Saturday, November 15, 2008

Oh Excrement!

I swear to you that the connection between those previous two posts was never studied, though I can hardly urge your suspension of any disbelief, since I must mock it now, this apparent connection. It's true though. I swear it. I came upon it unawares. It came upon me unbidden. But it's almost as though I meant it!

Still, there must be some subconscious prefiguring, and nothing mysterious about what shapes mind's expression. Now here I am returned from my breakfast sinning (what else can you call the acculturated craving for fats and high cholesterol which constitutes comfort breakfast, properly enjoyed?) and wanting, Žižek (there, I DID it) inspired, to say something about shit.

Having recently suffered the elemental indignity of a colonoscopy (thankfully, I was put out - and yes, it came out clean), I am made aware of the interesting fact that it has taken my life thus far to learn a proper technique to wipe my ass. Those among you old enough for the recommended procedure know exactly what I'm talking about.

Simply put, I never used to give it a thought. This is surely the part of my body most remote from my own viewing. I'm not even sure I could get a mirror to do it (I am quite sure that I'd never want to!). But at some indeterminate time in the not very distant past, I did realize that if I wanted to avoid embarrassing traces left behind - maybe this only happens with age? - I'd have to start more methodically, get feedback from the paper smear, and proceed to finish without rubbing to death and thus cultivating some hemorrhoidal ground on my much abused sitter. The embarrassment would be the unauthored smell. The shit stained shorts. There's good sense, materials science, and not a little engineering involved in the avoidance of something which in fact only happened about as often as I cut myself shaving.

But with age, it becomes worth the effort, and I fail less often.

And Žižek, who is ever so much more well read than I, and whose expression ever so much more fragrant, if not less dense, was mocking a kind of theological cosmology (as quite distinct, to be sure, from cosmology proper) whereby shit is what we are; creation in relation to God the creator.

Quite apart from my pleasure in elimination (this I am quite certain is an age related thing), I find no ambition within myself to leave this process behind along the way toward humanity's perfection. (How, theologically, is shit dealt with in heaven? Fucking?) Uploading myself, a la Kurzweil's brand of fundamentalism would be a horror even worse than immortality. A leap more terrifying than one over the Falls, even if I did have the trajectory perfected to where I'd pull out below as did that fabled boy, blended as he must have been so perfectly with the mass of water he'd joined. An awakening from which there could both be no return and no exit.

This would be a one-way interval, since the mind left behind could never be re-entered. And if experience could ever be the word for it, I would experience a nausea made more profound that there could be no stopping it by outering its stimulus, nor steadying on ground any more firm than that of ideas fully abstracted. Hoot AND Howl! I want my vibrant voice and smelling orifices all.

No shit, my God's name cannot be outered. This is not complicated. The thing is imminent or not at all. It's the telling that counts, not the having told. The Name assigned permanently things what it names, and consigns it to human creation. This we can know with certainty, you evil dipshit Evangelicals. This is not mysterious. You pander a fallen god, and the rest of us know his naming.

(I apologize for the smell. I simply did not wish to belittle by pity those craving craven souls who truly would do good, but that we so mistrust our own responsibility)

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