Art infuses all

Reflecting today on a mood that soured notwithstanding an outstanding week in Garbologie, I retreat to this track from Pogo:

It's a mixed up track, beautifully composed, perfectly nonsensical. What do the lyrics mean? Who knows - perhaps there is something that Pogo has attempted to express, but to me, trying to put meaning around the lyrics misses the point. The lyrics, the words, are an instrument blended in to form the music.

And what does this have to do with waste and Garbologie?

Well, not a lot. And a hell of a lot.

I think it is easy to ascribe too much meaning to events, to overlay your own meaning across something that is unfolding as it will. Something that has its own beauty, something within which the meaning is secondary to the art.

To put it in less high falutin' terms, it's easy to get caught up in the small stuff. Sure, it's a big deal at the time, but it unfolds as it will. Left alone, it unfolds just right.

How did that happen for Garbologie? Well, this week was our biggest yet in terms of activity. We received our largest number of mattresses in a week (330), loaded up a 40 foot sea container with foam and cleared out a heap of rubbish.

It was a busy week, and yet it found its own music. Sure, there were moments when it looked like it would all collapse, but it did not. Everything worked as needed, when needed.

It was a crazy mixed up, beautifully rendered week.

Step back and up. Is there perhaps some learning there for dealing with rubbish as a whole? That by taking the care to select your streams carefully, to splice and mix and render whole again, you can create something of true value? That the approach of treating waste as a undifferentiated whole is the musical equivalent of white noise?

Maybe my art (in the sense that Seth Godin writes of art) is to weave a new narrative out of the white noise. Sure, that's hard. Bloody hard, even when it's rewarding. Especially when it's rewarding, because something that is good shows up the little flaws that much better than something that was crap to start with.

I ramble. Isn't the Alice track beautiful? Isn't it fun blogging about something and nothing at the same time?

And no, you don't have to read every single article I've written in this blog as if it were a digital form of the torture suffered by Alex in A Clockwork Orange. It's ok to read just a bit and move on.