There’s that way, in a good lecture, a phrase or line will surface to capture your attention before sinking back into the texture of the whole. In the midst of Marina Zurkow’s marvelous lecture at Rice, “Haunting, Enchantment, and Leaky Ecosystems,” the phrase was this: “a place where the dead exert themselves and are loquacious.”
But what was she talking about might surprise you: plastic. The loquacious dead, sure. But loquacious plastics?
Zurkow discussed a recent visit to the New Museum’s IDEAS CITY festival in May 2013. Here’s a link. She set up a booth offering a free service: petrochemical self-assessment. How much plastic do you carry on your person? After a 15 minute examination of your person and possessions, you might receive a print out detailing quantities and types. Then you’d receive the equivalent weight in plastic pellets.
What fascinates me about this project is the willingness of participants. Dumping one’s possessions in a bin is really the stuff of airports and surveillance. And what to make of the heft of one’s own petrochemical complicity? The weight of it, and the unadorned nature of the plastic pellets, resist sleek convenience.
So before you start assessing your own plastics, one last question. Why are plastics the loquacious dead? Petrochemicals come from oil, oil from hydrocarbons, hydrocarbons from ancient life forms long dead. Death is the motor of an oil-powered culture and plastic is the face of that death.
