Cultivating: Waist Places & Waste Places

Turn of the century (1900's) postcard featuring one man between two women, his arms about the waists of each. Text reads: Cultivating the "Waist" Places.--

Theochrom Serie 1230-56, printed in the U.S.

A humorous play on waste lands, those lands which have not yet been made property but which may be reduced to that condition, be it the desire of an individual or a group (a country or politician in the name of colonization, for example, or a religious group in the name of God). All of which fall under the category of sheer greed.

The issues of waste lands, conquest, emigration, war, and dominion as ordained by God were quite fascinating to folks in the late 1800's and early 1900's.

For more, see The Rights of War and Peace, including the Law of Nature and of Nations, translated from the Original Latin of Grotius, with Notes and illustrations from Political and Legal Writers, by A.C. Campbell, A.M. with an Introduction by David J. Hill (New York: M. Walter Dunne, 1901).

See also, The Waste Places (1915),a poem by Irish poet James Stephens (1882-1950) as well as Eli Siegel's Beginning with Psychiatric Terms: An Aesthetic Realism Consideration (1966) in which the poem is an allegory for ethical unconscious.