I’m watching the tide come up the river. It brings gulls, terns, sometimes a seal. Later it goes out again pulling brackish water over estuary mud. Silver, black and slick mud like skin under the legs of wading birds. This is the valley where I grew up. The river and its tides bring flotsam; floating islands of branches, and bodies of animals, sometimes. One Christmas it brought a dead pony. It also brings plastic things, which gather in inlets, washed in by currents, caught in rushes and reeds.
My brother and I used to scour the shoreline when the tide was out. Finding an old handbag dried and flattened like a fish. Vertebrae of a cow, cresting out of stones. A dead swan now a feathered outline.Faded red fishing buoys. A bottle covered in barnacles, no message inside, on the outside, many mouths.
We once found the plastic casing of some US military object, one of our most exciting finds. We made mud bombs, but living remotely from others, we had no one to throw them at. The innocence of being a child means you don’t really think about what the US military is, or what a bomb is, or what is death (though you’re slowly learning), or even why it’s sad why things wash up at all. Many of the plastic objects go unchanged by the river, or else one part of them rots, while other parts remain imperishable, a doll with a plastic smiling face, cloth body already colonised by mosses, sinking into the green.
I’m thinking about how oil is one of the ingredients of plastic, and how oil is said to be made from the remains of dinosaurs, and also about the Iranian philosopher Reza Negrastani, who proposed in his theory-fiction Cyclonopedia, that oil is sentient, and demonic. He imagines that oil stores energy from the sun in its reserves as an earthly resistance to solar life. Oil desires, through wars and world capitalism, to bring about a destructive ‘desertification’ of all life, ‘a burning immanence with the sun’.
Archeologists examine prehistoric fossils to decipher the past and now we are forming ourselves into future plastic fossils. Dinosaurs are in oil which are in plastic, and now, it’s said, the plastic is inside of us. My friend said it’s like the song ‘O Ro the Rattlin Bog’. But instead of the flea on the feather and the feather on the bird, and the bird on the tree, and the tree in the bog, and the bog down in the valley-o, it’s the dinosaur in the oil, and the oil in the plastic and the plastic in the sea, and also, the plastic in the brain and the brain in the body, but also as our ancestor, wasn’t the dinosaur inside of us already?
Actually, I just found out that oil is not made of dinosaurs after all, just another urban myth. Fossil fuels come mostly from the remains of little plants that died in wetlands, and ancient seas, decomposing under high pressure, buried deep. While alive, they get their energy from the sun, and when we burn them in their transformed state, they release their 300 million years ago sun energy once again.
It’s understandable that it’s more appealing to imagine that a long-necked plesiosaur is fueling your home heating, and even influencing your lizard brain.
But we’re not descended from dinosaurs, either, it’sthe birds, but then again, we do share 60 percent DNA with chickens. But don’t trust me, truth is malleable, and anyways, everything tends towards entropy, and now the birds are landing on the sleek mud of the estuary, long legs sinking down, long beaks screaming harsh calls under the evening sky. Estuary mud teems with life, warm after the day’s sun.
Sometimes when I’m in my boat, at high tide, I see things in the water that might suddenly submerge or move everfaster from me as I approach. Like a serpent-like neck elegantly rising and diving, suddenly changing shape. I see something bobbing out on the waves. It’s choppy today, grey clouds barrelling overhead, I’m pulling with one oar where the wind is hitting the side to keep straight. I feel what I’m looking at, is to my horror, the upright and raw leg of a horse, the rest is underneath. The leg is waving as though an arm thrust up for help. Any horse out here is but a carcass beckoning from the deep. It’s hard to pull up in my boat right on top of something already being pulled by tide or current, by small zephyrs that help or hinder. While circling the ‘leg’ I realise that it is, instead, a coke bottle, taken in some water to help its upright trajectory.
I’m thinking about microplastics, which they say are everywhere now, in salt, in honey, in us. To be plastic is to be capable of transformation. To be called plastic is to be fake, insincere. The origin of the word plastic means ‘capable of shaping a mass of matter’. Like a god. Plastic surgery, plastic inside babies waiting to be born, microplastics entering us in smaller and smaller iterations to become one with us. What will be the thoughts of a plastic brain?
I’m in my boat again, with my small terrier, and we see ducks, and a strange thing, they usually wait till you are coming close and then fly up in a chorus of quacks. But not these ones, bobbing along obediently in a line, moving from a reed bed outwards into the river. We approach, careful, dog at the prow, alert, but the ducks hold their position. The more I look at them, their movement is unnatural, I am worried they are unwell like those mice you hear about that have toxoplasmosis, and then are unafraid of the cats that hunt them. The ducks ignore the boat, and keep on moving out onto pale grey waves. They gleam too dully, no feathers here on their carefully moulded bodies. We’ve been taken in by decoy ducks, the ones that hunters use to draw out living ones, and are carefully made and weighed so that they bob on the surface, and in the meantime the real ducks have up and flown.
They keep making these new ‘Artificial Intelligence’ technologies because there is an ambition to be beyond human, (though not in an interesting way), regurgitating creativity and knowledge like a 2 euro shop ouroboros. AI is causing the world to overheat. We are flying, Icarus-like, too close to the sun until our wings melt, but now everything else burns too.
Sci fi writers always dreamed that in the future there would be robots, but what if we are to be the robots of our dreams, our future plastic self?
I am thinking about the little plastic animals I had when I was small. I recently found them again when I was clearing out my dead mother’s things. All the things that we keep that we cannot outlast. A zebra with faded stripes, an ostrich on grass, a roaring lion, orange and red, a black bear on hind legs, a tiger with foreleg outstretched, an onyx, completely black, even its eyes, a snarling leopard, a black horse with red eyes. Now we are together again, forever, my homunculi.
When we die the plants that we grew grow on after we’re gone. The china, and furniture go on. Plastic lasts longer. To be said to have great plasticity is to mean you have great ability to transform. But you can never decay. If death is eradicated through the possibility of being plastic, then will we eventually live forever? But then there’s the micro-organisms, like Ideonella Sakaiensis that eats plastic, so perhaps death is coming for us after all, and there is always the ultimate destruction in war, or the sun which will come to burn us up in the end, by our own hand, no doubt. In the river, curlews call over the waves, and washing in along the shore, even now, are a cracked blue boat, an old toy gun, a tattered white sack, a red vinyl boot, and which when I stand on, exhales a gush of water.
Suzanne Walsh