Ur-Story: What is lost

Some quotes:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, 'East Coker' V. ll. 172-189

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept...
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, III. 'The Fire Sermon' ll.173-186

"The dump was roughly square, half a mile on each side, sunk fifty feet below the streets of the sprawling housing development which surrounded it. All day long, Rocco said, two D-8 bulldozers would bury the refuse under fill which was brought in from the north shore, and which raised the level of that floor a tiny fraction of an inch every day. It was this peculiar quality of fatedness which struck Flange as he gazed off into the half-light while Rocco dumped the load: this thought that one day, perhaps fifty years from now, perhaps more, there would no longer be any hole: the bottom would be level with the streets of the development, and houses would be built on it too. As if some maddeningly slow elevator were carrying you toward a known level to confer with some inevitable face on matters which had already been decided. ...Whenever he was away from Cindy and could think he would picture his life as a surface in the process of change, much as the floor of the dump was in transition: from concavity or inclosure to perhaps a flatness like the one he stood in now. What he worried about was any eventural convexity, a shrinking, it might be, of the planet itself to some palpable curvature of whatever he would be standing on, so that he would be left sticking out like a projected radius, unsheltered and reeling across the empty lunes of his tiny sphere."

Thomas Pynchon, "Low-lands"

"In his novel, Snow White, [Barthelme] tells us about the manufacture of buffalo humps.

They are "trash," and what in fact could be more useless or trashlike? It's that we want to be on the leading edge of this trash phenomenon, the everted sphere of the future, and that's why we pay particular attention, too, to those aspects of language that may seem as a model of the trash phenomenon.

Much interest is also shown in "stuffing," the words which fill the spaces between other words, and have the quality at once of being heavy or sludgy, and of seeming infinite or endless. Later we are told (Barthelme is always instructing the reader) that the seven dwarfs (for the novel is a retelling of the fairy story)

...like books that have a lot of dreck in them, matter which presents itself as not wholly relevant (or indeed, at all relevant) but which, carefully attended to, can supply a kind of "sense" of what is going on. This "sense" is not to be obtained by reading between the lines (for there is nothing there, in those white spaces) but by reading the lines themselves...

Dreck, trash, and stuffing: these are his principal materials. But not altogether. There is war and suffering, love and hope and cruelty. He hopes, he says in the new volume, "these souvenirs will merge into something meaningful." But first he renders everything as meaningless as it appears to be in ordinary modern life by abolishing distinctions and putting everything in the present. He constructs a single plane of truth, of relevance, of style, of value—a flatland junkyard—since anything dropped in the dreck is dreck, at once, as an uneaten porkchop mislaid in the garbage.
...
But cleverness is also dreck. The cheap joke is dreck. The topical, too, is dreck. Who knows this better than Barthelme, who has the art to make a treasure out of trash, to see out from inside it, the world as it's faceted by colored jewelglass? A seriousness about his subject is sometimes wanting. When this obtains, the result is grim, and grimly overwhelming.

People were trying to understand. I spoke to Sylvia. "Do you think this is a good life?" The table held apples, books, long-playing records. She looked up. "No.""

William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life, "The Leading Edge of the Trash Phenomenon," p. 100-101.

"The construction crew had gone for the day. We stood above a hole in the earth, an engineered crater five hundred feet deep, maybe a mile across, strewn with snub-nosed machines along the terraced stretches and covered across much of the sloped bottom by an immense shimmering sheet, a polyethylene skin, silvery blue, that caught cloudmotion and rolled in the wind. I was taken by surprise. The sight of this thing, the enormous gouged bowl lined with artful plastic, was the first material sign I'd had that this was a business of a certain drastic grandeur, even a kind of greatness, maybe—the red-tailed hawks transparent in the setting sun and the spring stalks of yucca tall as wishing wands and this high-density membrane that was oddly and equally beautiful in a way, a prophylactic device, a gass-control system, and the crater it layered that would accept thousands of tons of garbage a day, your trash and mine, for desert burial.
...
Detwiler said that cities rose on garbage, inch by inch, gaining elevation through the decades as buried debris increased. Garbage always got layered over or pushed to the edges, in a room or in a landscape. But it had it own momentum. It pushed back. It pushed into every space available, dictating construction patterns and altering systems of ritual. And it produced rats and paranoia. People were compelled to develop an organized response. This meant they had to come up with a resourceful means of disposal and build a social structure to carry it out—workers, managers, haulers, scavengers. Civilization is built, history is driven—
...
Civilization did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered philosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn't discard, to reprocess what we couldn't use. Garbage pushed back. It mounted and spread. And it forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art, music, mathematics.

The sun went down."

Don DeLillo, Underground pp. 285-87.

The upper torsos of two figures, one female, one male, emerge from a pair of garbage cans:

"Nell: What is it, my pet? Time for love?

Nagg: Were you asleep?

Nell: Oh no!

Nagg: Kiss me.

Nell: We can't.

Nagg: Try. (Their head strain towards each other, fail to meet, fall apart again.)

Nell: Why this farce, day after day?

Nagg: I've lost me tooth.

Nell: When?

Nagg: I had it yesterday.

Nell: Ah yesterday!

Nagg: Can you see me?

Nell: Hardly. And you?

Nagg: What?

Nell: Can you see me?

Nagg: Hardly.

Nell: So much the better, so much the better.

Nagg: Don't say that. Our sight has failed.

Nell: Yes. (Pause. They turn away from each other.)

Nagg: Can you hear me?

Nell: Yes. And you?

Nagg: Yes. Our hearing hasn't failed.

Nell: Our what?"

Samuel Beckett, "Endgame"

The Senses of Metafiction: The Spray of Phenomena

"Warmth, gloom, smells of my bed, such is the effect they sometimes have on me. I get up, go out, and everything is changed. The blood drains from my head, the noise of things bursting, merging, avoiding one another, assails me on all sides, my eyes search in vain for two things alike, each pinpoint of skin screams a different message, I drown in the spray of phenomena. It is at the mercy of these sensations, which happily I know to be illusory, that I have to live and work. It is thanks to them I find myself a meaning."

[Beckett, Molloy, p. 111 (1st Black Cat ed. of Three Novels)]

"There is a stew simmering on a gas ring and occasionally Toby stirs it, listening to the chimes from the Salvation Army mission across the street playing 'Silent Night.' He remembers other Christmases, the smell of pine and plum pudding and the oil smell of his steam engine. ...

"He tastes the stew. It is flat and the meat is tough and stringy. He adds two bouillon cubes. Another fifteen or twenty minutes. Meanwhile, he will take a shower. Naked, waiting for the water to heat up, he is examining the graffiti in the toilet cubicle, running his hands over phallic drawings with the impersonal interest of an antiquarian. He is a plant, an intrusion. ..."

[Wm. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night, pp 244-45]

"Often, when I was young, last year, I walked out to the water. It spoke to me of myself. Images came to me, from the water. Pictures. Large green lawns. A great house with pillars, but the lawns so vast that the house can be seen only dimly, from where we are standing. I am wearing a long skirt to the ground, in the company of others. I am witty. They laugh. I am also wise. They ponder. Gestures of infinite grace. They appreciate. For the finale, I save a life. Leap into the water all clothed and grasping the drowner by the hair, or using the cross-chest carry, get the silly bastard to shore. Have to bash him once in the mush to end his wild panicked struggles. Drag him to the old weathered dock and there, he supine, I rampant, manage the resuscitation. Stand back, I say to the crowd, stand back. The dazed creature's eyes open—no, they close again—no, they open again. Someone throws a blanket over my damp, glistening white, incredibly beautiful shoulders. I whip out my harmonica and give them two fast choruses of 'Red Devel Rag.' Standing ovation. The triumph is complete."

[D. Barthelme, The Dead Father, Ch. 12 pp. 105-06]

"So we get near the end of the book, and nothing resolved. But then, only segments have been given you of these few people. They are in no way representative of anything, necessarily. Such the perfections of fiction, as well as that honed cruelty it possesses which makes it useless. Everything it teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can't prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness. Can you see some shattered man trying to heal his life reading Tender Is the Night? In the back files of the Ladies' Home Journal there may, at least, be found the names of various physicians who will get you to the grave with a minimum of anguish—so they say. There is more profit in an hour's talk with Billy Graham than in a reading of Joyce. Graham might conceivably make you sick, so that you might move, go somewhere to get well. But Joyce just sends you out into the street, where the world goes on, solid as a bus. If you met Joyce and said "Help me," he'd hand you a copy of Finnegans Wake. You could both cry. Why is it that this should be? It is because fiction is real. When you writhe for Christopher Tietjens or the Consul, you writhe for real things that do not live, that do not represent anything anywhere, that have no counterparts in life. It is unsupportable to be so enslaved by the writer. Many people hate it, so they will read only 'nonfiction'; they'll not be tricked! If I say that Dick Detective is a man with the qualities of the green tissue on which I am now typing, and only those qualities, what then? I make him up. What a pleasure, my pleasure, it is true. He will teach you utter failure if you try to use his chapter as a handbook for living.

"It is this fact, that fiction is an invention of the voice, that tends to make writers' lives a shambles. [pp. 215-16] ...

"That evening, the fantastic silence, branches cracking in the cold. The sunset, frigid and subtle, essence of winter. The dark trees stretch down the slope toward the shining black ice of the river in shadow. The colors of the sky are rose, blue, pale yellow, and violet—almost amethyst. Let me say that it is amethyst. A small perfection. Dick and April stand outside the house, happy in the quiet. Civilized. April stokes her husband's thigh, Dick holds April about the waist. Delicate amethyst in the sky, growing slowly indigo. They stand again, after supper, the brilliant ice-cream moon of North America comes up luminous. A portrait of the poet and his wife: you and I and moonlight in Vermont. Dick thinks this, then he sings the line and laughs. April laughs. They are in Vermont! Vermont! They are in the moonlight in Vermont!"

[Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Last culminating para., pp. 242-3]

"I made my way to the edge of the old city easily enough. From the street din of motorcycles and buses to the voices of the long bazaar. The thoroughfare narrowed as I passed through the Lohari Gate, a brickwork structure with a broad towerlike fortification on either side.

"Once inside I began to receive impressions, which is not the same as seeing things. I realized I was walking too fast, the pace of the traffic-filled streets I'd just left behind. I received impressions of narrowness and shadow, of brownness, the wood and brick, the hard earth of the streets. The air was centuries old, dead, heavy, rank. I received impressions of rawness and crowding, people in narrow spaces, men in a dozen kinds of dress, women gliding, women in full-length embroidered white veils, a mesh aperture at the eyes, hexagonal, to give them a view of the latticed world, the six-sided cage that adjusted itself to every step they took, every shift of the eyes. Donkeys carrying bricks, children squatting over open sewers. I glanced at my directions, made an uncertain turn. Copper and brassware. A cobbler working in the shadows. This was the lineal function of old cities, to maintain an unchanged form, let time hang with the leather goods and skeins of wool. Hand-skilled labor, rank smells and disease, the four-hundred-year-old faces. There were horses, sheep, donkeys, cows and oxen. I received impressions that I was being followed."

[D. DeLillo, The Names, ch. 12]

"When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to you own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. You skin aches. At last: something real.

"Here in the tail section of the 00000, Gottfried has found this clear surface before him in fact, literal: the Imipolex shroud. Flotsam from his childhood are rising through his attention. He's remembering the skin of an apple, bursting with nebulae, a look into curved reddening space. His eyes taken on and on, and further. ... The plastic surface flutters minutely: gray-white, mocking, an enemy of color.

"The day outside is raw and the victim lightly dressed, but he feels warm in here. His white stockings stretch nicely from his suspender-tabs. He has found a shallow bend in a pipe where he can rest his cheek as he gazes into the shroud. He feels his hair tickling his back, his bared shoulders. It's a dim, whited room. A room for lying in, bridal and open to the pallid spaces of the evening, waiting for whatever will fall on him.

"Phone traffic drones into his wired ear. The voices are metal and drastically filtered. They buzz like the voices of surgeons, heard as you're going under ether. Though they now only speak the ritual words, he can still tell them apart.

"The soft smell of Imipolex, wrapping him absolutely, is a smell he knows. It doesn't frighten him. It was in the room when he fell asleep so long ago, so deep in sweet paralyzed childhood ... it was there as he began to dream. Now it is time to wake, into the breath of what was always real. Come, wake. All is well."

[T. Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow, p. 754]

"Rough dogs, barking, splashed into the river chasing sticks. Coats and ties had been hung in the trees and men were hurling stones at soda bottles or skimming pieces of slate and loudly counting the skips. He picked out squealing children and the laughter of the women. If there hadn't been a wall he would have seen them scuffling on the edge of the water. The land fell and the trees parted so that seated where he was the Ohio might have made his eyes blink, but the wall was eight feet high and wound in its vines like a bottle of claret. The bench was damp and cold, shadowed all morning by the elms, and he slid his bible under him. It was a poor garden, given over to ground ivy and plants that preferred deep shade, for the sun reached it only at the top of the day when it found an opening between the crowns of the trees and the head and body of the church. Absently, he felt the pores of the cement. The shadows of the elm leaves passed gently over the vines and grasses. In winter one could see quite easily through the gate at the end of the garden to the river lying placidly in its ice—leaden, grave, immortal. He had never learned when the key had been lost but the lock was rusted now and the double gates were bound. By spring, when the ivy leafed and thickly curtained the pickets, his blindfold was complete. Nevertheless he could see the sand rising in little puffs and the brilliant water striking the shore. It wasn't true, but Jethro Furber felt he had spent his life here. Certainly he had brought to the garden the little order it had, laying the walk with his own hands and clearing the graves of weeds and creepers, carefully scrubbing the markers. The rough cold bench was as familiar to him as his skin, and the garden, with its secret design and its holy significance, was like himself. He smiled as he considered it (he had considered it often)..."

[Wm. Gass, Omensetter's Luck, pp. 75-76]