts" without the much more blatant fact that he is on an island surrounded by sea.the sea itself is a gigantic carbon-sink of decayed fish, while free-range gorse and heather where cattle roam to graze stores carbon in the natural cycles of animal metabolism.
In his obsession with "scientific facts", Herr Sandford doesn't seem.to be aware of these rather commonplace functions of animals. Well, Stevens' book seems to take this forgetfulness towards a use of science in a frankly deranged manner - in a manor.
The enclosed space of Kennedy's experimental chambers contains a chilling allegory - as Lovecraft stated - of modernity as a giant hospital where the primitive lusts and hungers of living things are taken out-of-context and distorted to deranged ends.
Science tries to operate without the open range, which is simply the strong and clean balance of life and death. Country pursuits involve an active ecosystem that generates health in forest, fen, swamp, stream, sea.
The chthonic and the agricultural are linked in a psychic realm of balance or harmony. This is the realm where physical strength is reflected in the gods that Man worships. The lord of the air Quetzalcoatl. The Spider God Tezcatlipoca and his sinister alter ego Nacoc-Yaotl (cont.)
