Post-Colonial Jellyfish
While cavorting in Sydney on the weekend I had occasion to consider the following question: do colonial jellyfish exist? Nestled in deep chairs, perched in a revolving restaurant 46 stories up, our conversation meandered to the point at which it became necessary to wonder: is a Portugese Man-of-War (named in Australia a "bluebubble", by someone who obviously wanted children to play with one) a unity, or a mere plurality?
The supposed man-of-war is comprised (I hesitate to say composed!) of four distinct sorts of "polyps" - and these are said to be individuals, distinct organisms in their own right. Our question then: is this Voltron of the sea one or many? For that matter, is Voltron one or many?
And so the revolving restaurant revolved, and the harbour came into view, and I think I imagined that I saw the sail (or, less magestically, the "bladder") of a Bluebubble encroaching on the that estuary's empty entrance. Man-of-war sails come in two types - "right handed" and "left handed" - so that only fifty percent of them will ever wash up on shore at once. For every bloated Man-of-War corpse that lies, dehydrating, on the shore, there is a proud opposite-sailed counterpart, carried to sea by the wind, in quest of nothing more than to not lie, dehydrating, on the shore. It is doubtful that the Man-of-War herself, given such a life, ruled by luck and limited ambition, has worries about her existence (which is just to say that l'en-meduses does not become l'pour-meduses). But should that fact encourage us one way or another, on this matter of the Man-of-War's being?
The supposed man-of-war is comprised (I hesitate to say composed!) of four distinct sorts of "polyps" - and these are said to be individuals, distinct organisms in their own right. Our question then: is this Voltron of the sea one or many? For that matter, is Voltron one or many?
And so the revolving restaurant revolved, and the harbour came into view, and I think I imagined that I saw the sail (or, less magestically, the "bladder") of a Bluebubble encroaching on the that estuary's empty entrance. Man-of-war sails come in two types - "right handed" and "left handed" - so that only fifty percent of them will ever wash up on shore at once. For every bloated Man-of-War corpse that lies, dehydrating, on the shore, there is a proud opposite-sailed counterpart, carried to sea by the wind, in quest of nothing more than to not lie, dehydrating, on the shore. It is doubtful that the Man-of-War herself, given such a life, ruled by luck and limited ambition, has worries about her existence (which is just to say that l'en-meduses does not become l'pour-meduses). But should that fact encourage us one way or another, on this matter of the Man-of-War's being?
posted by Allan Hazlett | 1:19 PM
1 Comments:
The Voltron question is indeed an important one which may not be answerable until we see the upcoming movie. The "one or the many" problem reminds me of the idea of the "King's Two Bodies" in medieval and early modern European political philosophy—there's a great picture that was the cover art of some book I read my first year of grad school of the King made up of all the little people of the nation—which posited that the king had the body of a man, sure, but also had the body of the nation, which was a collective body. Unlike Voltron, however, the king did not have mechanical lions driven by these little people for limbs, and I can only imagine European history would be that much cooler if he had.
I would like to suggest that the Voltron of Lions is a palpably different creature than the Voltron of Cars. But what this tells us of the politics of the Man-of-War will have to wait till after class.
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