Some months ago, during an artists’ award event at a city hotel, I could not but note (again) the wastage of things – the waste of food and drink (sandwiches are made with crusts discarded, juices ordered in quantities people cannot cope with anyway; the waste of time (disregard for punctuality); and the like.
Waste not, want not, is an old adage, full of meaning for personal life, as well as life in community and civilisation at large. Had this been a university treatise, it could have been titled: “An enquiry concerning the concept of waste, with special reference to the notions of technology and vanity”.
In a bookish environment “waste” reminds of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Lan d which, I believe, caused an outcry when published in 1922. I find so many of its lines unexciting. The Afrikaans poet D.J. Opperman’s parallel poem Ballade van die Grysland(1947) has more poetic dare, conjuring the pleasures, and beauty, and terror of life – and poignantly relates to technology, even every “ordinary” day’s run-of-the-mill technicality. (Eliot and Opperman met when the English poet visited South Africa in 1950, and probably talked about their work.)
I (freely) translate three short extracts from Opperman’s poem, one relating to terror, one to pleasure, and one to beauty:
Each day, week after week,
I’m trapped, a hare inside strict bounds,
scared – at my heels six hounds.
In gardens softly lit, to my delight,
she flirts with me at night:
Will I be harshly judged for this?
A lump came in my throat
the morning when the pear-tree
blossomed white beside the moat.
Waste has many associations – wastage of time (as said); waste in the sense of garbage; of energy (consider Eskom’s woes); even memory will be wasted – remembering things that don’t deserve remembrance!
Technology and waste meet together seamlessly – as concepts, and as reality. The garbage truck with its crusher-compactor is a rough instance of technology at work; a notch up is the juicer in the kitchen, in line with the same principle of crushing and compacting, in this case providing refreshing liquid; and the highest notch up: The meeting of minds, in thought, and argument and debate, at times in agreement, at times clashing – a crushing and compacting of ideas, producing civilisation.
As to the third of our trinity of concepts: Human vanity is as old as the hills of the Garden of Eden. Letting our imagination go (somewhat wantonly), we can imagine Eve craving make-up, and Adam a dress shirt and bow tie! The relation of vanity to technology and waste is transparent: Every product of vanity has to be “techniqued” (made!), and comes off the total fund of whatever there is for us to live life with. (It has to be wasted!) Such products are not only material (like powder and paint). A skill such as plastic surgery, for instance, is often part of vanity. (I’m punning a little on Thackeray, of course, and also on John Bunyan with his critique of human living as a “vanity fair”.)
These concepts are infused with paradox: it may be vain of a woman (or man) to want their wrinkles smoothed or warts excised; by way of the same technology, however, death might be stayed for someone in the grip of a serious skin disease: In the news, recently, was research by South African doctors who have apparently developed a special technique of skingrafting, taking skin from a patient (in this case a mortally-ill young man), culturing it, then re-implanting it. The patient in question now appears to be regaining his former health.
Similarly, bad eyesight pushes a sufferer into vanity, to resort to contact lenses, steering clear of unflattering spectacles. A Canadian eye-care specialist at the moment claims to have developed a sensational new aid – a bionic lens which is implanted in the eye “in a folded form, by way of an injecting needle (and saline solution). Within seconds after implantation, it unfolds and sight is restored instantaneously” – and, more astounding, “the patient’s eyesight will gradually improve to 30% better than it ever was”. Experiments are now in progress on totally blind persons!
Vanity (with paradox) keeps raising its head. In the same mix of information about the sensational new lens, there is some cosy advice headlined “Fall in love with your own body”, and news about a project cutely called, in Anglikaans, “ilovemylyfie”! The young photographer involved tells how she became concerned “about the fact that (she) did not look like the models on the pages of the glossy magazines”; and thought an excellent way to have “a view of your own body” was the camera – after all, “society today is visually oriented”. So she unearthed all the bad things about her own skin, and found similar information for other women about theirs. “The Facebook site produced 3 500 supporters within the first 24 hours”. Now she has her work cut out with the clamour for “radio interviews and appearances on several blogs” – and now she is into well-remunerated work!
“Waste” has a broad definition in dictionaries. One source identifies types of waste – gaseous, liquid, solid. Solid waste is known also as refuse (the municipal workers will remove the stack of leaves, twigs, cut grass and the rest, after I had risked doing some gardening! This bundle they accept as “garden refuse”.)
I can see that empty glass vessels, aluminium discards, automobile debris, leftover metal cans, and the like, are solid waste. But how solid is garden refuse? (Let’s go with the thought that this is simply “a manner of speech”, confirming that we cannot but live by way of approximation and analogy.)
As far as gaseous waste is concerned, the best-known form of it is emission from motorcars. Aeroplanes also produce gas offal, and there is the burning by factories and crematoriums. The air in and around our cities is never “pure”, but rather a haze that makes things blurry – still, the sky’s blue is not easily suppressed!
Liquid waste is the messiest. It presents itself most immediately as sewage, with all its hassle. (Sewage has been much in the news again, from all over.) There are the flows from kitchen sinks and bathrooms (including toilets), fruit and vegetable processing factories, whatnot. (On the side, there are many sordid tall tales about sewage. But let propriety prevail!)
Waste also spawns embarrassing problems of odour (domestically at least): What will the visitors think? The fact is that the visitors suffer the same travail at home. But we would be oh so “sanitised”: The word meets one face-on when you walk into your hotel room and the message on the toilet seat reads: “Sanitised for your protection”. (I would mutter though: Thank God!)
Cynically, I wonder when we will ever learn to make peace with the fact that we really are human, and that there is no such thing as a neatly clinical reality. We actually have bodies. (But, of course, one should not contest the need for good hygiene.)
Another idea to note regarding waste is “recycling”. It relates to all types of waste, and has become fashionable (appropriately so). Much of what we discard can be treated in ways that make the resulting product usable again. (Paper and motor vehicle tyres are good illustrations.)
If waste disposal in the home causes uneasiness, things are much worse at community level. It is easy enough, on garbage-collection day, to wheel out one’s rubbish to the street – lined, as it is, with the neighbourhood’s black bins (some even nicely painted, and colourful – another small vanity). How is it all disposed of?
There are two ways of disposal: Open dumps (often health-threatening); and the more pleasant option of incineration (not really more community-friendly). The fact is that, being human, we cannot avoid putting out waste – and it must “go somewhere”. Cleanliness is next to godliness (another meaningful adage) – but God has destined us to dwell in a world in which cleanliness cannot prevail in a supreme way.
Some dumping is well-managed, and some not. (We live in a world where everything is “managed”.) A well-managed dump gets top-soiled regularly, until at last it is decided (municipally) that it has had its last intake, and is closed. Almost grandiosely, then, it is flattened, top-soiled a last time, and allowed to settle. Then (in America at least) the flattened surface is used for recreational purposes – tennis courts, for example – with nobody caring, or even knowing, what lies under the “ground”.
All in all, the story of waste and all its associated reality is greatly intriguing – and revealing of the essence of our humanness.
I have this fanciful notion that to know whether a concept is worth one’s time, one has to consult poetry. D.J. Opperman could capably use the unromantic hard words of the arena of waste, and make engaging verse of it. Even youthful work of his testifies to this. In his very first book of poetry, Heilige Beeste( Holy Cows), he writes a “perfect” poem in line with the concept of waste ( Stad in die Mis – City in the Haze):
My muscles tense,
I wander through the city’s haze.
I sense a creature
stalking me in the dark.
I hear its snort and bark,
its tottering on heavy-pillared paws,
its tilted back like steel…
(In a few powerful lines the poet takes in the world of “progressive” technology, and the anxiety of living in its wake. The beauty involved is simply the words of the poem.)
As the years passed, Opperman mastered this style of writing, and, in his age (when he was very ill), he writes some utterly moving lines: “In die hospitaal” he finds himself in a ward with other patients – like himself wasted by illness.
In the bed next to mine
– his body had been bashed –
he remains confused.
His car had crashed.
He shouts and swears,
straining at a chain
holding him down,
trying to break from pain.
This “steely” image of technology emerges: The treatment (the attempted re-making) of persons withered by disease; the camouflage (vanity) of the clean white linen on beds. And, despite, again the transforming beauty of the words:
In a corner opposite me
an old former farmer lies,
diagnosed with cancer:
When last was he on the farm
with his angoras and sheep?
I hear him now
speaking with them deliriously.
They’re all around him,
grazing on the grass
under the great flaming ring
of the Karoo sun.
Peaceful and bleating.