Children of the Sun

By: Matthew Battles
October 22, 2011

I’m ambivalent about Michael Langan’s “Heliotropes.” I mean, it’s lovely and deftly done; the simple, fluttering juxtaposition of avian and aircraft forms is an essay in itself. And the voiceover — what grain that guy’s voice has got! But in the end, I want to say that our frantic transcontinental wingings and our escalator drudgeries are not merely the manifestation of primordial heliotropism, but the residue of the political and cultural choices we’ve made. Of course they too express a nature — one more complexly inelegant than the daily dance of the flowers.

Tags

birds, feral, film, heliotropism, migration, nature, sun, sunflowers

See All Posts by Matthew Battles

Part of the founding HILOBROW crew, Matthew Battles is a maker and thinker whose work merges literary, scholarly, and artistic forms of inquiry. His writing on the cultural dimensions of science and technology has appeared in such venues as The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, and Orion. His most recent book,Tree, was published in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series in 2017. After ten years exploring the dark abundance of libraries and museums with metaLAB (at) Harvard, Matthew now edits Arnoldia: the Nature of Trees, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum.

Children of the Sun

Categories

Tags