The Swamp Dwellers Quotes

Hurricane Katrina arrived without a confirmed weather category, or a name that adequately addressed anger summoned from a thousand leagues down. When the levees broke in New Orleans images escaped television screens to tattoo every skin with the shameful reality that America’s towers fell twice. There was no phoenix. Only mosquitoes escaped the ashes, promising to puncture any still unbloodied with the needle kiss of plague. Then, a great swarm of dragonflies, sent by some other to even the odds. They feasted on the thin-limbed vampires, devoured body and virus, and then hovered around the floating bloated bodies of forgotten grandmothers, armored escorts of the dead. Their wings hummed swamp sonnets while their mouths swallowed maggots, thwarting attempts to hurry death beyond spring sunsets and autumn graves. They kept up their holy procession until New Orleans rebirthed jazz and cut the bodies loose and let saints march in all over again. As I steer my bike through one puddle after the other, making the street music urban rainforest dwellers know, I ask the splash to summon the dragonfly. Call her from the swamp into my throat to name the lump that will never loose me. Be my escort, gobble the flies ever entering me before their children become my whole.

Our knowledge is held not in a computer chip but in the living, thinking organism of the planet, in the bodies of plants and animals and stones and roots and rain. When “Man,” colonizer and castle-dweller, enters the swamp, he dies. But the swamp teems with life. A watery world, navigable only by boat, the shores of the swamp are constantly shifting with the tides. Our swamp represents the unconscious, the lizard brain, the root system that expands infinitely beneath the surface of the water. It’s the undifferentiated place from which all forms emerge.

Our knowledge is held not in a computer chip but in the living, thinking organism of the planet, in the bodies of plants and animals and stones and roots and rain. When “Man,” colonizer and castle-dweller, enters the swamp, he dies. But the swamp teems with life. A watery world, navigable only by boat, the shores of the swamp are constantly shifting with the tides. Our swamp represents the unconscious, the lizard brain, the root system that expands infinitely beneath the surface of the water. It’s the undifferentiated place from which all forms emerge.