Now with less lawn, no mind, and the same amount of plastic!
Article by Kristopher Ligtenberg Art by Katie Lockwood
This is your Brain
A woman hangs a portrait of a flamingo on the wall. It is a commercial product, a print on artificially textured canvas stretched under a cheap wooden frame dyed dark, worn at the corners. The flamingo is the least consequential aspect of the object. It might as well be a crocodile, a leopard, or a downcycled toilet. Still, there is the flamingo in all its lacey-hued glory, standing, as they are known to do, one legged in a shallow pool. It appears to be looking nowhere in particular, unshaded and unbothered by its sparsely detailed surroundings.
Who created this image? There is no information. This is a commercial product. Had it been made five years later the flamingo depicted would be no more aware of the fact that it was joylessly mined from a thousand other flamingo paintings and generated, thoughtlessly, by an intern operating an AI. The woman rips the thrift store sticker off the bottom right corner, revealing another underneath. The flamingo might as well have come from any seasonal section or season-after clearance sale at TJ Maxx, Target, or Bed Bath and Beyond, but this particular work of art came from Hobby Lobby, hence the sticker bears the object’s price and a serial number. Produced undoubtedly by child labor or some great big factory that the woman will never see and will never have any conception of, the creation of the flamingo in all its fidelity costs far less then the $25.50 marked by the sticker. From this initial value to the $10.00 sticker price at Goodwill, applying the half-off sale designed to move older inventory, the woman is pleased for a moment by her bargain of a purchase at just $5.00.
She rips the second sticker off without another thought. She marvels at, if anything, the fact that some bigwig wanted $25.50 for a shitty mass-produced flamingo who she notes to herself resembles more-so a lawn-flamingo than any real species. What’s more, the left leg is bent unnaturally, like a human’s, under its feathery body. The intern and his AI prompt would have no sooner caught an identical mistake, yet that flamingo would do less to convince its viewer that such “choices” were a product of creativity or the lack of time and information. True, the intern lacks all three of these things, but more damningly the company for which he generates lacks a base interest in anything beyond profit. Had the woman seen that AI’s flamingo, she wouldn’t wonder either at the decision to include the nictitating membrane, blurring the subject’s eye. The eye is blurry because an AI flamingo is possibly the most soulless thing one could imagine, therein resides no artistry, no soul to emanate forth.
We can assume the woman is changing her living room’s seasonal decor, that she is preparing one of her short-term rental properties for summer, that she is, in her way, trying to communicate her allyship during that, the holiest of months, June. Maybe this will be a baby girl’s room, or a therapist’s office, or a guest room. But, god forbid, she just loves flamingos. After a while, but not too long a while, a man will walk the aisles of Goodwill and find there a trove of flamingo memorabilia and among them one portrait which in his opinion hilariously overstates the regality of such a frivolous bird. He will not buy that portrait; it will be sent to the dump a week later and consumed for the last time by red flames a year later.
Phoenicopteridae: Crimson Feathered
Posted up across the lawns of America since 1957, courtesy of one Don Featherstone who would forever be remembered for his invention of the plastic lawn flamingo, the bird has come to symbolize something falsely friendly, and superficially desirable – a vivified icon of summertime Americana. If not for fox or fish, F is for flamingo, so the children's books read, and when the class is asked to name a pink animal, you’re the weird kid if you say Amazon River Dolphin. Flamingo and, recently, axolotls are the accepted answers, thank you. Surely, metaphysically speaking, the flamingo owes almost everything to its pink plumage, a product, we are told from childhood, of its shrimp diet. What strikes the soul about that color pink, found rarely as it is on an animal’s exterior?
But what do YOU imagine? The flamingo, a sleeper symbol of friendly exoticism, queer-coded whimsy, and general feathery faffery dodges the conventional associations we keep amongst birds of its stature and historical position. THIS is the phoenix of ancient Egypt? How can that be? It is more aligned, psychically, with the dodo, penguin and pigeon than, say, the graceful heron, ibis, or bennu. It is to this order of regal birds as a llama is to the average ungulate. They are the highland cows, the poodle moths of living dinosaurs, and form no convincing dirigible up in their “v” formations, strike no imposing silhouette with their long arching necks, insight no fear by their pin-prick eyes. So what do you imagine? What gravity are they shackled by that it stands, at leisure, on one foot? What color does the unblinking eye see when at last surrendered to sleep? Does the red bloom of the tide on the shore recall something primal to the flamingo? Not the rust of iron in blood but the carotenoid dyed water across which the lesser flamingo of East Africa flies or, god forbid we imagine, the soggy pink salt around a graying chick’s ankles? What is death to the flamingo, the modern herald of all things frivolous, enshrined from conception by consumption?
Black White, Green or Blue, Show Off your natural Hue-
Bent necked, positively flaccid, the pink flamingo stood aghast at the pyre of its happenstance destruction. Such is the culmination of John Waters’ 1972 film Pink Flamingos, in which said pink plastic flamingos stand witness to, what I might call with some affection, a rather queer tableau of atrocities. Approximately, Divine is the film’s protagonist, leader of her family/posse and self-stated, declared-by-law filthiest person alive. The conflict of the film revolves around her rivals, a couple named the Marbles, who seek her title for themselves. In their pursuit, they hire spies to find out Divine’s location and schedule, crash her birthday party by calling the police, and eventually burn down her trailer, for which they are executed. The movie is semi-famous for a concluding monologue of Divine’s: “Kill everyone now, condone first degree murder, advocate cannibalism, eat shit! Filth are my politics, filth is my life!” Indeed, Divine is no hypocrite like the Marbles, she does kill, murder, cannibalize (police), and eat shit. That was the second moment I have unironically gagged at a piece of media.
Let us not ignore this element of pink and plastic and flamingos: cheap, girlish, exotic, frivolous, ironic, unnatural, unmistakable, not in the least bit interested in begging for our forgiveness. It is queerer than lavender or light green carnations in its capacity to clarify its champion’s poor taste, and so no symbol better serves as herald to Divine. Beyond a consumer’s reach into normalcy, past the unshakable veneer of low-class interests, oh so shameful as we are meant, in mass culture, to see them, and which all we assume of the ever consumable flamingo, alas it is the fire — from which it’s plastic is melted into form and once materialized so long ago out of the sunset — to which it shall rightfully return.
Alternatively, maybe the pink flamingos are the friends we made along the way. There is something nomadic, irregularly migratory to Divine and her posse’s ultimate plan. As the flamingo moves with the seasons in colonies at times one-thousand strong, the displaced found family shall too travel America, roosting in gas station bathrooms and, when necessary, disappearing into the sunset. So this is the definitive connotation, the flamingo’s final metaphysical form. Need the subversive reading fly above and beyond all else? Don’t you think so? Is it worth asking of the flamingo something noble? Something god does not forbid?
Flamingo, Rosa y Negro
To my point, the flamingo itself yields no answer. We may beg these questions of it, recall and build again the myth of rebirth, locate the phoenix, mind the pelican, and ultimately laugh because we’re talking about silly gay birds. So the myth of the phoenix goes, any bird of the nile could be its real-world inspiration. The image of a great bird rising from white cast water of the sun is poignant whether or not a bird you revere lands next to you. So the myth of sacrifice goes: In late 2020 a video of two flamingos feeding their chick went semi-viral for its apparently gorey depiction. It appears that one flamingo had bore into the brain of its partner, and the blood that drips from its head drains to its beak from which an expectant chick feeds. That is not what is happening. A flamingo’s shrimp and algae diet dyes what nutrients it feeds its young a bright red color. This, incidentally, is called crop milk and is produced by only a few other birds such as pigeons. And that fact need not be as surprising as it seems. Flamingos and pigeons are more related to each other than the flamingo is to other water birds like pelicans or herons. The ritual, characterized as it were, from time to time, as a gruesome reminder to the lengths some animals will go to feed their children, and, at other times, a rather pitiful reminder to the gullibility of those who think themselves fit to read pictures, nonetheless is not in either or any sense more potent as it was at a glance. The flamingos are merely feeding their young, they had just so happened to try to do so at the same time. What one might say to a persistent willingness to characterize birds of all things as self-sacrificing to the point of self or special harm, I do not know.
The corollary medieval myth of a pelican mother who pierces her own breast to let her chicks feed on her blood does not have such a clear explanation in reality. Neither does the pelican mother’s other myth where she kills her chick and three days later cries over its body, reviving it. What we can say is that a flamingo’s pink color becomes depleted during pregnancy and throughout parenthood. Crop milk contains no blood, yet is there not something more poignant about its ability to drain raw color from its producers? Pink, the flamingo’s quintessence, what makes a flamingo desirable to its mate and marks it as well nourished and behaved fades away as a chick, born gray and needy, comes into its own and molts their old feathers. How mythically, socially satisfactory.
This is your Brain on Flamingos
So do you think you know what a flamingo is? What it means? You most certainly did, it’s the big pink bird that wades, eats shrimp and stands funny. Yes, you most certainly — probably — could recall a piece of clipart or summertime retail goods colored by that largely fictional shade of flamingo fuchsia and depicting some combination of sunglasses, palm trees or festive coconut beverages. Does the flamingo in your soul still lie half shaded from the tropical sun by a cheery beach umbrella? Does it do so, but instead of lackadaisy, the lounging flamingo’s effect more aligns with contemplation, exhaustion, or defiance? The ubiquity of such a symbol and lengths I’ve gone to to mythicize them makes such questions seem downright condescending. Yet so long ago, I looked across that chamber of darkness, a pin-prick pupil set within a frankly stupid visage, and I asked these questions. I got the distinct impression that — beyond the warmth of the sun and its fire, or the nutrition of a carotene rich snack — the flamingo itself did not really give a damn. And yet, here we are.
Why love anything? Specifically, I began thinking about flamingos and their analogical potential in reference to how they stand on one foot. I thought, that’s sure like me, as in how I feel I look and seem to others. This silly, ugly creature balanced for a time but fundamentally clumsy in its execution. It's an uneasy life, incredibly vulnerable to predators and only protected from them by a short head start over shallow water. I don’t know that a flamingo feels alone, looking out over his flock, also called a flamboyance. But I don’t see myself in others. I’m waiting, always, for the other foot to drop, when everything loses its meaning and I don’t have something to look forward to. That is my life as a filter feeder, my meditation on blood, not a flamingo’s. Unlike them, I really only need and want one shrimp, and flamingos don’t stand on a single leg for the precarious feeling that defines “being a person” to them. Being a flamingo — to a flamingo — probably involves preening rituals and an ideal diet among other behaviors and values we as humans have no frame of reference for. And as humans, with our own behaviors and values, which the flamingo finds mutually incomprehensible, some of them involve loving anything and thinking about it and looking at it for as long as you can and for no other reason than to be doing something with that human brain of yours. That is why. That is all anything I do is done for, as of yet, I dream to think.