A life between parentheses
In summation, a life between parentheses. The premise offered this afternoon by my friends over at Thalassa, during a series of short documentaries dealing with the world as seen from a container ship. Often, while my bus does its short detour beside the river, I see heavily laden freighters, inbound and outbound, with carefully corded containers. This was a chance to see vignettes from the life of those that move “all our stuff” around the globe.
I have unbridled enthusiasm toward the work from the team at Thalassa. The story is important, and the production quality is superb. Today we received musical interludes invoking the sounds of the sea, from the Orchestre de contrebasses; worth a search at YouTube. Now, where were we?
Well, although the sea is never monotonous, the daily routine of those who work on board a container ship is one of scheduled similarity. Only when the ship reaches a point of transshipment, and controlled chaos is the rule, do crew members see the paretheses of their existence. As one crew member joked, “The first hundred years of the job are the hardest”. Salaries depending on nationality, family life scheduled by storms at sea, careers that last three decades and more. The new monastic order?
One interesting aside was the new use for recycled shipping containers (produced mainly in China); housing. A development from the port area of London demonstrated that with a careful attention to colours and textures, the utilitarian becomes domestic. No similarity to the trailer park of urban fringes, these are becoming trendy and might represent another tool in the fight against housing shortages.
This particular series is in use as part of the curriculum in French schools, to explain the concept of mondialization to youth in training as citizens of the world. We forget that a large percentage of “all our stuff” is here only because of the container ship.
