Waste & excreta

Waste is the book's master medium — the body leaking at its boundaries and a whole economy built to displace what it produces. It opens with the "defecatory posture" and the mold, and quickly acquires infrastructure in the E.W.D. land barge, "first on-page waste-displacement infrastructure," and the wasteland Concavity with its "uremic-hued" clouds. On the intimate scale it fixates comically and horribly on the body's outputs — "The turd emergeth," the unflushable thing that "won't go away" and "keeps reappearing," skin as "excretory organ." Its great thematic fusion is temporal: "time had become the shit itself," binding Time and Waste into one thread, echoed in Pemulis's boundary obsession where waste is "expelled at the boundaries of the body" just as "the boundary of the Concavity is also determined by waste." From colostomy bags to moose-guano "vectored into Mexico," the motif insists that a civilization is defined by what it refuses and where it sends it.