Disposable
Amy Bobeda
Disposable:
that which may be done without
free to be used
as the occasion my require
to be available.
Designed to be discarded after one use.
A desired surplus of income—
A pipe dream springs a
leak; a loss of water—
Dispose:
From disposen—
Set in order, place in a particular order.
Arrange, control, regulate, disposer—
Dis
Pose
Air—another oxygen monitor sings twilight. Goodnight to
another moon who will not rise tomorrow.
Ponere, to put or place, haphazardly among the leaves, two by two in unmarked graves.
To incline the mind or heart of—
Disposal:
Like a daughter by marriage, of waste—our material matter—
“You do not make a billion dollars,” NY House Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez say,
“you take a billion dollars.”
In the 1620’s, dispose + al,
Power to make use of, right to dispose of or control.
You do not take a million lives, you neglect them.
“We hear you. We hear you. We know we’re wrecking the world, but we don’t know how to turn this around. The system as so much momentum now. What can we do? Can you help us?” – Humans respond to humans masked as plants and animals in the work of Joanna Macy
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Displace:
Remove to a different place, put off usual place; remove from any position, office, or dignity.
The sugar maple becomes a legless climate refugee. One degree Celsius.
La Camp de La Lande: the memory of the Jungle tents, one small theater, library, St. Michel’s with a cross—demolished after a fire coincides with the Paris bombing.
What comes by chance—
The story is the story of the story we see on the four
cornered screens censored, the story is
never the body, whole.
We correlate; convenience
for a good story: product
means.
In 1944, displaced person became refugee—
the atom bomb a viable idea.
A false face
May never decay in our lifetimes’ memory—future archeologists ask why we grew to amass a land of plastic, so vast stone become indistinguishable from straw.
You do not take a place, you neglect it.
You do not take a place, you displace it.
The scene shifts, a different mask appears, and the ghost of the tormented dead person speaks, recounting the manner of his death and
describing the tortures of hell. – Carmen Blacker on Nō theater
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How to Wear :
Be sure to wash your hands before putting on, do NOT touch the mask while wearing.
Not an accessory for necks, foreheads, chins, noses, dangling from a single ear.
How to Remove :
Untie, unclasp loops, handle only by strings, like a tampon—cleanse or dispose, wash hands again.
How to Dispose :
Is not included in the CDC guidelines. Neither is how to dispose of our loved ones and land.
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If the memory of an event is a “trace” in the land, the actions that took place long ago are “etched” there, but “long ago” may become tomorrow at any time! –Cecilia Vicuña
Often a man fails to differentiate between his essential identity and his persona, becoming only the mask.
–Nancy Qualls-Corbe
We tied our masks in strings of many colors.
Blue the flavor of water,
Red the season of blood, inextricably braided,
purple beyond our imagined borders,
the time of now, cut
through remnants of liquidity.
Wounded water, agüita herida,
Water of the deep aquifer, subterranean water of dreams, hear our song. – Cecilia Vicuña
“Our lives are the enactment of our dreams; our case histories are from the very beginning, archetypally, dramas; we are masks (personae) through which the gods sound (personare).” – James Hillman
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On the day after the 2020 US Presidential Election, colors masked the country’s official leave of the Paris Agreement—the little spoken of five-year anniversary of a global initiative towards sustaining life on planet Earth. Amidst the largest surge in COVID-19 cases since the virus introduced itself as our newest cohabitant, Americans watched the news, protested, counted ballots, waited for answers, remaining people of America––the second largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world.
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“I blame the cows,” Katie Holmes’ character says in a movie about a tropical storm in Louisiana that blows a tree through her roof.
“It will only get worse with global warming,” her mother-in-law says.
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1976: Mikhail Budyko says, “a global warming up has started.”
1983: The modern “human induced” climate change enters discourse.
2006: An Inconvenient Truth is released, six years after Gore loses to Bush in the Florida recount for President.
2019: Canadian Cree, Shawn Wilson says something along the lines of, “if scientists could communicate to the public climate crisis, we would have done something by now,” in a lecture on Youtube.
2019: The Guardian changes its climate phrasing to global heating, and climate emergency.
2019: Swedish teen Greta Thunberg says, “It’s 2019. Can we all now call it what it is: climate breakdown, climate crisis, climate emergency, ecological breakdown, ecological crisis and ecological emergency?”
2020: COVID-19 circulates the globe, calling for rapid change in public health policy, including recommendation and demand for reusable or disposable facial masks worn in public. 55,000 tons of disposable face masks are produced within 3 months of the pandemic’s onset.
2020: 1.25 million people die from COVID-19 by early November. Face makes become a US point of political contention, rather than a public safety measure.
2470: The proposed year microplastics from 2020’s face masks will decompose.
Inconvenience: from the 1400’s meant harm, damage; danger; misfortune. From Latin inconvenientia, lack of consistency, incongrucency. An improper act of utterance.
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Amy Bobeda holds and MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where she founded Wisdom Body Collective, an artist collective rooted in the sacred feminine. Her work can be read in Humble Pie, Vol 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. @AmyBobeda on Twitter.