hatchlings

Describing the theatrical experience in notes for her late drama, Venice Saved, the philosopher Simone Weil states that an event, whether located in an image or "on the stage", transpires through "the slow maturation of a deed, with the universe around it—then the deed is hurled into the world". Like a hatched sea turtle heading for ocean, an action begins with a waddle across warm sand, and then, a subtle violence…as the tide catapults the deed into reception.

So rumbles from the stippled muqarna of the unfinished angel, the band-aided Self: that the port-of-call where "universe" gives way to "world", has, today, been closed; there is now little difference between the domain that engulfs an action—from the first ujjayi undulation—and those infinite waves into which we might throw it.

This new framework flips Weil's slow to fast tempo: things happen quickly, yet quickly and without end. For instance, an injurious side-effect of modern resort zoning is that commercial lighting and beachside activity disorient turtle hatchlings as they make their nighttime forays towards the water. Instead of hewing to a clear path, the migrating hatchlings become distracted and offtrack, they circle themselves on the beach, unable to find bottom.

Hatchlings are defined by the fact of their birth. To be born is to leave, or else be "hurled", from an egg. The recent waterfront development crisis lends the turtle birth as departure cycle a samsaric eternality, as action, context, and consequence exist in unitary synthesis. To the confused baby animal, the beach has Saharan proportions, the sand goes on and on until it fills up with their death; or else, if they are lucky enough to be collected by the water, the unbounded ocean sweeps them into death's mirrored infinity: the long aquatic life for which their species was intended.

In either case, though, the change in pacing is clear, as is the fact that for us, as for these turtles, survival is not guaranteed; the immediacy of a circumstance is, and so is its endlessness.

My parents' generation, X, that according to the still-hegemonic historiographies (in desperate need of rewriting) came of age first with The Brady Bunch, and then with Nirvana, is in a curious position of having witnessed the endless begin. They are hinged between two paradigms for measuring behavior in time—the timescale Weil describes, of slow-to-fast activity, versus what Virilio, Land, the turtle kingdom, and nearly every recent commentator models as fast-to-infinite valences. X is a generation of a stochastic flux, that endures quite like driftwood, stripped down from early yuppie enthusiasm to resigned listlessness, its members washing up at random and able, in the range of their exposure, to offer less security-in-time than informed opinions on it. 

Here is an excerpt from a Gen X "offspring", Mike White's Enlightened (2011), that has languished happily on the shorelines of cultural confusion, being so coyly particular, or as some pundits have put it, "hard to market", as to lie low in a kind of passive prescience: the giant turtle hallucination scene from the very first episode, that reads like a mashup of the Nature Channel and the Nevermind album cover.

A homage to the "world turtle" (Akūpāra, Lenape) mytheme—that so enchanted me as a child—it's also a good way to kick off a show that builds on the related "turtles all the way down" principle, as its waylaid hatchling protagonist—arrested in her spiritual "rebirth"—ambles ungratefully through her own hall of mirrors, with each discovery, each action, enclosing another sorry consequence...slow, fast, and ceaseless.