The Pacific Vortex is not the Afterlife

"If the soul of the commodity which Marx occasionally mentions in jest existed, it would be the most empathetic ever encountered in the realm of souls, for it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle."
--Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (via othervoices.org)


By now I suppose most everyone has seen this. Werner Herzog is Plastic Bag. Ramin Bahrani's lyrical film addresses humanity's relation to the material world by creating an actual relationship between Herzog's eponymous bag and his female owner (she dumps him halfway through the story; he moves on).

Ever since they first appeared (so long ago now), the bags have seemed an apt figure for human estrangement not just from nature, but from the world more broadly (just where, initially, were those things supposed to go?). So I was glad to see the bag voyage to the Pacific Vortex, that immense gyre of plastic garbage floating for miles in the Pacific Ocean (there are actually several, and not just in the Pacific, as it turns out).

I often think about the Vortex, and I'm convinced that if people were forced to look at pictures of it (perhaps at the point of sale) being mindful might come more easily. It's harder than you think; some residents of DC were so reportedly so incensed about the new 5 cent bag surcharge this winter that they vowed to shop in Virginia, that fabulous frontier where bags range freely and don't cost a red cent. (Take that, planet Earth!)

Of course, nobody's likely to make a film about a plastic tampon applicator, but they are just as eternal/infernal; I suppose they're just one of an entire karmic class of personal care flotsam. I used to see them every winter among the seawrack when I walked the beach at Ocean City, or Assateague, or Fenwick Island. Actually, tampon applicators are far worse than plastic bags, simply because we must not indicate that we even see them: they're about LADYPARTS, unmentionable even in commercials for feminine hygiene.

Stardust revealed by Hubble Telescope

Source: Hubblesite.org


From the HubbleSite NewsCenter:

"This brand new Hubble photo is of a small portion of one of the largest seen star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. Towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula. The scene is reminiscent of Hubble's classic "Pillars of Creation" photo from 1995, but is even more striking in appearance. The image captures the top of a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being pushed apart from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks like arrows sailing through the air."


Our world sometimes seems so snarky and small ("hey--that looks like the liner from a Yes album"). Yet these images make me lightheaded; I have no words with which to name what they inspire. My hands fall motionless on the keyboard, as if this were some sort of meditation. Indeed, at no other time do I find it so natural to be absolutely still. It's as close as I have come for many years to anything approaching religion.

Prolegomena to Any Future Anything*

While elegance is refusal, this blog commends instead the exultance of acceptance, the radical acceptance even of what might look like refuse. Trashadelica: because I’ve washed up on an isolated shore under my own uncertain navigation. Trashadelica: the aesthetic of a solitary bricoleur, the perspective from an invisible academic atoll, an ethos of well-intentioned liminality.

Trashadelica: the surprise in the cadavre exquis, not to mention the recycled cadaver; for more on the latter, see Mary Roach’s awesome book Stiff, a sincere survey of the heroic, surprisingly varied careers of dead bodies. Trashadelica forages (what is psiloscybin but repurposed poisoning?) and reveres frugality: lichens can live on rocks, and nothing on earth is more beautiful, or makes more out of less.

Trashadelica exults not in debris per se, but in heterogeneity, hybridity: what comes in over the transom, since everything’s dust anyway, “star stuff,” to quote Carl Sagan. But before its atoms are rearranged some stuff might turn up at Value Village, where one can find both staph infections and the stray Limoges box. Trashadelica is sometimes trashed, because, as Rimbaud knew, there is much to be found in the disordering of the senses, though my stance is more humble.

Trashadelica: most of all because I admit defeat at trying to divine any grand literary purpose, the salvation of some ecriture feminine or even a single genre, let alone a verifiable trajectory for autobiography. I’m closing in on a half-century, after all, so better late than never, with a shout-out to Ken Macrorie: it is right to give him thanks and praise. Trashadelica: candygrams from my brain (inestimable gratitude to you, John Jacob, for that line and so much else).

Trashadelica: it’s not in the OED. But here’s what I did find: –delic (2nd ½ of psychedelic), from the Greek, deloun: to make manifest, reveal. As for the word trash itself: origins fittingly unknown. “1. A thing of little or no value; worthless or poor quality stuff, esp. literature; rubbish….” Okay. So what's in there? And what else?

*I freely admit to stealing this title from the late Ellen Kreitler, who was brilliant, who had read Kant and everything else (I have not), and whose Prolegomena I read at VCU in the 1980's (when the mainframe--hey, UNIX for People!--was newly installed in the Hibbs building and no one dreamed of actually charging to print a document). Sic transit gloria mundi.