"The Vortex" is a tour-de-force of a style of essay that Eliot Weinberger is a master of--these sort of collaged constellations on a particular subject or theme. They include very little overt commentary, but rather purport to convey particular, curious narratives from the world over. They're lovely & thrilling, & they appropriately create a kind of mental whirlwind (at least when there as long as "The Vortex," which is about 20 printed pages). To me there a more lyrical variant of some of Benjamin's essays.
The essay traces the vortex as a kind of primal form through ancient creation myths, spiritual theories, metaphors & symbols, poetics, science, nature, metaphysics, etc. The penultimate paragraph takes us to the North Pacific Gyre, where Captain Ahab, the Pequod, & everyone else but Ishmael, likely met there demise, & home of what I consider to be simultaneously one of the most marvelous & saddest environmental, um, shall we say, blemishes: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also called the Pacific Trash Vortex.
Weinberger's description of it:
"The Gyre, is one of the dead places on the planet, on the same latitude with the Sahara and Gobi deserts, and the equally lifelss Sargasso Sea. Commercial fisherment don't bother to go; merchant ships rarely cross it, for it is on the route to nowhere. The Gyre is filled with garbage that has drifted from Japan and the west coast of the U.S.. A scientific expedition trawled for a few days and pulled in a ton of debris: plastic hangars, drums of chemical waste, tires, television sets, basketballs. There are bright-colored plastic pellets in the transparent jellyfish that proliferatte there; six pounds of plastic for every pound of plankton. On the uninhabited nesting islands, the stomachs of decomposing albatrosses are a mass of bottle caps and bits of bleach bottles, action figures, plastic twine, styrofoam peanuts, shrink wrap, and the splinters of compact disk cases."
