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.