Waste
We waste money. We waste time. Teenagers get wasted. Broken old drunkards wasted their lives. T.S. Eliot wrote of The Wasteland. Freddie Fender sang of Wasted Days and Wasted Nights, and The Who sang of Teenage Wasteland. Anorexics waste away. Landfills contain waste and sewage is known as waste-water. Polite company calls excrement “waste.”
Everyone knows about waste.
Or at least think they do.
Thing is, waste isn't easy to understand. In all its varied meanings, there scarcely seems to be a common denominator.
It's not the part of speech: it can be a noun, a verb (transitive or intransitive), an adjective.
The only common denominator among its usages is negation. Waste can't exist by itself. It only exists because there are things that are better: a better substance, a better place, a better result.
Perhaps paradoxically, without goodness, there is no waste.
What does this matter?
It might not. Waste is waste. We could leave it at that.
Thing is, we live in a world where we agree on almost nothing: What is good, what is true, what is beautiful? Caught in a pop cultural landscape choked with the S-Weeds of solipsism, skepticism, and subjectivism, we don't agree on such things. No consensus can be reached. Those things that emanate from goodness, truth, and beauty–art, virtue, morality, nobility–are ignored, denied, or derided.
We cannot even begin to discuss such things. They seem to be beyond public discourse, the basic building blocks of discussion hidden from the view of our mental landscape.
Maybe waste could be an apophatic building block.
Everyone, after all, acknowledges waste. It pervades our culture. The statement, "That's not moral" is snickered at. But "that's a waste" often invokes an intuitive agreement that the speaker has a point.
