Flights

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES

The planet’s witnessing the appearance of new creatures now, ones that have already conquered all continents and almost every ecological niche. They travel in packs and are anemophilous, covering large distances without difficulty.

Now I see them from the window of the bus, these airborne anemones, whole packs of them, roaming the desert. Individual specimens cling on tight to brittle little desert plants, fluttering noisily – perhaps this is the way they communicate.

The experts say these plastic bags open up a whole new chapter of earthly existence, breaking nature’s age-old habits. They’re made up of their surfaces exclusively, empty on the inside, and this historic foregoing of all contents unexpectedly affords them great evolutionary benefits. They are mobile and light; prehensile ears permit them to latch onto objects, or the appendages of other creatures, thus expanding their habitat. They started out in suburbs and rubbish heaps; it took them several windy seasons to reach the provinces and far-flung wilds. But by now they have occupied vast tracts of the globe – from gigantic highway junctions to winding beaches, from the abandoned lots of grocery shops all the way to the bony slopes of the Himalayas. At first glance they seem delicate, frail, but this is an illusion – they are long-lived, almost indestructible; their fleeting bodies won’t decompose for some three hundred more years.

Never before have we been faced with such an aggressive form of being. Some, in a kind of metaphysical rapture, believe it’s in the bags’ nature to take over the world, to conquer all continents; that they are pure form that seeks contents but immediately tires of them, throwing themselves to the wind yet again. They maintain the plastic bag is a wandering eye that belongs to some imaginary ‘there’, a mysterious observer taking part in the panopticon. Others, meanwhile, with their feet more firmly on the ground, assert that these days evolution favours fleeting forms that can flit through the world while at the same time attaining ubiquitousness.