An Ontology of Trash: The Disposable and Its Problematic Nature

Before the End

Before the End I well remember that those very plumes, Those weeds, and the high spear-grass on that wall, By mist and silent raindrops silvered o’er, As once I passed, into my heart conveyed So still an image of tranquillity, So calm and still, and looked so beautiful Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind, That what we feel of sorrow and despair From ruin and from change, and all the grief That passing shows of Being leave behind, Appeared an idle dream, that could maintain, Nowhere, dominion o’er the enlightened spirit Whose meditative sympathies repose Upon the breast of Faith. I turned away And walked along my road in happiness. —William Wordsworth, The Recluse, Book I With these words, Wordsworth depicts a radical human transformation— one, moreover, not in the least metaphysical. The passage comes at the end of the doleful story of a ruined cottage. Once the domestic sanctuary of order, care, and humble industry, Margaret’s “poor cottage/ Sank into decay; for he was gone, whose hand,/ At the first nipping of October frost,/ Closed up each chink and with fresh bands of straw/ Chequered the green-grown thatch” (lines 901–904). The narrator sadly retells a history of negligence, indifference and carelessness that sinks the once proud and comely home into dereliction. He mourns the wasteful loss, recalling the former beauty, hospitality, and peace of the spot. But precisely there, surrounded by ruin and decadence, with the rubble of memory giving cold comfort to a tired body now bereft of its late shelter and rest, the 183 narrator’s understanding suddenly penetrates the phenomenon of destruction and waste. Compassion seizes him out of the lethargic isolation of despondency and plants him in a world lush with wondrous manifestation. The signs of decay become revelations of beauty to “the enlightened spirit/ Whose meditative sympathies repose/ Upon the breast of Faith.” Faith sanctifies the desolate present. No longer a spectacle of failure and loss, the meditatively apprehended ruin appears a signpost pointing in the direction of happiness. Our world is now a ruined cottage. Like Margaret’s abode, it suffers the loss of careful hands to tend and to keep it. Everywhere we look, our dwelling shows signs of grave decay. The forests are felled or falling; cities, rotten at their cores, collapse into social disorder; poisons and illbegotten weapons settle to the floor of the seas; meanwhile, amid all this declension there rises up a mountain, confounding as the Tower of Babel, a mountain of trash. The magnitude of this obstacle to our careful human dwelling in the world makes it seem insurmountable. We know that we cannot continue unabated to consume and dispose of the world as we now do. Yet this mountain of used convenience, with its summit of spent promises, imposes itself between our present path and the road to happiness that lies beyond trash. We fear that we have neither the strength nor the will to go straight forward. We tell ourselves that we have not the desire to go back. So we wait helplessly at the base of our own indifference and uncaring, adding a little more mass to its bulk, and another cubit to its height every consumptive day. The nature and content of this book are somewhat foreign to the philosophical tradition. Its conclusions, under the objective scrutiny of disembodied reason, may leave the reader at a certain loss. But the success of an ontology of trash is to be gauged not so much in what it proves as in what it exhibits and elicits. At its best, such an ontology ought to be transformative in a manner not unlike Wordsworth’s history of Margaret’s decline. When infused with compassionate understanding, Wordsworth’s narrator is party to a double transformation. First, the whole sorry spectacle that so dismayed him transforms into a scene of beauty and promise and hope. At once the cramped decay of the world bursts open with possibility and vivacity. Suddenly, the ruined world appears hospitable again. This apparent external alteration coincides with an existential transformation within the narrator himself. To see hope and beauty in waste, he must rely on faith and careful thought. Only then can he turn away from the old aspect of ruin, not in disgust, fear, or callousness, but instead in happiness . He turns away and foots the road just newly cleared by the strength of a receptive, meditative sympathy. 184 AN ONTOLOGY OF TRASH [18.216...