SOMETHING ROTTEN IN. . .

WARNING: This is an adult subject.

I'm working through Lewis Hyde's Trickster book. Hyde’s second half of the section he calls “Dirt Work” is indeed about dirt, both earth and shit. He calls this chapter (#8 in the book) “Matter Out of Place,” because that’s the definition of mess, dirt, shit, and -- if you’re talking vegetation -- weeds. (Hyde doesn’t discuss weeds, nor does he talk in terms of ecology.)

HEAVEN’S PRIVY is the title of the first part.
This could have started with Martin Luther (the original) saying late in life that he was just an old turd waiting to drop through the asshole of the world, meaning that he was what was left of what was once fire in the belly. Instead Hyde goes back to his West African stories and then comes forward again, using Mary Douglas’ powerful work about “clean and unclean.” I haven’t read it for a long time and haven’t even read ALL of it. I’d better get to it. What is retirement for otherwise? I have at least one of her books on the shelf.

Then he goes to Carl Jung, a variation of Freud, who had a dream before he ever heard of Freud. He was twelve and dreamt of a fabulous ideal scene with a perfect cathedral with God sitting on his golden throne high above among the great sky castles. But there’s a hole in the throne. Suddenly God emits a huge turd that crashes into the cathedral.

I used to have a favorite “traveling” sermon entitled “Everybody Poops,” which was originally for a small fellowship that included quite a few little kids struggling with toilet training. They didn’t want to give up anything. The point was that if you don’t poop/discard/edit, you’ll swell up until you crush yourself from inside. The adults understood on a slightly more abstract level.

(At this point in my reading, Squibbie -- my tortoiseshell cat who is more than a little bit trickster -- climbed into my lap to be comforted for a case of diarrhea and my thinking became multi-sensory before it was interrupted to do the obvious.)

DEMOCRATIC CARNIVAL is the title of the second part.

There is a body of thought, well-represented by Victor Turner’s “The Ritual Process,” which suggests that carnival/festival/reverse rituals are a way of discarding the tensions of the usual order, esp. when that order is strongly enforced as in medieval villages. For a limited time, all rules are off and people go wild. In Valier the wife of the onetime village sheriff said that in the old days when the town was straining to build dams and ditches, there would be occasional blow-outs that left the streets ankle-deep in beer cans. Today we have “Homesteader Days” which are far more decorous; in fact, seen as advertising for ourselves. But I’ve written about Halloween at Heart Butte when there is a night of reverse-costumed dancing that is more powerful than pow-wow, entirely without alcohol. Maybe it's because the community is Catholic and Pentecostal.

At it’s most satanic extreme, the drive to purging becomes ethnic cleansing, an orgy of killing that leaves piles of skeletal human beings waiting for mass graves. They are the shit so the blonde, the powerful, and the uniformed can be clean. (The obsession with cleansing will kill the oppressors in the end, like the people poisoned by disinfectants, allergic to themselves.)

Society often identifies artists as unclean and in two cases that Hyde explores, the artists in question accepted and exploited that. The first was Andres Serrano, whose crucifix in a beaker of urine horrified the conservative nation. It was not explained by the media that there were other containers showing the same crucifix in milk and in blood, to make the point that Jesus was incarnate in real flesh with all its fluids. This is the theological shock that is supposed to be the heart of Christianity, but the parishioners liked their commercially produced communion wafers and grape juice better.

Hyde talks about working in a hospital ward for alcoholic, demented, and addicted men and how his job often included cleaning up shit and vomit. He says -- and not to make too big a thing of this, but Jesus might also say -- that this duty was a good balance for his daytime student work studying abstractions. When I did my Clinical Pastoral Care, our mighty leader thought it was demeaning for “professionals” like chaplains to act as orderlies and didn’t require us to do that, as was usual. Not only did we lose the chance to make real and physical contact with people, but also he turned out to be highly intolerant of any shortcomings in us, mostly because he obsessed so much about his own shortcomings. He flunked his own evaluation from his own supervisors and left the CPE system.

Hyde takes a surprising swerve here, identifying this denial of shit with the rise of Protestants like Calvin, so focused on order, compliance, pre-determination, the status quo. We are paying the political price now, this very insistence on the old order causing chaos in what were supposed to be reasonable town meetings. There has been no place for the rage and despair to get out, no place for the hope and renewal to get in.

The other big art case Hyde discusses is Mapplethorpe who photographed with great skill and elegance the acts of transgression most directly confronting shit: penetration of the anus, once with the handle of a bull whip and once with a whole hand and arm, which is called “fisting.” This art show went to court. The exhibition was protected in much the same way as Rodin’s nude statues were sequestered in a separate tent during the 1897 World’s Fair in Chicago. One paid to attend, there were warning signs, one couldn’t glance inside by mistake -- looking at these images had to be a deliberate act.

The jury was told that the law defined art as what the experts say is art and ALL of the experts said these beautiful photographs of outrageous subjects were art, explaining carefully why that was so. The jury acquitted, saying they didn’t like this kind of art, but they realized that’s what it was. Hyde then tilts the scales all the way over by pointing out that suppressed homosexuality and intravenous drug use were the social shit in the gut that had to come out into the open in order to understand AIDS. Beyond that, the USSR was collapsing of its own constipation, packed with pollution and infection.

In short, a people who do not properly deal with what they want to get rid of, either in practical bodily terms or in major social ways, will find themselves in trouble. Art can be catharsis that breaks the fever.

The National Sculpture Society magazine this month printed a photo of the ultimate comment on art as shit: canned feces of the artist. Worth a lot of money. You won't need your canopener.