Symbols: Eels and Silt
Eels:
Eels are used to great effect in Waterland to portray life. Literally an eel is an order of fish that are linear in body design and tend to live in mud burrows. Often migrating upstream, the eels have to encounter and conquer many obstacles. The eel can create life in many areas in which it is not thought possible and because of this eels are used to portray human life in the fens. The Englishmen who have taken up their "mud burrows" live a slippery life that is always damp, and usually obstacle filled; however, these swamp people manage to reproduce and continue creating a name. Constantly adjusting a hold on a slippery life is a daily struggle for not only the inhabitants of the fens but every human being. |
Silt:
Silt is a very minute accumulation of rocks that can be transported very vast distances either to ultimately settle on top of water or below on shelves of other earth. Literally this may sound like nothing, but in Bangladesh silt has added around 30 square miles of new land. Symbolically silt represents the culmination of human achievement over thousands of years of critical thinking. Human progress is made in very small steps over a long period of time usually due to the need for multiple minds. Great inventions are based off of the simplest of math, science, linguistics, and art. Phones, computers, art, language, and government all run off of questions that a child could answer, yet the ability to have many of these questions answered at once begins the tricky portion. Swift seems to be taking shots at how everything humanity has done is built on very small steps. No large jump has been made. Instead ideas rest on others like silt, and one well placed question may unpack the loose soil and send it down stream. |