If you are mixed up with trees,
how do you know they are not using you
to achieve their dark designs?
(Bruno Latour, Pasteurization of France)
Plastic bags: People make them, use them, condemn them. Regarded as the plague of our times, they are everywhere, uncontrollable, disturbing, obscuring the scenery like tumbleweed, one trillion new ones every year. Only a blink in a person’s shopping history, but they will survive, live on for centuries.
What do they spend the greater part of their lives with? Is it all bliss? Swimming in oceans (do they ever get wet?), getting whirled around by the winds? Hanging out in branches, sunbathing all day, falling in love with thorn trees? And what do the trees think about all this? We humans will never know. This is the inscrutable world of things, and their thingish affairs.