Let's Talk Trash

  Today was trash day, a term used here in the U.S. to indicate the day that those big 9-miles-per-gallon hydraulic-loaded trucks come and haul away the contents of your rubbish bins, big 50-gallon bins that for us somehow keep filling up each week despite our best efforts at recycling (our recycling bins are rather full as well).  Of course everything is packaged here in the U.S., from the frozen peas to the replacement wiper blades for the car which come complete with every possible bracket and adapter for the various years and models of vehicles.  Off it all goes into either the trash bin or the recycling bin, a dilemma made no easier at the recycling facility which is now fond of the term, "aspirational recycling," a term used to describe how we consumers throw in everything that we think can be recycled but aren't really sure so let the recycling facility sort it out (here's a hint, most of what we throw in with that mindset can NOT be recycled); and off it goes into their trash, all to also be magically hauled away.  But this post isn't about all that...well, just a little.*

    I threw that tidbit in because I was once again outside raking the leaves that had fallen, pine needles to be exact.  And if it seems as if I have been raking a lot, well yes, such is the price one pays for living in an area with four seasons or at least seasons which have just enough of a temperature change to trigger the leaves to change color and drop.  I always feel grateful at this time of year, the seemingly constant raking not bothering me (much), the mulching of the leaves giving me free fertilizer for the next spring, the treat for my eyes from the leaves that give their last gasp with a burst of colors, and of course the gentle reminder that this is how the cycle of life and death works.  Pine needles, if you didn't know, blow with the wind and gather as densely as  leaves from any other tree, and each time I study the needles I forget about the differences between the conifers, the general term used to describe all the different pine, fir and spruce trees.  But here's one way to differentiate the three: pine needles appear on branches in clusters of two, three or five needles (picture the fingers of your hand) whereas fir and spruce needles are each individually attached to the branch.  Needles from pine trees will generally fall only after three years have passed whereas fir and spruce needles generally fall after four or five years have gone by (who knew?)  And as to those pine cones...um, a misnomer because fir and spruce trees also produce "cones," although the direction that the cone grows is a good identifier.  Phew, there's your quick botany lesson out of the way.

From the Northern Sun catalogue

   But back to my raking for once again we had had some snow and some rain and enough of a melt that I could glance at what seemed a carpet of pine and spruce needles now clustered all over my sidewalk and street; and although I normally mulch even these needles into the ground, they were now wet and rain was again coming and, well, it was trash day.  So into the rubbish bin they went to be hauled away, all of which made me think of a bumper sticker that read, "When You Throw Something Away, Where Exactly Is Away?"  This came from a company in Minnesota which makes and markets an entire line of tee shirts, magnets, buttons and bumper stickers, the majority of them getting you to think a bit about our world and our place in it; the jabs are political or funny or famous quotations or grandly redone images (one of their more popular items as shown in the picture is the DaVinci sketch of man re-done as playing an electric guitar).  One of my favorite stickers of theirs comes from a quote by famed photographer Ansel Adams: It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment.  

   But it was that "away" thing that got me, perhaps because we so casually toss that term around as in "don't throw your life away."  So what does that really mean, and where the heck is "away?"  Was it simply a place out of sight, out of mind, as in a prisoner hearing those dreaded words, "let's put him away."  Okay, was I just putting too much into this?  After all, I was experiencing a factotum brain, or rather, now listening to a series of talks on vocabulary and how to not only build words up but more importantly how to take words apart.  The lectures by Professor Kevin Flanigan start with these three words: ambitious, factotum, and procrustean.  He wants you to rate each one in your head as to how familiar they are to you both in definition and usage; in most cases, the words emerge in descending order as in very few people knowing or ever hearing the word procrustean.  I incorrectly thought that I knew the second word because of the word factoid, a word which came into existence only in the late 1950s.  But Professor Flanigan breaks the word factotum down into its Latin & Greek parts (languages from which he notes, 70% of the English language originates), the "fac" portion coming from the verb facio which means "to make or do" and the word totum which means "all."  So think of factory or facilitate or even facetious.  Okay, it all makes sense in the lectures but here's what I'm taking "away" from much of this...there is much more to some things, something which is often simple and more hidden than we imagine.  As he notes, why is the word health spelled with a silent "a" (to just sound it out, it could easily be spelled helth); the answer lies in taking away some letters, specifically the th and you're left with the base word: heal.

Part of a sketch for solo bassoon and wind ensemble;

LRB

   Another interesting piece appeared in the London Review of Books by composer Nico Muhly, part of which read: With every piece, no matter its forces or length, the first thing I do is to map out its itinerary, from the simplest, bird’s-eye view to more detailed questions: what are the textures and lines that form the piece’s musical economy?  Does it develop linearly, or vertically?  Are there moments of dense saturation --the whole orchestra playing at once-- and are those offset by moments of zoomed-in simplicity; a single flute, or a single viola pitted against the timpani, yards and yards away?  More practically, I see each commission as a challenge: write a piece of music which lasts between fifteen and twenty minutes, for an orchestra comprising the following 65 instruments, and we'd like it by this date.  These are known restrictions, the sort of predetermined constraints architects and painters work with too: you know the site on which the building will be built, or the size of the wall on which the canvas will be hung.  The primary task, I feel, is to create a piece of art that is better than the same amount of silence... And I seem to feel much of the same as I listen to these lectures on words, less the meaning and memorization of those words but more the background behind and within them.  Quick quiz: what do you call of cluster of cats?  Come on, everyone has cats or has seen cats; so what do you call a group of them?  A herd?  A bunch?  A crowd?  Or as with crows, a murder? 

   And as it is with words, so I have to think that we can look at ourselves and others in much the same way, perhaps even looking at all of life in this manner.  Buried within each of us is a story and a background, a complicated mess that somehow makes sense if we go back far enough and dig deep enough to find its roots.  It could be the person crying out silently, maybe your best friend, all smiles on the outside but torn up inside, or the person you just can't relate to, or maybe even the person staring back at you in the mirror.  Even for me to study those music notations above seems nothing but gibberish; but to someone it makes perfect sense, perhaps even becoming luscious and moving and life-changing to the senses; eyes closed, a composer can hear that symphony as clearly as we can see and imagine our dreams.  We don't have to push such things away.  Break down away and you have two words...a way. We can think in the mode of pushing away, or telling someone to go away, or stay away.  Or we could do the opposite and say come away with me, or let's go away together.  There will always be "away," just as there will always be "a way."  It's all a matter of perspective; as one of the bumper stickers says, EARTH Without ART is Just "EH."

   *So the trash thing.  The holidays are just about upon us and of course that will mean packaging galore and more aspirational recycling.  So a quick list from RecycleNow and Costco: You cannot recycle wrapping paper if it's metallic or has any extra embellishments, like glitter, on it.  Shiny wrapping paper has to be thrown in the garbage.  Keep in mind that bows, ribbons and Styrofoam packaging are all nonrecyclable as well. (Use) the "scrunch test" to determine whether you can recycle something.  If it scrunches, then you can.  If it doesn't, you can't.  As a basic reminder, those plastic bags and other soft plastic have no place in your recycle bin but grocery stores and other outlets generally will collect them for recycling (in my state, all such plastic bags, even if full of aluminum cans and such, are simply sent to the landfill...recycling facilities simply cannot take the chance that a plastic bag will jam their machinery and slow or stop the entire processing line).  And I found this interesting in a piece from Science Advances and mentioned in Discover: 8.3 billion metric tons.  That's how much plastic humanity has produced thus far...Of that, nearly 80 percent has been thrown out (as opposed to recycled or burned).  That amount of plastic is enough to make nearly 300 TRILLION soda bottles.  The unfortunate news is that future predictions show our plastic production increasing at a rate double that of our capacity to recycle (that 8.3 figure is expected to climb to over 26 by the year 2050).  As another piece in Bloomberg Businessweek noted about the waste produced just from making our clothing: The equivalent of a dump truck filled wioth textiles gets landfilled or incinerated every single second.  Yikes!  But hope is out there, as evidenced by companies such as Inditex, ReFibra, Smart Stitch and others.  And a final reminder...leave those caps ON your bottles when recycling...