The Infinite Previous: Florida

[Celerity]

cross posting because I find this to be one of the best short pieces on an American state that I have read





Images of Florida

https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-infinite-previous-hofmann






THE SOUTHERNMOST OF THE CONTINENTAL UNITED STATES, the so-called Lower Forty-eight. Where better shoot for space, publicly or now privately, than from the flattest and lowest and most unstable of them all, its highest point barely a hundred yards up in the soggy air? A plump peninsular dangle haunted by the promise of its physical (dis)appearance decades hence, or, the way things are going, sooner than that—shrunk to bone (it has no bone, there is no bone), hence merely atrophied and shortened to a carious stumpy shrivel or wizen, ending at maybe Orlando, all the rest taken back by the Atlantic and the Gulf. And presumably still impeccably gerrymandered. Well, easy come, easy go, as is not—but might as well be—the state’s motto (which, if you must know, is “In God We Trust”).

From the air, it is cities, bays, jungle, and mottling—what the booksellers call foxing—like a form of rot; a level scape of little mushrooms on blotting paper; a pointillist blotch; the dotting of millions or billions of lakes and ponds among the slabs of forest and field and just swampy spare ground waiting to appreciate; the round clumps of “tree islands,” sometimes called “hammocks” in the palmetto and vine scrub; sinkholes as much a possibility as mobile homes, like the holes in Swiss cheese, sinkholes popping up—popping down—in the porous limestone when the sand plugging them abruptly drains out of them. Gridded by highways meeting at infinity, and then the plops of the round ponds. Round and straight, round and straight, like so many noughts and crosses. Inadequate separation of earth and water, the world as if God had thrown in the towel after Day Two. (And when it teems with bouncing white rain, Day One.) Brown when wet, tan when dry, gray when grown over by the duopoly of pines and palms. Dark wiggling meanders (where is the gradient that would straighten them out or speed them up?), the color of tea from the amount of leaf matter swilled out of the sandy ground, and old white dead straight—no, not authors—roads, silver in the sun, made from sand or crushed shells.



Water is a constant—or rather, an inconstant—mystery, our own prairie that half the time is a lake (we think of it as something like Zola’s Le ventre de Paris, a frenzied frog-eat-frog mutual gourmandize among water-, earth-, and air-creatures); water filling up the underground limestone caverns and spilling out of them at great pressure and purity in the springs of the Santa Fe and the Suwanee (the rights to extract and bottle billions of gallons of it obtained for a pittance by Coca Cola and others), and disappearing to leave behind aridity, sand, and death. So flat, so soft, so rootless, so yielding, so accommodating to invasives and (some) incomers, the pet boa constrictor unspooling out of the toilet, the armadillo hoofing it up from Texas at the rate of a few yards a year, the Cuban migrant crawling ashore, wet-foot or dry-foot, the armed and dangerous jail-break making a beeline for us, the totemic beasts we are known for and are sentimentally pleased to slap on our license plates—the Florida panther, the manatee—imperiled and all-but-gone; a landscape formed by bulldozer as by butter knife from the flat, resistless, featureless plain; no hill, no rock, no soil, slash pines cleared into heaps and middens to make space for new condo developments, with natural or British-sounding or misspelt tony names (the flamingoes or magnolias that were driven away to make this), where an influx of disappointed new or hopeful old people can dwell in brief comfort in system-built high-rise among the low-rise, cheek by jowl with their cars.



We are perhaps used to thinking of the clash of nature and culture; in Florida, there is no culture, no landscape that leaves a stable record of the effects of human settlement. It is more garish, more conflictual than that, more primal or more modern. It is the clash of nature and money. Subtropical nature and hot money, at that, or at the very least, warm, humid, sweaty money. Pecunia maybe doesn’t olet, but it sudet. The waves of greed and panic, panic buying, panic selling, the land booms and real estate busts, remote ownership, in-your-face ownership; railway barons and cattle barons and trumpery barons; the South a more troubled, less idyllic, less familiar, less idealized version of the West, at best, it’s “go South, old man,” or “Florida and bust!” A less favored version of California, without the rich farmland of Central Valley or the corn of Hollywood or a swamp to call Silicon; a state where things somehow didn’t take as well or as dependably, second in cattle, second in oranges, Florida permanently prox. acc., (though for all our other curses, we don’t have earthquakes; they have the Big One, we have lots of Little Ones, not earthquakes, but all manner of other plagues and pestilences).

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