Category Archives: fourteen forms of melancholy

Freshkills

The landfill opened in 1948 as a temporary landfill, but by 1955 it had become the largest landfill in the world, and it remained so until its closure in 2001.

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It consists of four mounds which range in height from 90 to about 225 feet (30 to about 70 m) and hold about 150 million tons of solid waste. The archaeologist Martin Jones characterizes it as “among the largest man-made structures in the history of the world.”

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By the 1970s, city developers were referring to the landfill as ‘landscape sculpture’. Today, the 150 million-ton pile of industrial waste is twice the height of the Statue of Liberty.

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“It had a certain nightmare quality. … I can still recall looking down on the operation from a control tower and thinking that Fresh Kills, like Jamaica Bay, had for thousands of years been a magnificent, teeming, literally life-enhancing tidal marsh. And in just twenty-five years, it was gone, buried under millions of tons of New York City’s refuse.”

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Feral dog packs roamed the dump and were a hazard to employees. Rats also posed a problem.

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From 1987 through 1988, in an environmental disaster known as the syringe tide, significant amounts of medical waste from the Fresh Kills landfill, including hypodermic syringes and raw garbage, washed up onto beaches on the Jersey Shore, in New York City, and on Long Island [during height of AIDS epidemic].

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In 2001 it was estimated that, if kept open, the landfill would have eventually become the highest point on the East Coast. Under strong community pressure and with support of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the landfill site was closed on March 22, 2001, but it had to be reopened after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in Manhattan. Virtually all the materials from the World Trade Center site were sent to the temporarily reopened landfill for examination.

Thousands of detectives and forensic evidence specialists worked for over 1.7 million hours at Fresh Kills Landfill to try to recover remnants of the people killed in the attacks. A final count of 4,257 human remains was retrieved, but only 300 people were identified from these remains. A memorial was built in 2011, which also honors those whose identities were not able to be determined from the debris. The remaining waste was buried in a 40-acre (160,000 m2) portion of the landfill; it is highly likely that this debris still contains fragmentary human remains.

…the City’s Chief Medical Examiner retains custody of all still-unidentified materials at a facility within the National 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan. The remaining materials at Fresh Kills were then buried in a 40-acre (160,000 m2) portion of the landfill that will be known as West Mound. Afterward, the landfill facility was closed permanently, in anticipation of the park on the site.

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The garbage once destined for Fresh Kills was shipped to landfills in other states, primarily in Pennsylvania, but also in Virginia and Ohio.

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The Fresh Kills site is to be transformed into reclaimed wetlands, recreational facilities and landscaped public parkland, the most significant expansion of the New York City parks since the development of the chain of parks in the Bronx during the 1890s. The new park will be designed by James Corner Field Operations, the landscape architecture firm also responsible for the design of the High Line in Manhattan.

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To use Fresh Kills as a medium is complicated, but to regard it as a ‘site’ is impossible. You can’t see it, you can’t enter it, you can’t even, really, get close to it. The best you can do is stand on top of the layers of soil that conceal it and count the methane pipes popping out of the ground between flurries of wildlife. Friedman-Pappas reflects on these visits with a tinge of irony: “Gassing masses is not what they’re advertising. The staff at Fresh Kills runs a strategic campaign to highlight the repopulation of animals in the park, and to downplay the presence of waste. My site visits would consist of Freshkills Alliance employees pointing out and exclaiming, ‘An Osprey! A Red Fox!’”

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“The transformation of what was once the world’s largest landfill into a sustainable park makes the project a symbol of renewal and an expression of how we can re-imagine reclaimed landscapes,” the FKA’s website reads. “As more sections of the park open, the unusual combination of natural and engineered beauty—including creeks, wetlands, expansive meadows and spectacular vistas of the New York City region—will be accessible.”

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“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!”

The first night she heard the sound, she wasn’t sure it was sound. It went ringing and ringing down the hall. She walked down the hall in the stony twilight streaming in through the window, wondering how the body moved as it did. She felt drawn forward as a slanting cell. She had been walking for thirty minutes and none at all; for five miles she stood still. If she had to describe it as anything, hearing was the closest she could come after that first day, and she knew that it lasted less than forty minutes, if more than a moment, for she found herself thinking these thoughts, sitting in her favorite armchair, listening to her grandma drone on and on in an argument with the wizard-like elder Saphic Maco. She found herself suddenly understanding all of these things in that very moment. This feeling of her consciousness unfurling itself over her was akin to some combination of both a cold pail of water and a heavy quilt being tossed over her curled form. The feeling was electric. “The power flows heavy these days” she whispered to herself. “The white on the water,” the air sang softly.

Clodagh Kinsella Thing

I turned on the radio and it was tuned to five hundred twenty eight Hz. Love hurts, said the DJ. He was a bit of a dick but I lingered with it. Experts have confirmed that the love frequency can increase cell viability by twenty per cent, he said. Experts have confirmed that it can decrease the toxic effects of ethanol by a percentage that may be unfathomable. To this I raised a glass of ethanol.

Five two eight is the key to all mythologies, said the DJ. It’s the reason why bees buzz, why roses resonate, why snowflakes are six-pointed stars. Five two eight is the matrix of creation, a me on the scale of miracle.

And as the messages grew stranger, my mind began to spiral. Does a blade of grass grow towards the sun? asked the DJ. Naturally, because it’s intelligent. If it was stupid it would grow into darkness and die. And soon, despite my fears, my thoughts had begun to vibrate to the heavenly harmonic frequency.

It was the third summer of love and the radio was streaming a festival down by the sound mirrors. The neo hippies were worshipping the womb and vibrating with the infinite palette of rainbows. Couples were copulating by the concrete, as a hooded man resequenced its DNA, tuning the mirrors to five two eight. It was the love frequency, and they were spreading the love.

The next day the microphones began picking up the sound of my local supermarket. There was something unexpected in the bagging area; that something was love. The day after, the microphones began picking up the Thames, amplifying the runways of Heathrow Airport. Seven four sevens trailed incense, and within a week the microphones were picking up all known sounds.

With the whole world tuned to five two eight, the vibrations were becoming relentless, recalibrating rhythms and rewinding clocks. I listened to earthquakes ricochet off the Richter scale, and volcanoes spew lava into non-existent seas. As I stood in the supermarket, bulk-buying ethanol, all the dead I had ever known came back to me too, drawn by the five two eight frequency.

At the festival zeppelins had eclipsed the sun and the mirrors were eclipsed by infernal seas. Only the tops were visible now, so I swam towards them and assumed watch on the concrete. Sometimes, over the following weeks, I’d spy a bangled wrist as the neo hippies did aqua aerobics amid superbly exotic but long extinct fish. The neo hippies were growing more and more excited as the heavenly vibrations grew greater and greater; they were singing songs not of love but hate.

And it was at this point that the experts began to admit that they’d made a mistake. That five two eight was not the frequency of love, was not the heavenly frequency, but was the frequency of death, was the frequency of the sun moving towards the abyss. That we’d all been listening to things in reverse, as in a mirror, and that the third summer of love was the summer of blood. And it was at that point, when the end was in sight, that I decided to turn off the radio. 

There is another world above this one; or outside of this one; the
way to it is thru the smoke of this one, & the hole that smoke
goes through. The ladder is the way through the smoke hole; the
ladder holds up, some say, the world above; it might have been
a tree or a hole; I think it is merely a way.

Fire is at the foot of the ladder. The fire is in the center. The walls
are round. There is another world below or inside this one.
The way there is down thru smoke. It is not necessary to think
of a series.

Excerpt of Through the Smoke Hole by Gary Snyder