We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and the ocean that we were made from.
-Robinson Jeffers
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bag #1
Cities in a larval state possess a large number of seeds along their roadsides. Besides a multifarious population of birds, their great predator is the bag: the last of the animals living wild, in crags as well as on plains both urban and pseudo-rural. The bag fragments into diverse specimens which, after coexisting in the air, fold themselves up, moving along in the shadows of traffic lights and billboards that wish the traveler a timely return.
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bag #2
The bag is an organism possessing a system of orbital migration leading it to adapt both to the breadth of oceans and the heights of mountains. Bags form colonies that in turn absorb other colonies of marine mammals and reptiles, who –in confusion– eat them, believing them to be jellyfish or Medusas. In this way, bags travel within organisms tossed to their own deaths upon beaches and continental shelves.
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bag #3
The bag, as recently studied by Darwin’s heirs, has turned out to be a biological enigma that violates the moral laws of nature, most notably due to its longevity. To this day, there is no reliable data on how long these organisms exist before degrading. What is known for certain is that they nest in store and supermarket check-outs awaiting their place in spaces inhabited by human beings and from where they will cast themselves around the known universe.
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bag #4
Bags eat away at the steadfast beliefs held by human beings regarding usefulness. Through this very effective tactic, they determine their multiplication and survival. Only one organism on Planet Earth is more clever: bacteria, which model in the human brain a series of imaginary material needs and so create the conditions for their infinite reproduction.
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bag #5
Bags can live for years high in a tree, much like other creatures of the plastic animal kingdom. They compete with seeds to conquer the air as a means of locomotion and in cities with wide open spaces, they reach flying altitudes of close to 65 feet. Through these adaptations, evolved over the past century, the bag ensures its survival in remote areas of the atmosphere.
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bag #6
A sacred animal among various human populations, the bag has replaced ancient totemic figures such as the dragon in China or the lion in sub-Saharan regions. In Latin America, it lives in harmony with the continent’s mestizo reality and has come to be included in Christian and Indigenous rites in jungles and in the sierras without wreaking havoc or new and bloody coups.
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bag #7
Among Earth’s hollows and limestone bluffs, deep within, as if forging a new geological layer, striving to participate in tectonic activity or altering scientific precepts in order to establish a new law, the bag embeds itself, defying erosion and the length of time it takes an animal to become fossil, stone, or sand.
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bag #8
At night, the plastic forms glow like an arc of will-o’-the-wisps. We then tend to think of the magnificent aurora borealis so as to calm ourselves.
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bag #9
Ancient algae that grew into undersea banks or forests over thousands of years, providing refuge and habitat to fish of myriad shapes and colors, once communicated through sound waves, generating an aqueous yet translucent language no longer in existence.
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bag #10
Bags brought things to a full stop. It was linguists who attempted to translate their language into a form comprehensible to human beings. Linguists are part of a lower hierarchy within the organizational structure of cities; they have no power of summons –except for good ol’ Noam Chomsky– and, like the majority, they’re hampered from intervening in reality.
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bag #11
In the less visible corners of retail shops, space fills varied uses; there the staff place their bags containing fruit, bread with cold cuts, or packages of cookies; they pour themselves plastic cups of water and soda that slowly erode in their interiors, forming populations of new residues, new colonies for economic and social trade.
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bag #11.1
A krill is illuminated under a microscope; we observe how it absorbs miniscule algae, polyethylene particles in suspension enter its organism. The krill is moved along by the cold currents of Cape Horn until it reaches the mouth of a fish –unable now to achieve its finest form– captured by the fishing nets of Norwegian or Chinese factory ships: these quickly can its body to distribute and deposit it in a supermarket aisle. An average citizen purchases the tin, opens it at home, shares it with their family or in total solitude, with or without a side of vegetables, consumes it, chews and swallows it, unlike the particles already adhered to the intestine, which persist on their long migration.
All of this can be observed through the lens of a microscope.
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bag #12
Affixed to cultural goods such as books, plastic wrappers and bags enter the minds of consumers through the light reflected by their surfaces. Almost instantaneously, the subject’s neurons evoke connections such as: cleanliness, transparency, order, and rigor. This translates to the ballot box, where the same words encase other words such as genocide, austerity, foreign investment, and prison.
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bag #13
At the bottom of a dark gutter lies a white glove, like the hands Dante saw when crossing the river where all those who never did anything came to lie.
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bag #14
In the embrace of a father and a son, there’s a plastic logic; between speculation and dark matter, there’s a bag of tricks; between the cross and the alienated, someone left holding the bag; between communism and mange, a carpetbag; between simulation and biology, a grab bag. And at the end, along the inexhaustible avenue, beyond the carburetors and the sirens, like an upright cinder block, there’s a man wrapped in a bag.
