Late Stage Capitalism: Republic Services Apex Landfill
According to T.S. Eliot and Hugh Kenner, much of what happens in Vegas stays…just northeast of Vegas
A desert sculpted for one billion tons of waste — what the thunder said [1]
Jonatha Chance | Copyright © 2024 CC-BY-NC-ND (4.0 International)
[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land
"_A heap of broken images_ Eliot’s endnotes for the poem connect the following line to Ecclesiastes 12:5: “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets.” But it also resembles Ezekiel 6:4: “And your images shall be broken.” Though the “heap of broken images” is one of many depictions of post-war decay in the poem, it can also be taken more generally as a metaphor for how present consciousness consumes past culture. Hugh Kenner, one of the great scholars of Modernism, explained this element well, arguing how the line evokes: “the manner in which Shakespeare, Homer, and the drawings of Michelangelo, Raphael, and the Magdalenian draughtsmen coexist in the contemporary cultivated consciousness: fragments, familiar quotations: poluphloisboio thalasse, to be or not to be, undo this button, one touch of nature, etc. […] Cities are built out of the ruins of previous cities, as The Waste Land is built out of the remains of older poems.”" From comment 3 at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land