maraschino red, the beaver seems altogether out of place in this menagerie, a mammalian interloper from somebodyâs acid trip. A seam left by the split mold bisects all four animals asymmetrically, and thereâs a little anal button of scarred plastic where the blow pin, that steel umbilicus, withdrew.
CUTE NEIGHBORS
âWhy do precisely these objects we behold make a world?â Thoreau wonders in Walden. âWhy has man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice?â Since Thoreauâs time ecologists have explained why that mouse filled that crevice, and since then Walden Woods has grown far less bewildering. For Thoreau the distinction between the natural world and the man-made one matters less than that between the subjective experience within and the objective world without. For him, both rocks and mice are objects that he perceives as shadows flickering on the walls of his mind. For him, anthropomorphism is inescapable. All animals, he writes, are âbeasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts.â
The word synthetic in its current sense of âchemically unnaturalâ would not appear in print until 1874, twenty years after the publication of Walden and three years after the invention of celluloid, the first industrial synthetic polymer. In its 140-year history, the synthetic world has itself grown into a kind of wilderness. With the exceptions of our fellow human beings and our domestic pets, the objects that make the worlds we behold today are almost entirely man-made.
Consider the following: In nature, there are 142 known species of Anseriformes, the order to which ducks, swans, and geese belong. Of those species only one, the white Pekin duck, a domesticated breed of mallard, produces spotless yellow ducklings. Since the invention of plastic, four known species of Anseriformes have gone extinct; several others survive only in sanctuaries created to save them. Meanwhile, by the estimates of an American sociologist of Chinese descent named Charlotte Lee, who owns the largest duckie collection in the world, the makers of novelties and toys have concocted around ten thousand varieties of rubber duck, nearly all of which are yellow, and most of which are not made in fact from rubber, nor like the Floatees from polyethylene, but from plasticized polyvinyl chloride, a derivative of coal. Why has man just these species of things for his neighbors, a latter-day Thoreau might ask; as if nothing but a yellow duck could perch on the rim of a tub?
Letâs draw a bath. Letâs set a rubber duck afloat. Look at it wobbling there. What misanthrope, what damp, drizzly November of a sourpuss, upon beholding a rubber duck afloat, does not feel a Crayola ray of sunshine brightening his gloomy heart? Graphically, the rubber duckâs closest relative is not a bird or a toy but the yellow happy face of Wal-Mart commercials. A rubber duck is in effect a happy face with a body and lipsâwhich is what the beak of the rubber duck has become: great, lipsticky, bee-stung lips. Both the happy face and the rubber duck reduce facial expressions to a kind of pictogram. They are both emoticons. And they are, of course, the same colorâthe yellow of an egg yolk or the eye of a daisy, a shade darker than a yellow raincoat, a shade lighter than a taxicab.
Like the eyes of other prey (rabbits, for example, or deer) and unlike the eyes of a happy face, the rubber duckâs eyes peer helplessly from the sides of its spherical head. Its movement is also expressiveâjoyously erratic, like that of a bouncing ball, or a dancing drunk. So long, that is, as it doesnât keel over and float around like a dead fish, as rubber ducks of recent manufacture are prone to do. Itâs arguable whether such tipsy ducks deserve to be called toys. They have retained the form and lost the function. Their value is wholly
CUTE NEIGHBORS
âWhy do precisely these objects we behold make a world?â Thoreau wonders in Walden. âWhy has man just these species of animals for his neighbors; as if nothing but a mouse could have filled this crevice?â Since Thoreauâs time ecologists have explained why that mouse filled that crevice, and since then Walden Woods has grown far less bewildering. For Thoreau the distinction between the natural world and the man-made one matters less than that between the subjective experience within and the objective world without. For him, both rocks and mice are objects that he perceives as shadows flickering on the walls of his mind. For him, anthropomorphism is inescapable. All animals, he writes, are âbeasts of burden, in a sense, made to carry some portion of our thoughts.â
The word synthetic in its current sense of âchemically unnaturalâ would not appear in print until 1874, twenty years after the publication of Walden and three years after the invention of celluloid, the first industrial synthetic polymer. In its 140-year history, the synthetic world has itself grown into a kind of wilderness. With the exceptions of our fellow human beings and our domestic pets, the objects that make the worlds we behold today are almost entirely man-made.
Consider the following: In nature, there are 142 known species of Anseriformes, the order to which ducks, swans, and geese belong. Of those species only one, the white Pekin duck, a domesticated breed of mallard, produces spotless yellow ducklings. Since the invention of plastic, four known species of Anseriformes have gone extinct; several others survive only in sanctuaries created to save them. Meanwhile, by the estimates of an American sociologist of Chinese descent named Charlotte Lee, who owns the largest duckie collection in the world, the makers of novelties and toys have concocted around ten thousand varieties of rubber duck, nearly all of which are yellow, and most of which are not made in fact from rubber, nor like the Floatees from polyethylene, but from plasticized polyvinyl chloride, a derivative of coal. Why has man just these species of things for his neighbors, a latter-day Thoreau might ask; as if nothing but a yellow duck could perch on the rim of a tub?
Letâs draw a bath. Letâs set a rubber duck afloat. Look at it wobbling there. What misanthrope, what damp, drizzly November of a sourpuss, upon beholding a rubber duck afloat, does not feel a Crayola ray of sunshine brightening his gloomy heart? Graphically, the rubber duckâs closest relative is not a bird or a toy but the yellow happy face of Wal-Mart commercials. A rubber duck is in effect a happy face with a body and lipsâwhich is what the beak of the rubber duck has become: great, lipsticky, bee-stung lips. Both the happy face and the rubber duck reduce facial expressions to a kind of pictogram. They are both emoticons. And they are, of course, the same colorâthe yellow of an egg yolk or the eye of a daisy, a shade darker than a yellow raincoat, a shade lighter than a taxicab.
Like the eyes of other prey (rabbits, for example, or deer) and unlike the eyes of a happy face, the rubber duckâs eyes peer helplessly from the sides of its spherical head. Its movement is also expressiveâjoyously erratic, like that of a bouncing ball, or a dancing drunk. So long, that is, as it doesnât keel over and float around like a dead fish, as rubber ducks of recent manufacture are prone to do. Itâs arguable whether such tipsy ducks deserve to be called toys. They have retained the form and lost the function. Their value is wholly
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