Trash and Treasures

By Patrick Schabe, PopMatters. Posted March 6, 2006.

"Dear Daddy, Remember that bus ride to North Carolina we took together. I would go through that a million times over just to be with you. I guess that now I have an idea of how you may have felt when I stopped writing you when you went back to prison after we were together in Arizona. Tim, you are ripping my hopes and dreams away from me. You and Justin are the two men in this world I want to love and dedicate my life to. What happened? Are you in love with someone else now? Why have my letters been sent back to me? Do you not even want to read what I have to say? Please tell me why this is." [sic] -- Found on a BART train in the San Francisco Bay Area.

" to be with. Joe loves me and I love him with the love you showed me. That is the gift I got from you. Love never dies and never will lessen, subside or disappear. We will meet again one day in Heaven and will love each other like there was no pause. Thank you so much for the gifts that you have given me -- I thank you & God for the relationships I've been lucky enough to find because of you. I hope you are happy I feel that I finally am. I love you S. Monkey! [heart] Always, Katie" [sic] -- Found tied to a deflated balloon in rural western Wisconsin.

It is the rare person who has not, at one point or another, felt like garbage.

For certain, all of us have at one time lost something, be it as innocuous as a CD or as momentous as a lover. We know the feeling, the comprehension of it, the very state of being that is "lost" as surely as we recognize humor or sorrow. We distinguish it from being "misplaced" or "hidden," because when a thing is lost, there is a sense of finality and hopelessness to the affair. The thing -- be it ourselves, an object, or an idea -- is really and truly gone from us. Even when it is the realization that we're lost in unfamiliar territory, it is our grounding, our ability to navigate space, that is stripped from us, and the fear of the moment is our despair that we have lost that ability forever, that we will never find our way back to a place we know.

For the creators of Found magazine, it is precisely the combination of trash and the lost scraps of our lives that holds a magical fascination. It's a simple idea: In the eddies of garbage that swirl about our feet, lie fluttering in gutters, and wind up wedged into nooks and crannies of objects and architecture, tiny scraps of our lives are floating about the world, each with its own back-story, each capturing a flicker of time and leaving a footprint trace of our being.

At first explanation, Found seems far less poetic. The magazine itself is essentially little more than photocopied pages of trash literally taped down to a backing with notations providing a title and the location where the piece was discovered. There is little commentary, and if there is much art to the arrangements of the pieces on the page, it's a rough collage at best. What you're left looking at are images of parking tickets, notebook paper, stationery, envelopes, school tests, stray photographs, scratch paper, torn scraps and recycled wrappers.

More often than not, these bits and pieces are torn or burned or otherwise damaged. They've been retrieved from storm drains, gutters, parking lots, fences, abandoned books, fields, windshields, bus stops, and culverts. They are pictures of honest-to-goodness trash.

But it's in how the scraps were used -- or more directly, what's written on them -- that the magic occurs. Here the human will to language and communication gets warped and ripped from the pages of context and offered back up to us as inscrutable artifacts of everyday actions, desires, and fears. These bits of paper are home to love letters, diatribes, class notes, test evaluations, grocery lists, family photos, legal documents, letters to parents, letters from parents, warnings, threats, break-ups, hook-ups, apologies, entreaties, affirmations, and prayers. In short, all of this so-called trash, once blowing around out in the wild, is the distillate sum of modern life, as communicated in a few short lines of handwritten chicken scratch.

Found challenges the reader to treat these scraps as anthropology. We take a handful of words and their meanings and extrapolate outwards, trying to get a sense of the situation that produced them, the hand that wrote them down and the audience for whom they were originally intended. We are granted an anonymous and incomplete form of voyeurism. We are spies and detectives. Can handwriting analysis, sentence structure and grammatical construction reveal the age, the education, the demography of the writer? What can we determine about the lives of the subject, audience or author from a brief and incomplete scene? Is there meaning in the way that a photo is torn, or the words that are missing from that mutilated Post-It note? Can we intuit pages one, two and five from pages three and four of this letter? Can our lives be boiled down and reduced to such minute essences, or do we want to see the invisible author on the other side of time and space as far more complex and unknowable?

The experience of Found is disorienting, yet funny, sad, poignant, disturbing and heartbreaking. Because these scraps are without context or commentary, we suspend judgment along with disbelief. We accept these things -- and these mysterious characters -- as more than true, malleable yet inert. Poetry is garbage.

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