Scene during a garbage workers’ strike in New York City, ca. 1970’s
At what point do the objects we discard and leave behind cease to be just that? Waste surrounds us, purged in routine installments, never to be accumulated so significantly by any one person such that they would have to acknowledge it. Its destination is not a concern of daily, practical life. Our species has before abandoned whole cities for reasons obscure to the present, only to be answered in estimations by archaeologists, a detective at history’s crime scene. These objects are not returned to by us as waste, but as ruins, in which their abandonment takes on an imaginative glow. The loss of the knowledge of the object brings us back into a desire to reconstruct its significance. What is near and contiguous to our lives possesses no such mystery, its disposability is accepted and we continue to make our lives in successively refashioned images that simulate a sense of change. Failures can be disposed of, purged from sight; we have no need to continue our possession of them. At least ruins are honest about being a failure. The truth of their being such is in a non-activity that is the precondition for their merging with all that surrounds, and will come to surround. One day, the Earth’s crust will come to claim them as its own, but this is long after vines and grasses learn of and train for the strength it takes to choke cement and steel. The ruin does not come to mind as a waste product, its name still an austere glimpse into a past we have enchanted; it does not matter who built them or under what conditions they did so. We call a “ruin” what we wish to give the mark of tragedy, where we do not acknowledge the failings already carried by the name. Waste is an expenditure that has no sense but its evacuation from our immediate sensual existence. It is to be sent away and never to be heard from again. The ruin can linger, take on the thrill of rediscovery, ignite a curiosity of our past; waste can only remind us of how we have actually spent our time. Accompanying the transparency of the ruin’s failure, the misrecognition of it in the romance of tragedy, is the brutal honesty of waste and our collective refusal to watch it linger and grow beyond our wildest dreams. When the trash is picked up with regularity, we seldom have any idea of just how much we generate. The parcelized slots of housing that we inhabit as commodity-bearers does not allow us a glimpse into the collective nature of waste production. When my ankle monitor came off I went to work at a waste management facility for the County. Looming over the asphalt campus is a large mound pocked with hundreds of trees, a blank face of grass and dirt watching over the circulation of vehicles below dumping, transporting, surveilling. This hill is the cap of the landfill that this relatively new facility is built upon. Chimneys located all around its base burn off methane gas 24/7 to release the pressure of gas pockets forming and their accompanying tendency towards combustion. Between the eternal flames and the weight of 18-wheelers and dump trucks circling the pavement, the pavement sinks into an uneven plane, where every successive rainfall forms an expanding lake, and the drains built into the asphalt some two decades ago now run uphill to the pockets where starlings now congregate to bathe. On one end, residents and small contractors come to empty the contents of their vehicles into containers, which will then be taken to the other end of the complex and dumped onto the tipping floor, where commercial dump trucks line up to amass the collective contents of their routes throughout the residential streets of the County into their own mounds, subsequently consolidated by loaders that push waste into the bay where a tractor-trailer lies below, and which a crane then packs and sorts through the refuse of many lives. I worked in the tunnel below where these trucks would be loaded, clearing their way throughout the day of roadway debris, walking through clouds of dust that formed from the loosening and making of particles from any combination of waste now knocked loose by the force of the loaders push and the impact of the load slamming into the walls of trailers. On a clear day these clouds emanate from the vents in the tunnel sides and linger in the air outside, forming a gradation with the pollen slowly amassing in the Spring. On a windy day it blows and cuts into your eyes, forming a thin layer of grime on your skin, as the cloud dissipates for a moment. I came to hate the wind during this time, as the structure of the complex and the tunnel below forms a centrifuge where any breeze accelerates with the persistent movement of vehicles, and papers and thin plastic items accumulate all over the site. Kites of congealed petrochemical byproducts are carried by the wind and slapping themselves against fences, lancing themselves on trees whose roots penetrate the dirt below into mounds of soon-ancient trash. If I heard a gust blow outside while waking up, I knew my day would involve this encirclement by specks of oil either branded by retailers or conformed by chemical production processes into new and expanding uses for what remains of a barrel cannot be consumed by the engine of your car. The vast majority of the trash is made from petrochemical byproducts, and every mountain of bags is an assemblage of discarded objects bound together in polyethylene shells. These hills that form and ebb and reform throughout the day are destined for an incinerator, located at another end of the County, and drivers run these loads, at least 4 a day, all day back and forth, exhaust merging with a metabolism of combustion. This is just the waste that can be made to disappear, for amongst and inbetween such many thousands of sites across the US are those that once relied on the export of recyclable waste and plastics to China and Southeast Asia, an option now foreclosed. These plastics cannot survive more than two cycles of reuse anyway, and themselves disintegrate into an unidentifiable but definite non-biodegradable matter that will forever be encased within the soil of this planet. I could go on about the imperatives of valorization driving the increase of numbers of actualized exchanges that realize monetary values, and how this incentivizes all production to generate objects that have to be purchased many times, thus intensifying and forever increasing this mass of waste. This compulsion is aside from what is immediately striking about this movement. For every mass that can be made to disappear, to move, its circuit and pathway made a point in reproducing a value in expanding quantity; it can never be disposed of, simply voided from our immediate field of recognition, something to be designated no longer any person’s problem, or rather not any one person’s problem, but the obligation is still effectively nullified, and the site can remain a contribution to the set objectives of a department of environmental regulation’s quality of life standards, as long as it has ceased to be the responsibility of the immediate polity. The labor process there reflects and constitutes this as the imperative to protect one’s own self from supervisory or disciplinary scrutiny. This undergirds the entirety of people’s motives, an incentive structure of aversion only to be unraveled and reconstituted in further retrenchment when the inevitable consequence of such interpersonal degradation breaks bodies and flesh. I once saw two men fall at least fifteen feet through a pit cover into the tunnel, one shattering their pelvis and the other face down, arm twisted, skull fractured and split, the corner of the many tons of steel that gave out beneath them hovering over where they landed, just a few feet above their bodies, one breathing, the other screaming, limbs mangled and bones shattered on a layer of trash compacted by the successive weight of massive steel and rubber driven over top of it throughout the day. Last year a man was crushed in a compactor at a facility an hour away, and safety inspectors took their anonymous strolls throughout the site, no words exchanged as they would walk by me and I would glance up from a book, reading in the hallway I took refuge in from the sun, the rain, the cold, the ever swirling clouds of bags and dust. The maintenance laborer crew bears the least of any responsibility, existing as we do to undertake the tasks that machines can neither reach nor navigate. The crannies of the tipping floor complex that we found to insulate ourselves from the weather bore resemblances to holding cells for intake, and the accommodation to these spaces facilitated by our shared experiences of incarceration. On the bottom rung of manual labor is a class of those whose lives can be read back to them from rap sheets, making seats of boxes of receipt papers to discuss lives that are all too frequently determined by papers. This social life came to be a comfort and support to me, a place where I could everyday live with those who understand. It became part of my own rhythm that began when I accepted the parameters of inevitable outcomes, and a place from where I could already begin acclimation. On late nights where the floor could not be cleared until 9 pm or later, the smell of bleach began to descend the stairs as the nightly cleaners were well underway. The smell of cleaning solutions frequently takes me back to my first arrest in 2017, a night spent in a full holding cell where the odors of humans packed together were only ever extinguished by waves of chemical mixtures washing upon cement and concrete. It’s a strange juxtaposition in a workplace so open to elemental exposure at all times. Ecological concerns have seen the introduction of cosmetic standards into the construction of such complexes. Residents passing through should see a greenspace that exists in harmony with the spatial distributions of waste and its disappearance from their sight. We do not have to consider how hostile these processes are to non-human life, and idyllic moments of deer passing through the far boundaries of the treelines do not have to be squared with the head of a deer one finds in a pile falling off the side of a truck. Grass can be cut to give the site a sense of upkeep and care and the mangled bodies of garter snakes, spines broken by weed wackers, are not seen. Yet this remains a site where the fauna establish themselves quickly in corners temporarily empty of human activity. By a crane closed for one day I see a hawk disemboweling a squirrel on the concrete ledge over a pit, spilling blood into the same hole through which I saw those two men fall. Territorial claims oscillate between civilization and natural life; crows and vultures arrive en masse to expropriate what they can when the trucks have all gone down the road to the incinerator. Mounds of refuse constructed throughout the day eventually burn into a thick smoke that induces climatic perturbations that we will only become conscious of as destabilizing seasonal cycles, intensifying summer heat that we experience radiating from the asphalt we walk upon, encircled by seagulls above that have mistaken the large patch of dark terrain for a body of water. Mass quantities of garbage can be purged every day, but the expanse of that which cannot be obliterated grows from the smallest fragments that escape the fires granting us an impermanent sense of absolution. Ever more beautiful variations forming in the color of sunsets are produced by light refracting through a landscape of manifold ignitions of waste. The animation of hulking metals colliding with the cast off remnants of daily life is a perpetual molting, a shedding that cannot deteriorate fully, or, if it can, it produces a husk of material that we have yet to know the half-life of. The ocean will see new territorial spaces constructed of these pieces of ourselves converging where the currents bring them in combination, and the Earth will incorporate a new entry into its ledger of geological strata, subterranean pockets of waste decomposing into itself, unable to integrate with the soil encasing it. Absent the chimneys releasing the pressure of this currently irreconcilable tension between species and nature, craters would form, swallowing the smaller structures and slipshod sheds where transactions occur, leaving and leveling the larger structures where we once built our mounds. One day these sites may themselves take on the aura of the ruin, and investigations bestow upon them the appropriate sense of tragedy that they currently cannot allow.
Thanks to daisuke shen for encouraging me to experiment and write in this register.
🔥🔥🔥
brutal