The global atmospheric disturbances of 1909 are, of course, well-recorded fact. Few of us will forget the many national and international events, films, books and merchandise that accompanied the 100th anniversary and worldwide commemoration of that terrible time. It is history, and it is all safely in the past. It is a fit subject now to use to scare children and thrill moviegoers.
Only it isn't. The terrible truth of our lives is that our security is an illusion and that the widely held view that the Black Fog is gone, or at the very least contained in military zones is utterly false. It is greatly diminished, yes, and the most significant existing breach points with other realities, times, places - if you accept the most scientifically romantic explanation of the 1909 phenomenon - are now enclosed within high-security containment structures, but...
Always a but. We have all heard stories from the man down the pub, the unreliable aunt, the neighbour no one trusts. Whispers of things in the woods when the mist is unusually thick and dark, strange findings on the shore after a sea frett that is deep, deep grey, vanishings in the hills during a murky day when heavy thundercloud cloud has covered the high tops. We do not connect these with 1909 because, quite simply, we dare not. Our sanity depends upon refusing to acknowledge the truth: that after the upheaval of 1909 things we never quite as secure, that the membrane between here and there seems forever weakened, slightly permeable, where once it was impermeable.
Hence the Institute, and its long and patient study of the strange, the other, the things from beyond - what we call 'The Arkayne'. We aim to understand, to try and prepare for another 1909... but also to collect, examine, catalogue and categorise, to try and make sense of that otherness, what some also call the 'supernatural' and in doing so, keep the public alert to the ever-present threat.
We urge you then, above all, to remember:
Watch the skies!
Watch the seas!
Watch the ground beneath your feet!
This is not the kind of thing, after all, that you want to tread on.*
Dr Garrick Fincham (FRSAS), Director, Southburgh Institute for Arkayne Research
*An extract from Dr Fincham's 2021 inaugural address to the Royal Society for Alternative Science, on being made a Fellow of the RSAS.
No comments:
Post a Comment