(Photo courtesy Bob Yeager)

Amanda Marcote at Pandagon has some interesting things to say about recycling. It’s not that she thinks recycling is bad. In fact, she thinks its very good. But she wonders if recylcing isn’t a way of feeling better about driving your car to work–that people (me included) use it as a salve to our conscience. I am of two minds about recycling. I don’t think it makes a big huge difference, but I do think it teaches us mindfulness. It makes consideration of what we throw out part of our lives. And that, I think, could help lead to a reduction in waste–it’s a ritual in a kind of social religion that says things like global warming and destruction of habitat are bad. But I also wondered if it doesn’t make people feel as if we’ve done something meaningful when we really have barely scratched the surface.

When I was at Ohio University, David Gillis and I used to watch cartoons together. David was 6’6” tall and loved Chuck Jones cartoons. Particularly Roadrunner. He loved the landscapes—those looming deserts with their vertical cliffs, flat floors and precariously balanced rocks. There were no humans in this landscape, just roads and the occasional truck or car, and apparently, a pretty good postal system since the coyote could get almost anything out of the Acme catalogue by mail. It was a vertigo inducing paean to the open road full of space and blue skies.

David was also the person who observed that in Chuck Jones world, if it was cute, big-eyed and apparently defenseless, it would kick your ass. The roadrunner, those cute kittens that were always the target of the bigger more established cat. They never lifted a finger—or rather a toe or claw—to defend themselves, and yet their adversaries were always getting flattened, blown up by TNT, or flung halfway across the state by giant slingshots, or flattened against the grill of a truck driven by no person (who might have braked) but rather only by the soulless impetus of the automata itself. Trucks were Newtonian, in motion they tended to stay in motion. And on a Chuck Jones road, there is only motion.

Those big eyed creatures are mute (except for the famous ‘meep-meep’) but there are several episodes where the Coyote speaks. In one he even has a card. Wile E. Coyote, Supergenius. Those innocents, the Roadrunner and the kitten, they have no speech, no goals, no needs. They are like the lilies of the field, just existing to be what they are. In the case of the Roadrunner, it is moving. Speed. Constant motion for no reason other than its own sake. The Roadrunner doesn’t appear to be trying to get anywhere. Although he will stop for a pile of birdseed or a pretty She-Roadrunner. He has no home, or at least, it never dawns on the Coyote to stake it out.

Which leads me to understand that the Chuck Jones cartoon is actually about us, and about our ceaseless, existential striving. We are not and can never be the Roadrunner. Although we sympathize and root for the Roadrunner, we are, in fact, the Coyote. Scheming, working, sweating. Fallen. Often falling, our tiny shadow on the floor of the canyon getting bigger and bigger and we whistle down until we finally hit, leaving a little coyote shaped crater. While the Roadrunner, innocent, still in a state of grace, zooms past.

From inside the office this morning.

I had to trudge through the snow to get to the office. Uphill. Both ways. Kids today got it easy!