“Finding our way through the mud and mangroves of the Pacific Coast of Colombia, I become aware there is no border between land and sea. What exists is not a coast but a blur. The mangroves claw at the mud, like me -– matter falling through time with a strange comfort in a sucking motion where being coagulates in. a unity of sticky shadows. This morass is definitely the long-sought in-between of sludge rising and falling with the tide, home to all. manner of life-forms, the lunar zone of rot and decay in whose slow, eternal rhythms clouds of shrimp waft and crabs hide. The gold that was, and the co-caine now spreading, cause the same fermenting mix of composting life we choose to call corruption. Mangrove swamps offer comfort, here being na-ture’s corruption, where death and life sustain one another in extremis, and matter — formless matter — spreads its silver trail in the moonlight.”

Contrast that with the idea of reclamation, or the struggle between water and silt. This is Michael Taussig, in a photocopy I pulled from a stack of same yesterday afternoon. It’s a few pages from an unknown book. Not My Cocaine Museum, although it has similarities and focuses on the same place. He may refer to the coast as a blur, but his last sentence reflects a sense of co-constituent symbiosis. Graham Swift touches on that ever-so-lightly in the excerpt you’ve posted.

PS: while I was looking around, I came across this. It’s got some interesting stuff.

Apologies for the mess above. I needed to edit it a bit more.