NP, but Big Lebowski

[Michael Bailey]

Waste and W.A.S.T.E. figure prominently in Thomas Pynchon's novella, _The Crying of Lot 49_.

One person's signal may be another person's noise. 

Lands that are undeveloped may be called waste, yet in developing them does a builder not lay waste to such estimable structures as trees, watersheds, animal habitats? In projecting a world or executing a will, is there not inevitably more ignored, left undone, opportunity costs paid with usuriously borrowed time and energy and funds? It is Oedipa's nature to address these faults in what it was Pierce's fatality to pile up!

Time and events may have laid Pierce Inverarity waste, but does he not live on, though in some form largely unloveable by Oedipa, in the patterns and structures he imposed upon the world he found, flourished in, and departed from?

 And in turn, Oedipa lays waste to whatever message Pierce intended for Oedipa in the executorship. Like the traveler gazing on the wreckage of Ozymandias, her survey of the works of his wealth takes a different turn than any he would likely have intended. 

As executor, the estate isn't, for her, a single vehicle she can take up the reins of and drive toward a goal. She sees the waste and damage surrounding the circumstances of its accumulation, from the charcoal bone filters to the bloody seas of the Dardanelles, the poor living up phone poles, the maddened militias of the surplus store, the amiable dotty senility of the old man remembering the Tristero, the dead hands of the Yoyodyne board members on her thighs, the fraternities of the lovelorn, her psychiatrist's abdication of sanity, and the refuge  Mucho chose from NADA closing in on him, in the embrace of sound, psychedelia and the temptations of teenaged girls.

While the great revelation does occur to her - that the preterite, ignored by history, and seen by the powerful as pawns, valueless as waste, have their own reality and message - she already knows this, having majored in literature. 

The shortcomings of a great society are not different from its greatness; its decadence is not different from its transformation; Oedipa's realizations not different from what she already knows.  Her frustration with men not different than her subtle confrontation of the varieties of waste, and W.A.S.T.E., and the messages they carry. Her divine discontent with the existent not different than her grappling with the possibilities engendered in her mind by hints that there is an organization of communication in place but hitherto unknown to her!

Her emergence as a vested bidder in a sanctum of the Great Game is heartening. When the door  lock clicks, she is on the inside and will be representing the rightful heirs, who are (aren't they?) the children who meet up in their dreams by night. Or at least, she is cognizant of them and will be capable of decency.

> On Sep 9, 2014, at 7:33 PM, Qui Zael <quizael at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Can anyone here explain the waste thing? Its Waste. .org. What was that? A thing where stuff was sent clandestinely?  What made it waste.  Why was it called waste?  Because it was sent through trash?
> 
> And what were the mesages, of this Waste, facilicility, however brass it may have...be.
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l