Old Words and Ancient Smells

Robert Kelly on old words: "They store the power of long attention to things in the world […]" (introduction to Thomas Meyer The Umbrella of Aesculapius)

Maybe this is a bit of what led him to those reflections

Sun & wind
      the smell, estragon, of another country
& the field
      spread with shit

The leafy greenness of tarragon is evoked — a scent really only released in close up - gives way to the ripe earthiness of manured fields. A circle of life and decay is honoured.

And so for day 1473
25.12.2010

Defecation Fame

Banksy. Wall and Piece (2006).

Last bit of “Advice painting with stencils”

The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Fame is a by-product of doing something else. You don’t go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.

Time to invent fibre-conscious menus.

And so for day 1388
01.10.2010

Disposing of Dispersal

Margaret Atwood (playing out the thematics of Victory Gardens) in the forward to A Breath of Fresh Air: Celebrating Nature and School Gardens (having cultivated the ground of morals and food production) snaps from the vine this set of observations on the period of post-War affluence:

There was an undeniable emotional charge to throwing stuff out. Scrimping, saving and hoarding make a person feel poor [...] filling up your garbage can with junk you no longer want makes you feel rich. Saving is heavy, discarding is light. Why do we feel this way? Once we were nomads, and nomads don't carry around grand pianos. They don't hoard food; instead they move to where food is. They leave a light footprint, as the green folk say. Well it's a theory.

But we can't all be nomads anymore. There isn't enough space left for that.

I like how the very notion of nomad-influence gets discarded. The writing is composting itself.

A couple of observations: she doesn't say we cannot be mobile. A Red Queen type of mobility sur place awaits us in our densed-up urban settings. Indeed at some level what we dispose of needs to develop velocity — needs to convert quicker (and in less space). The infrastructure of compost-creation leaves a heavy footprint. Industry plugs into local food.

Energy calculus. At play in the system will be a surplus of consumables — there will be food to waste (only so much hydroponic lettuce will find its way into our personal digestive track; a fair bit will provide roughage to the corporate waste management system). Cities will look to lock into their hinterlands their muck. Look up the history of "night soil".

Future civic deliberations will focus upon the feeding of The Machine and the speed of cycling with factions vying for the accumulation of value through speed up meeting the resistance of calls for equilibrium though respect for traditional time lines. Will we have to take the time to become light footprint leavers? Become not nomads but partakers of the potlatch — a coastal people in the islands of our metropolises?

And so for day 1201
28.03.2010

Global View of Canine Feces

W.S. Merwin in Selected Translations 1968-1978 has rendered selections from Asia which he gathers under the rubrics Japanese Figures, Chinese Figures and Korean Figures. The pieces are two-liners (they don't quite function like couplets) without any direct links between them. The impression generated is one of a collection of aphorisms. One of my favourites is found in Korean Figures — there is something outré about its subject matter and something insightful in its treatment.

Even on dog turds
the dew falls

One can appreciate the remarkable syntax which by placing "the dew" last implies a universal fate — the dew covers many many things including the abject. As well, the poet refers to a definite dew — it's "the" dew not simply "dew". The use of the verb "to fall" to describe the dew makes it in someway akin to what has already fallen and of course the shared initial consonant between "dog" and "dew" evokes a certain similitude. And on the pages of Merwin's book there is a bit of white space before the next two-liner — enough space for dew to evaporate and excrement to decompose.

And so for day 1118
04.01.2010

Dung and the Masses

Salman Rushdie's narrator, Saleem, in Midnight's Children is prone to reading history in associative terms and it is perhaps fitting that we hereby bring the final paragraph of the novel in close proximity to a scatological moment — an almost castaway waste of a moment — that occurs near the end...

Midnight, or thereabouts. A man carrying a folded (and intact) black umbrella walks towards my window from the direction of the railway tracks, stops, squats, shits. Then sees me silhouetted against light and, instead of taking offence at my voyeurism, calls: 'Watch this!' and proceeds to extrude the longest turd I have ever seen. 'Fifteen inches!' he calls, 'How long can you make yours?' Once, when I was more energetic, I would have wanted to tell his life-story; the hour, and his possession of an umbrella, would have been all the connections I needed to begin the process of weaving him into my life, and I have no doubt that I'd have finished by proving his indispensability to anyone who wishes to understand my life and benighted times; but now I'm disconnected , unplugged, with only epitaphs left to write. So, waving at the champion defecator, I call back: 'Seven on a good day,' and forget him.

Saleem may be modest about his production of shit but magnificent in the scope of multitudes that his writing pours out onto the page in those final epitaphs. He spirals off into the untold.

Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred millions five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, all in good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.

Enormous. Flood of human essence. Appropriate for a novel where the principle interlocutor is called by our narrator his dung lotus, Padma. We as readers are still focalized by this one point, this interlocutor, but we are bereft of her response. Stuck. Having to refigure in a Saleem-like fashion the connections between the untold story of the one unabashed shit producer and the multitudes whose stories are foreshortened and come to figure a return of the same but not same sons which morph into the genderless children. Privacy is forsaken. Peace unattained.

And so for day 1091
08.12.2009

Intestinal Intertextuality

A whole chapter of Saints and Scholars by Terry Eagleton is devoted to a description of Dublin. This bit might remind you of James Joyce's Ulysses.

The Irish style of defecation would be regular and efficient, brief in duration to avoid anal eroticism; children would be taught to regulate their bowels like Gaels, not shit as Sassenachs.

For some reason, I thought of the scene at the conclusion of Chapter Four of Ulysses where Bloom is relieving himself in the privy while reading. And as Eagleton continues the description of Dublin and its inhabitants, we get the wink:

Each morning Finbar would watch one of his neighbours in Eccles Street, a jowlish shabby-genteel Jew much berated by his blowsy wife, set off in bowler hat and stiff white collar to circle the city as some kind of commercial agent, before returning each evening to be insulted again.

All this in passing ...

And so for day 376
25.12.2007