This text constitutes something of a manifesto.
It's entitled "Virtually Nontoxic."
It's pretentious enough to have an epigraph by the poet
Christopher Dewdney.
"'Vinyl is as natural as lichen.'
Plastic is the Silly Putty with which we simulate,
then supplant, every facet of reality,
converting all the varied elements of the planet
into one common emulsion.
While we sleep, our automatons toiled throughout the night,
transmuting everything into a petroleum byproduct that
resists bacterial predation.
Our species might openly mourn this phase of our demise,
but in secret, we really exalt the power of its genius,
marveling to think that in some landfill of the future, long
after our own extinction, a single crash helmet might still
endure, sloughed off like the carapace of some alien crab.
Our gewgaws some epoxy resin and nylon fiber
do not attest, however, to any advance in our rational prowess
so much as they allude to the breadth
of our cultural tyranny.
The invention of plastic has given birth
to a celluloid spectacle whose reveries displace
the esemplastic imagination of the romantics,
filling our hollow skulls with an injection-molded mentality
as pliable and as durable as any blob of polypropylene.
Has the language itself begun to absorb the synthetic qualities
of such a modern milieu, becoming
a fabricated but disposable convenience no less pollutant
than a Styrofoam container?
Has not the act of writing simply become
another chemically engineered experience
in which we manufacture a complex polymer
by stringing together syllables instead of molecules?
The words of our lexicon have become so standardized
that they now resemble a limited array of connectable parts,
and the rules of our grammar have become so rationalized
that they now resemble a bounded range of recombinant modes.
The protean quality of our discourse
finds itself vulcanized in our playthings.
We see language marketed as an infantile commodity, a toy
suitable for kids of all ages, because its plastic coating
makes it safe to own and easy to use.
Nevertheless, we must imagine a more corrosive poetics,
something vitriolic enough to dissolve such an acrylic
veneer, and if we cannot distill this kind of acid,
then let us concoct a more explosive poetics,
something catalytic enough to detonate such an acetate
finish.
We need a lingual variety of gelignite or plastique,
the kind of incendiary literature written only
by misfits who have grown up still dizzy from the fumes
after having melted a platoon of plastic army men with a match."
[APPLAUSE]