Nothing shall last so long, and ruin so completely all the magic of the world. Not only in its elements, but also in its form: this gaudy creeping death. Its creators, spawning and dispersing its dreadful shapes on the land, like Lovecraft’s demon. Deep in the thickest corners of the wood, in the most distant reef of the lagoon, we find this filthy scourge. “Surely someone else put this here,” we say. “It wasn’t us.”
So we bury it in smoldering heaps and gather all other garbage into its gaping maw.
We line pits with vast sheets of it, as we pour more of it into the earth like a grotesque Russian nesting doll. Layers of it, almost endless. Why won’t it stay hidden? Perhaps we’ll try and repurpose it, or recycle it? Alas, it always ends up on something beautiful, turning it wretched and cheap: your home, the ground, the sea.
Is nothing more suited to be the landscape of our now modern world, where paper is replaced with mere moments on a screen, and thoughts with loud, careless words?
Why do we make the misshapen tools and hideous garments that fill the vapid wasteland we’ve built out of this eternal garbage? It holds no inherent value, breaks immediately, is unrepairable and yet lasts forever. Perfect for this numb and thoughtless time.
Even something as complete as a saucepan. Ubiquitous. Perhaps perfect in its most basic construct, isn’t immune from this grotesque future we live in.
For millennia the shape has needed no change. Some made with exquisite care, and detail: bronze, copper, and steel. Some as simple as a slab of iron with a small wooden handle. Or clay, shaped by fingers, hardened by fire, tended by necessity. All for one basic, common purpose, each one holding something unique, something personal. Sustenance. Survival. Even love in the form of warm milk, served with tenderness, or oats, when there was nothing else. Perhaps even grief and its antidote, broth, savory like tears. Recipes remembered through the ages and perfected, in its worn, sturdy belly.
A saucepan, if taken care of, may last for generations, holding countless soups, frying endless potatoes, a beloved stew, feeding hundreds. But one will be uniquely yours.
In this well-used and often forgotten heirloom, lies the heart of the cook, culture, and family. It sits humble and unnoticed by the hearth until its moment of need, thousands upon thousands of times. Its bottom darkened from countless flames lapping at it, losing its luster. Its handle will wear and singe, as have the many hands that held it. Maybe it starts to remind us of our mortality. Instead of remembering the lovely soup our grandmother once stirred, we remember our own imperfections. So we dispose of it into a plastic-lined pit, to rust into oblivion.
But in throwing away a saucepan, we have discarded memory and replaced it, instead, with more eternal garbage.
We welcome the “new” saucepan! No one’s owned it before. It has no history. And we like that. It’s light to hold and looks sleek and new. No need to worry about cooking properly. If we burn food in the process, we always have more. And the new pan’s majestic coating is easy to clean. Not like that old pan, requiring one’s attention while cooking; being mindful, being present. There was a level of skill and care required in the kitchen for cooking and for cleaning. No time now for this level of commitment. There are too many distractions in this age of the eternal garbage wasteland.
The new pan is easily replaceable. You admire that, and you will replace it; soon, and often. Its toxic exterior will flake and scratch and you’ll put off throwing it away for a week or two. Slowly you’ll be poisoning yourself until its ugliness offends you and you dispose of it and proceed to buy a new, but identical piece of garbage.
It’s no bother. All things are like this now.
They’ll happily deliver this new, plastic-handled, toxin-coated, aluminum wonder directly to your house, wrapped up in plastic bubbles, inside another hermetically sealed plastic bag, in a large box, packed in plastic foam, from inside a van, itself made partly of plastic: a byproduct of the fuel that propels it.
And a man, wearing fabric made from strands of plastic, who rings your plastic doorbell, places his plastic trainers on your plastic welcome mat, hands you carefully wrapped garbage… with a smile, from under his plastic hat. All of these things are already in the eternal garbage wasteland, forever in the Valhalla of the cheap; expendable and lazy, where everything has been forgotten: both hardships and joy.
There will be room for nothing else. You’ll make sure of that. We all will. There is nothing to remember now. No more pain of loss. That sting has left us. The complication of continuity, learning, caring and trying, replaced with a momentary spasm of the new and the inevitable disappointments that follow. For nothing rots now. Nothing returns to the earth. There is no more room for stories and old useful things. Only endless layers of new eternal garbage.
