Shivspeak IV

"Waste has no response in the ethics of memory or the ethics of innovation. The first has no mnemonic for them; the second confines them to obsolescence. Waste has become the no man’s land of modern ethics where genocidal death is met with indifference. I remember a scene from Anna Akhmatova’s work. She is standing for hours for days waiting to see her son. She meets a woman also waiting who recognizes her and asks, “Can you remember that?” She nods, the woman smiles in profundity of mutual recognition. We have no Akhmatovas and Miloszs left. The conversation of our societies has to be around this new globalization of evil. It requires a summoning of poets, novelists, philosophers and people to answer, “Can you remember this?” Not in the language of sociology but in the poetics of suffering.

"He builds out of it huge dolls and creates a village, the remembered village out of waste. A village of memory out of waste. A theory of waste becomes a theory of memory because every time you recycle waste, you actually recycle a narrative. You recycle a story. So waste in fact becomes a nucleus of a new possibility of memory, a new possibility of story-telling."