CONTAINER

CONTAINER

'A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.'

Ursula k Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction: 166

'It is of course the logic of inversion that leads us to imagine the living being that has thus spiralled in on itself as an externally bounded object, deceiving us into thinking that it is not so much a movement in itself as a container for life. This is like confusing the curling movement of your hand in drawing a circle, and the trace it leaves, with the perimeter of the completed figure. Circles may lie inside or outside each other; they may touch or overlap. But in the whirligig world of organisms and storms, there are only coils or spirals, dynamically sustained formations in the current of life that continually run into and out of one another in the very processes of their generation and dissolution. Coils cannot overlap, but they can wrap around one another: they can interpenetrate – like octopuses and anemones, to recall the analogy of Marcel Mauss – in the medium of their environments and sentiments.'

Tim Ingold, Lines: 55

A habitat is what is contained within an area: resources, physical and biotic factors that support the survival and reproduction of a particular species. Yet, habitation cannot be contained.

Deriving from the Latin habitāre, to inhabit, or from habēre, to have or to hold. A habitat holds lives, when a habitat is destroyed, those that lived there are destroyed. Things are intrinsically linked to that which contains them.

I too
could not see
myself
in the stories
of man
a spear
did not
fit in
my palm
never
part of my
story
instead
I collected
things
and
still do
my favourite
room
in the
house
is the kitchen
with its
cupboard
full of
jars