Bury Me in the County Landfill
Kurtis Brecker
The sun is hot on my face and the ascent is steep, winding. It’s doing the best it can, the truck, to carry its multi-ton load on the muddied path to forgetting. At this time of morning we are one of many in the caravan of trucks that start and stop and sink into the ground idly. In front of me, there is a township recycling crew, compactor overfull with plastics and cans that families carefully rinsed and sorted. They have been deceived. Behind, a contracting company hauls what I think must be the remnants of a large landscaping job, from the branches that peek at me from out behind the cab. They’ll return to the Earth in the most unnatural way imaginable.
What I’m carrying is the contents of someone’s home. An elderly man passed away after a long stay in the hospital, and for months his house sat empty, quiet. He had lived alone. When it came time to settle his estate, his only living relative decided to sell the house as-is. So a young couple, eager to move in, had us come out to make space for their lives: everything was as he left it, and everything went. From the dishes in the cabinets, the cotton-swabs and half-used toothpaste tubes in the medicine cabinet, the pilling throw rugs in the office, to the boxes of once-sentimental items in the attic, the photos, the artwork.
This landfill is discordantly beautiful– this man-made mountain, a monument to excess, a burden to all the senses, from afar appears to be a brilliant green hill, and from the vantage of the peak, the river and the city glimmer in the sunshine. But the mud, I know, carries rot and decay, and the opportunistic birds that crowd the sky are clouds. I can’t say the hydraulics on my truck are great, but with enough fussing the bed tips and though the wheels spin wildly with nothing to grip, the contents of his home pour noisily atop the pile of recyclables.
Sometimes, I can’t quiet the hum of the memories I carry into nothingness. And from time to time, I pull a piece or two or three from the pile and make it a part of my home. “The Twins,” “104/150,” and “The Doubled Self” are the posthumous titles I’ve given three particular pieces that I’ve trash-picked, which is to say, deferred their oblivion.
Through my window, the rising sun greets “The Twins” each morning, their curious faces standing out amongst the post-cards and concert posters pinned to my wall. It’s an oval-shaped portrait on a deep green matte, an undated “cabinet card,” captured sometime in the late 19th century. Oliver and Thomas, as they’re labelled on the back in scribbled black ink, are young men in their twenties. They wear white shirts with tall starched necks and cravats, a tuxedo jacket, and expressions so subtle yet so full of life. It’s their expressions that draw me in, yet I struggle to describe what they are, and how they move my emotions. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes describes the sensation of looking at a photograph, and that “the incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance”. Through their disturbance, “The Twins” transcend the boundary of a century and situate themselves presently, not as figures long since passed away, but as a pair capable of acting now, from their 4.5″ x 6.5″ window, complicating the passage of time.
The alive-ness of the photograph often makes me wonder if by saving them from the landfill, I saved them from death. Time had made the envelope that I found the card in brittle– what once held them turned to dust upon handling. I could not bury them. I know, in Barthes’ words, “what I see has been here, in this place which extends between infinity and the subject […]; it has been here, and yet immediately separated”. And that separation between Oliver, Thomas, and myself is what gives the object of the cabinet card that indescribable life.
Perpendicular to “The Twins,” amongst prints of flash tattoo sheets bought from artists that I’ve sat for as a canvas, A. Battista’s print, “104/150,” hangs. Fruitlessly, I’ve tried to know Battista, the name signed on the bottom left corner. Their print is a geometric piece, where cool purple, blue, and silver circles, all defined by black outlines, spill outside the bounds of a blue and silver square. From the texture of the page and the slight bleed of the outlines, I’ve been able to discern that it was meticulously screen-printed. I know that it was made in 1974, and I know that in those fifty years it made its way to suburban New Jersey. Though I know this data, Battista remains unknowable. To know that there are 149 other copies of his piece makes my room hum with the potential for 149 portals from my current moment. If I could step into this print and arrive at the location of another, how many times of the 149 would lead me to the landfill?
“104/150” arrived to me unframed and discolored, torn and scuffed. Its symmetry, with time, has become imperfect, and that imperfect symmetry is what unifies all three of these pieces I’ve trash-picked. “The Twins” are not identical– their similar short hair and familial features identify them as a pair. They lean into each other in such a way that their bodies are mirrored. Yet their expressions prevent the symmetry they seem to suggest. So too, does “The Doubled Self,” the 1978 photograph, defy itself.
Closest to my heart, as the centerpiece of my living room shelf, sits this double-exposure self portrait. He wears white pants and a white shirt separated by a black belt. He’s barefoot and unshaven, sitting back-to-back with himself on an outdoor bench. What allows this image to linger in my mind is the realization that neither the primary nor secondary exposure produced a solid image of the man. Where he could have produced one complete image of himself, he’s instead fractured into two phantoms, where half of him is seen at a time, but never clearly.
There’s a sensitivity that comes with handling items made and loved by those who have passed away, and it’s strange for art to end in the garbage. Realistically, most art meets that fate, doesn’t it? If I could turn time onto itself and allow these artists and subjects to speak to me now, I’m not sure I would necessarily want their insight. Did the bearded man in the photograph mean for the inky dark background to be speckled with purple? When I look into the deep sepia, I’m not sure I want to know what lies beyond the reach of his camera’s flash. Like the discordant beauty of the landfill, these pieces hold in tension the pleasure of a charming object and the trouble of morosity. Of the tens of thousands of pounds of material I’ve taken to its end, these artworks and their artists have spoken to me from beyond the intelligible.
Mark Doty describes still life painting as something where “the familiar is limned with an almost hallucinatory clarity, nothing glanced over or elided, nothing subordinate to the impression of the whole”. His meditation on the familiar yet estranging quality of a piece that features everyday objects echoes my connection to the “garbage” I’m meant to carry. Whether it is Barthes’ notion of a “punctum” or the magic of recognition, the presence of these pieces in my home has changed me, the people who view them, and the status of the artists’ memory.
But I’m only prolonging the inevitable:
Bury me in the same Earth as the art that meets the landfill. If I am so lucky (and this is a self-indulgent thought), my journals of collages and poetry will momentarily end up in the hands of someone curious, before my pages become dirt and my words fiber for worms. “The Doubled Self,” “104/150,” and “The Twins” defy the natural processes of forgetting while they adorn my space, their time-line stretched to my own. And so I climb this hill, a self-conscious garbage-man Charon who knows that my time will come, to join the pieces I’ve thrown away and the ones whose fate I’ve delayed.
Gas-valves and mud and man-made mountains of forgetting, dump trucks and dreams.
Kurtis Brecker (B.A. English & Music ’26) grew up in Pennsylvania but often tells people he is from New Jersey. His hobbies include creating collage art from old magazines and applying the spirit of collaging to every other aspect of his life. He currently works at a junk-removal company.