I spent my first day as poet in residence at my local dump last week; the place has a longer official name, along the lines of ‘resource and waste recycling management centre’, but a dump’s a dump and contains and surrounds all such terms: you know where you are with a dump. Only I didn’t, and I still don’t, and that is why I’m going to be visiting it regularly over the next twelve months: it’s news to me and it may be news to you.
This first visit was a strangely thrilling experience. Harry drove me out of town, through the business park and onto the new road to the dump, past a couple of small lakes, some newly planted trees and an unofficial scrambler track. As we drove into the controlled area, the true dump or landfill cell in the distance, I had my first glimpse of the inner workings of this extraordinary place. Through the doors of one of the vast, blue, hanger-like sheds, a long conveyor-belt dropped its load of many-coloured paper into a hopper. The sliding doors of another gave on to vast banks of magazines and newsprint heaped up against steel walls like grain in a barn, at which a tractor clawed, moving back and forth, as it fed the conveyor connecting the buildings. Harry was to end up shouting himself hoarse as he explained what was going on above the maelstrom of beeps, squawks, buzzing, metallic wrenching, the dull bass falls of reclaimed timber dropping into skips, and the revving of mechanical movers of all kinds as they reversed or plowed into heaps of newly arrived stuff. As a midwife once said to me: ‘the babies, they just keep coming’; well, same goes for trash.
Shifting green waste for shredding and sieving
I had on my hi-viz jacket and hard hat, but it felt a threatened space for the human body to be in. And maybe that’s why it felt so thrilling. I was a soft piece of flesh moving around in an astonishingly organised, open-air mechanism designed to perform the miraculous illusion of making our waste disappear. Is man no more than this? Faced with all that waste, all that mingling of the once valuable with the instantly throwaway; all those stories of desire and effort and work and excitement implied and lost together in vast bales of all-coloured things, it did make me wonder at the vacuous deployment of our potent control of resources. Maybe our needs needed reasoning through: a simple thought in abstract, but when faced with the mad facts of it, it’s the kind of realisation that strips you bare. All the old sayings come back. You can’t take it with’ee when you go. There are no pockets in a shroud. I was surrounded by the irrevocable traces of our existence concealed within a system that seeks to save us from our past desires by generating the illusion that when we put those ill-judged purchases, those wastes-of-time, out for collection, they’re gone for good; our material souls shriven; our mental loads lightened; our houses free to be filled with more stuff. Crematoria and dumps; they midden and the grave yard; how they’ve changed, how clean and remote they’ve become.
Of all the traces of our consumption and its enduring afterlives, perhaps the most surprising for me, that day, came in the form of the old VHS tapes that everywhere festooned tractors, hopper-lips and bales with their Lilliputian, brown, magnetic ribbons. The great gullet of waste disposal was being tied down by brown tape. All that information; all the light and the stories; all that attentiveness and money and joy had come to this: a web of flittering tape that’s a real irritant to those who work at the site. It clots up and blocks the flow of paper through the baler. Hands have to get involved at that point to sort it out and ease the system back into motion.
For there are hands in this place of great machines. Not everything can be sorted by a magnet, or by bombarded by a positive then negative charge to make it leap across a gap into a hopper (aluminum cans); not everything can be sorted by the fun-house moving floor that treads paper apart from plastics; not everything can be done by tumbling stuff in a vast rotating drum (a sort of judgement day ascension into heaven, or fall to hell). No, there are people sorting out contaminated waste with their hands. People I have yet to meet and to find out more about. I was told that they don’t like to be photographed as some of them feel ashamed about the work that they do. Whether or not this is true I’ve yet to test, but it did reinforce my sense that there’s a hidden world out at the dump, both of people and of industrial processes. Over the course of this year I want to find out what passes before those people, and through their lives away from this place. How did they come to this place of endings and beginnings? Many seemed to be Eastern European and most were young men. What struck me was the dexterity, thoroughness and speed with which their hands moved over the stream of rubbish. Harry said that they had an instinct for rubbish, by which I think he meant that they had no time to think but had to work by feel for what was paper, metal or plastic. It was too noisy for them to speak.
I asked one man about some things that appeared to have been saved during their filtering out of contaminants: there was a Thomas the Tank engine; a super-hero figure I couldn’t identify, and a calculator; I wondered if they were gifts for a child, but he didn’t know anything about them. There they stood, overlooking the steady flow of our waste: all those words and all those images off to be pulped. So much effort to prepare the stuff! And so soon, all that effort going through the reserve process.
It was bright and breezy that day: April in May. But because of the bank holiday gift of sunshine the green-waste heap where all the compostable stuff goes was steaming and fuming like a Victorian ash-heap. A tractor scooped up great claw-fulls of leylandii branches, hedge clippings, grass cuttings and all manner of blackening mulch and dropped them into a hopper for sieving and shredding even finer. As they fell from the conveyor they seemed like a steamy, dark froth: the dump’s all very chthonic in its way; a place of undoing; the chaos of Hades; the generative heap. But this undertaking is highly controlled: the general green-waste heap is tended and measured and needs to reach 60 degrees C in order to kill off all the seeds so that gardeners can spread it safely without contamination: it’s purified by its own heat of fermentation. I found myself wanting to go and bury my hands in the sweet dark matter. It reminded me of cooking an egg in a heap of grass clippings with my dad when I was a child. Once the compost’s shredded it’s scooped up and arranged in enormous furrows with the ridge a couple of metres high. Again, I felt small and amazed at the process: these soft, dark prisms of compost, known as ‘wind rows’, are designed to allow the ‘good’ aerobic decomposition that stops it all turning slimy and stinky to take place.
And that was something that I wasn’t prepared for. I’d expected the place to stink, but, with the exception of the irredeemably mixed and un-recyclable stuff slopping around as it was loaded up for transportation elsewhere, there was little or no smell. So much for developing the poetry of stench; but perhaps I’ll get better at nosing that out for you. There was a lovely, sweet vinegary aroma from the mount of bottles; I’d say it had a fruity, Beaujolais top-note to it with a good length of cidery beeriness undercut with mold.
Glass Mountain
If the stink was understated, the acoustics of the place were astonishing: as the bottle-bank lorry backed away, its tailgate open and its container tilted, the great glass deluge began: first a couple of smashed bottles and then the onset of the great annihilating bass roar, an accelerating, pelting torrent of detonations and shuckings-out of contained space that crashed through all limits until the cascade petered out into light tinklings and a renewed sense of acoustic space: a clear, fresh space between the grinding if machinery and the terns skewering the air with their cries. And counterpointing this din were acoustically ‘dead’ spaces where the bales of fabrics were stacked. Observing this slow heave of rubbish and oblivious to the occasional breakers of sound, along the edges of the sheds were ENORMOUS black-backed gulls and immaculate herring gulls with nothing to do but patiently get over their Pavlovian reaction to the non-arrival of waste onto the landfill itself, for the last cell has only recently been closed and now all waste is to go to York. The birds were what I’d most associated with the site from driving past it on the bypass: the huge bulldozers like landlocked fishing boats riding up the swell of rubbish followed by a bright circulation of gulls – well not here any more, although there are no doubt rich pickings to be had.
It’s all and and and and and at the landfill. All the springs of green, brown and blue bins spill out down our streets and feed into this vast reservoir of rubbish. And I think that may be the way I’ll go about this residency in order to get truly stuck in to the material. This will be a heap of voices; a mass of tangles; with some sorting-house principles I’ll try to work out for you. Sorting will be the thing; sorting in the face of all that mingled chaos. How can language fill itself with a feeling of the dumps entirety? – its noise of voices; its clamourings at point a transformation or burial. Even if I am to embrace the heap, to bury myself in its deliquescing rich, it will of course be sorted moment by moment as I run my eyes and ears through the lines that flow in and radiate out of it. For, of course, I’ll be talking rubbish, singing filth, unpacking the full vocabulary of the pure and contaminated as I move within the vast sorting houses of our collective material soul.
The Soul of Waste
johnwedgwoodclarke 