10.3 I worked on this imaginary presentation during down-moments: while I was walking around, say, or taking a bath, or staring at Madison’s ceiling after sex, or at my office’s wall during intervals between two bits of proper work — in other words, pretty much all the time. Oil, gentlemen, I’d say, is hydrophobic: it recoils from water. This is not a tendency or quirk of oiclass="underline" it is an elemental property that defines it at its very core, shaping its micelles, hydrocarbons, atoms. Oil and water, as the old adage goes, do not mix. So what are we observing when we watch these elements con. When we watch them introduced to. When we watch these liquids thrown together? You might say that we’re observing ecological catastrophe, or an indictment of industrial society, or a parable of mankind’s hubris. Or you might say, more dispassionately, that we’re observing a demonstration of chemical propensities. But the truth is that, behind all these episodes. Dramas: beneath these. Beneath all these dramas, I’d say, and before them, we’re observing, simply (gentlemen), differentiation. Differentiation in its purest form: the very principle of differentiation. Ones and zeros, p and not-p: oil, water. Behind all behaviour, issuing instructions, sending in the plays — just as behind life itself, its endless sequencing of polymers — there lies a source-code. This is the base premise of all anthropology.
10.4 At this point in these scripted fantasies, I’d pause to take a sip of Evian, or some such. There’d be a hush as delegates waited for me to carry on. A gesture to the screen as I’d name, once more, the substance filling it: Oil — then, smiling, I’d sweep my hand back towards the bottle, and say: Water. The theatrical manoeuvre sucked them in completely: they were mine. Where one is, I’d tell them, the other cannot be. When we encounter, then, as we do often after spills—click—an oily sea, a sea whose body, while it still performs the functions and ceremonies of a sea — flowing, lapping, breaking into waves and the like — has become dark and ponderous, what we’re in fact encountering is not a sea at all. It’s oil that has ousted the sea, usurped it, packed it off into exile and assumed its position. It’s a putsch, a coup d’état. Another pause to let the metaphor take hold. And yet, I’d say (unpacking it into full-blown conceit now), the usurper has kept all the infrastructure of the ancien régime in place, the rules and regulations governing its rhythms and activities. The judiciary and legislature have decided, for their own tactical reasons — for even minerals, gentlemen, display an instinct for self-preservation — to comply fully with the new executive: the same laws of gravity and motion apply as did before; the same day-to-day, minute-to-minute patterns play out as on any other day and as at any other minute; and for many subjects (low-level constituents whose collective toil produces currents, eddies, tides) there’s no sign that the coup has taken place at all. If they do know, they don’t seem to mind; they even seem to welcome the regime-change. And why shouldn’t they? It’s an improvement. Oil has more consistency than water: it is denser, more substantial — and thus brings the latter into its own more fully, expressing the sea’s splendour in a manner more articulate, more something. In a manner more poetic. No, more lyricaclass="underline" the sea’s splendour in a manner far more lyrical than that in which the original ever did. When you watch swell and surf rolling through a sea that’s turned to oil, is it not like watching the whole process in slow motion? All the grace of a wave rendered through high-end visual software that manages to hold and frame each moment without interrupting or arresting. Something to do with sport: when you can see the football’s backspin. And the net’s grid, exploding. Perfection.
10.5 A swell would, every time, be building up inside the hall at this point in the lecture, nods and murmurs turning into exclamations of excitement; and I’d ride it into the next sentence, leaning forward on my podium. Thus, gentlemen, I’d say, the ocean’s choreography, which for so long has held such fascination for us, is made sharper, more momentous: it is amplified. With this word, amplified, the swell would break into a foaming, multi-voiced cry of huzzah!, surging down the banked rows towards me. Letting it wash past me, then holding its edge back again by raising my wi-fi-enabled finger, I’d continue: The same goes for all those animals you see—click—on stricken beaches: tar-drenched birds who float bewilderedly in blackened rock-pools, or—click—stare out stoically from atop tarry boulders. Robbed of flight, immobilized, humiliated in an almost ritual manner (and doesn’t the inversion make the custom even crueler? Feathers first, then pitch!), they become instant martyrs — and, in so becoming, are infused with all the pathos and nobility of tragic heroes. Living Pompeiians! Victims of the oil Gorgon! They, too, are improved — yes, gentlemen, improved: augmented, transformed into monumental versions of themselves, superior by the same token as statues are bigger, better versions of historic people. Even the rocks on which they perch are granted status and significance by having their forms so meticulously re-molded by the oil that duplicates them half a centimetre beyond their own mass’s natural boundary. Ask any sculptor: to recast even the dullest object is to celebrate it, to align it with its essence at the very moment this emerges, becomes manifest. Has oil not done this to these rocks? Of course it has, with a panache that’s the more brilliant for its simplicity: it has made them rockier.
10.6 At this point in my speech a lone, indignant figure in the auditorium’s back row would pipe up: Shame, sir! Shame! The atmosphere would tense up: a dissenter! I would peer over my glasses, see the wheel-mounted carry-on bag standing at my critic’s side and immediately recognize him: it was my old neighbour from Turin — suit on, tie off — bemoaning in his best Eurozonese this spectacle of nature’s defilement; denouncing my aestheticizing of it. Me? I’d ask him, glancing exaggeratedly around and behind me for effect; I’m “aestheticizing” it? Gentlemen, I’d reason, opening my arms up to my serried ranks of allies; was it not he who first used the term tragedy? Cheers, rising from hundreds of chests in unison, drowned out his protests: the exchange in the transit lounge was universal knowledge; they all knew that I was right. Who, I’d continue, cast the first aesthetic stone? The truth is, that these people’s (for behind this man there lay a much larger constituency: they’d be there, too, dotted about the streets around the conferencing centre, and in homes throughout the city, and in other cities, purchasing ecologically sourced products, sponsoring zoo animals and so forth) — these people’s entire mindset is a product of aesthetics. Bad aesthetics, at that: misguided and ignorant. They dislike the oil spill for the way it makes the coastline look “not right,” prevents it from illustrating the vision of nature that’s been handed down from theologians to romantic poets to explorers, tourists, television viewers: as sublime, virginal and pure. Kitsch, I tell you (here I’d thump my fist onto the podium, three times in quick succession): kitsch, kitsch, kitsch! And wrong: for what is oil but nature? Rock-filtered organic compounds — animal, vegetable and mineral — broken down and concentrated by the planet’s very crust: what could be purer than that? When oil splatters a coastline, Earth wells back up and reveals itself; nature’s hidden nature gushes forth. The man who brings this gushing-forth about — the drunk ship’s captain, oversightful engineer or negligent safety officer, or, behind these, the oil magnate, or, behind even him, the collective man whose body, faceless and compound as oil itself, is the corporation—he should be considered a true environmentalist: nature’s more honest intermediary, its loyaler servant. The cheers, at this point, grew quite deafening; the argument was won; and my foe would be evicted from the building, whimpering as blows rained down on him.