A story of what is discarded

We show greatness, not by being at one extreme, but by touching both extremes at once and occupying all the space in between

Whether they give it any thought or not, every person employed to work as a cleaner quickly learns to make the distinction between two orders of rubbish, the dry and the wet. Taking into consideration the perversity of the human heart, I hesitate to claim that every cleaner, if given the choice, would opt to dispose of dry rubbish over the wet, but emphatically that was my preference. As is the way of things with those who have a limited knowledge of the world, I learnt to carry into other areas of my life this distinction between the states of wetness and dryness as a method of selection, and I applied it wherever I was presented with a situation in which I had to make a decision. In moments where I was confronted with the particularities of an unknown circumstance, I became adept at asking myself the question, what is the dry in this, and what is the wet? Once the initial decision was made, I knew that if I encountered the same object or event again, I was already in possession of a classificatory means for engaging it. Everything then appeared to me as if at the point of its being discarded. And I stood in the world as if before the twin mouths of two refuse chutes. I had the power to consign to oblivion any object I encountered by selecting one or the other of them. Certainly, there were some forms of rubbish, certain ideas perhaps, that were not easily described as either wet or dry. I did not much touble myself with the more difficult items, and I do not care to speculate on what happened to all that junk. Then, when the inevitable happened, and I too became a piece of rubbish, I naturally turned my hard-won method towards identifying the category into which I had been discarded. At the time, I felt the best approach was to ask myself the same basic question which had aided my passage through life: if I was rubbish what type of rubbish was I, dry or wet? Simple. I could not deny the transformation had occurred, there was no way back to what I had been. And I felt the impact of the blow softening whenever I considered that most discarded objects do not get to have their say over what order of abandonment they belonged to. I readily concluded that there was no good reason for refusing to accept I now belonged to the world of the thrown and not that of the thrower. It was my new circumstance. At that level, I resigned myself accordingly but remained actively involved at the level of the subset. What I did not know was whether I had been launched down the dry chute or down the wet chute. As a means of refining my enquiry, I utilised as a secondary set of categories, Bateson's conception of 'collateral energy', by which he classified different responses to external force and thus made distinct the boundary between the energy of a kicked stone and that of a kicked dog. I associated the category of the dry with the category of the stone and (not without humour) the category of the wet with the category of the dog. In the early days of becoming rubbish, it seemed preferable that I should cleave to the order of the dry, and like a stone allow myself to be rolled along at the mercy of external forces. Later, it occurred to me that I might be 'rolled along' like this forever, or at least until I was brought up against an obstacle that would then serve as my final resting place. I soon foresaw that in this position my fate was one of completed abandonment, the indifferent forces of the world would always swirl about but never with sufficient energy to move me on again. For some reason, still unknown to me, I had resisted belonging to the order of the wet and had not been able to issue that kicked dog's yelp. I had not found a way to take charge of the pain. Then, as I settled into my place within the order of the dry, I began to contemplate what might have been if I had chosen to become sticky, if I had made a mess and adhered to the space of my trauma. What if I had invoked the law of surface tension? Perhaps I would not have been so soon forgotten.