“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, April 1, 2011

I Met Jeremy Fisher


The trip around the Everglades is still unspeakable in the main, but here are some things I've been thinking.

The Everglades is a hyperobject.

Joel Trexler's element was the Everglades. I mean this in all seriousness. The way he held his body when he on the boat out in the Everglades was strikingly different from how he seemed when he got off the boat. It just seemed as if he lived there.

This reminds me of Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Jeremy Fisher. My love of ecology and my love of wetlands goes back to this book, which I cleaved to my bosom from the age of 2 on, taking it everywhere like a security blanket until it was totally worn.

Jeremy Fisher is a frog who lives in a house that's flooded with water. He steps out into the rain and the pond by walking out of his window. How cool is that?

1 comment:

Bill Benzon said...

Pond scum (a set of photos at Flickr). It's not the Everglades, not at all.

This little pond is in Jersey City, by some railroad tracks, not far from the Holland Tunnel. It's beautiful in its way. And the animals who live there don't know it's scum.

Haven't seen any frogs there. But I've seen turtles, and birds, and swimming furry things.