Ode to Pollution

Ode to Pollution

I do not concede that I live in squalor. I live in misery, to be sure, but this I tolerate. To be eternally miserable in a world made of filth would be intolerable, so I do not concede that all is filth. I walk along the waterfront, miserable but in good health, in the midst of sights and smells that are called odious and are called the unmistakable marks of human evil. This is industry, and industry has tainted all that is not a part of itself. My stomach turns, but I cannot concede that, between the sky and the ocean floor, my stomach is turned by evil. For is this industry not perfect in its foulness, complete in its adoration of waste and debris? Waste is the final, creative product: manufactured and useless.

I have tried, walking along the waterfront, to see the film of muck weighing heavily on the flight of pelicans. I have tried to see the black toxic water underneath the calm blue, and I have tried to see the caustic effect of smoke and metal borne by salt. This monstrous metal thing could rip apart the flesh of anything in its path, and endless refuse from the land accompanies it in its fury meant to rid the water of life. Life, beautiful life, and no less fragile, is met with this behemoth of human creation, sublime in its mindless bulk, and life is blindly destroyed.

I am, of course, wrong to approve of this destruction, but I do, just as I would approve the destruction of this same massive thing, bit by bit, in the beaks of seagulls. Perhaps then the seagulls would be the instruments of death, releasing that infinity of stuff into the bottom of the sea, where fortune and her fishes would take charge of the battle. Would not some other undying object become the final product then? And if the birds themselves should exude slime from their feathers, poisoning we who innocently use them for quills, no more or less magnificent would reality be.

Were all seagulls lost, as one day they must be, and all colors dimmed and dissolved by rust and oil, and all humans fallen ill from freely flowing acid, still I could not in good faith disapprove. On that day evil will assume some unknowably different form, and I or my messenger will walk along the waterfront in poor health. I or my messenger will compose an ode like this one, not to filmy pelicans and impure water, but to plastic and to all the shades of black and brown that there are on Earth. And the ode, for its composer at least, will relieve for a moment the real ache of misery, of the eternal absence of good, which is life.