Seven-Tenths (2011)
“People in remote places labour long and hard to live by this trade. The sacks and bundles pile up in bamboo sheds or beneath a covering of dead palm fronds: the shells and corals dragged from the seabed and rotted out in heaps; the hardwood cigarette boxes stacked in piles; the sharks harvested for flesh and teeth, jaws and fins; the alligators stuffed; the baby porcupine fish inflated and lacquered; the aquarium fish poisoned.
Often it seems the more that people become urbanised, the more they want about them talismans of nature on their walls, their shelves, their keyrings. Many souvenirs are marks of pilgrimage, like religious relics, and denote travel. Many of these talismans come from the sea. They are tokens of lineage and are to Homo what a family crest is to an aristocrat. The blood line lives on. Yet perversely, this importing from one universe to another, from water to air, is invariably fatal. Nothing looks as dead as a seashell in suburbia, a piece of coral skeleton or... a stuffed fish.MoreLess
Often it seems the more that people become urbanised, the more they want about them talismans of nature on their walls, their shelves, their keyrings. Many souvenirs are marks of pilgrimage, like religious relics, and denote travel. Many of these talismans come from the sea. They are tokens of lineage and are to Homo what a family crest is to an aristocrat. The blood line lives on. Yet perversely, this importing from one universe to another, from water to air, is invariably fatal. Nothing looks as dead as a seashell in suburbia, a piece of coral skeleton or... a stuffed fish.MoreLess
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