Showing posts with label shit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shit. Show all posts

5 Oct 2019

Pansies: Brief Notes on D. H. Lawrence's Excremental Aesthetic

Georgia O'Keeffe: Detail from  
Black Pansy and Forget-Me-Nots (1926)

'The fairest thing in nature, a flower, still has its roots in earth and manure; and in the perfume there hovers still the faint strange scent of earth, the under-earth in all its heavy humidity and darkness. Certainly it is so in pansy-scent, and in violet-scent; mingled with the blue of the morning the black of corrosive humus. Else the scent would be just sickly sweet.'
- D. H. Lawrence


Pansies were one of Lawrence's favourite flowers and I can understand why; they're lovely little things, that turn their faces to the sun and backs to the wind.

And their name, of course, is the anglicised version of the French term pensées, meaning thoughts; particularly gay little thoughts, that bloom and fade without care or system.

An excellent name then, as Lawrence realised, for a collection of poems that fill the page "like so many separate creatures, each with a small head and a tail of its own, trotting its own little way".

But thoughts, like flowers, only stay fresh, if they keep their roots "in good moist humus and the dung that roots love". This is true also of objects made by hand, such as a Greek vase:

"If you can smell the dung of earthly sensual life from the potter who made [it], you can still see the vase as a dark, pansily-winking pansy, very much alive. But if you can only see an 'urn' or a 'still unravished bride of quietness', you are just assisting at the beautiful funeral [...] of all pansies."

Alas, many modern people want cut and dried forms of beauty. But a pansy that has been carefully plucked and pressed, which has no faint scent of shit and can no longer make you sneeze, is but a corpse-blossom.


Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'Draft Introduction to Pansies', The Poems, Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), Appendix 4, pp. 657-58. The opening quotation below the image is from Appendix 6, 'Introduction to Pansies', pp. 663-64.

In using the title Pansies for his 1929 collection of verse, Lawrence was, of course, displaying his own Romantic roots as a poet; Wordsworth references them in his work, for example, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's last published work was an unfinished piece entitled Pansie, a Fragment (1864). 


22 Jan 2019

Toilettenphilosophie

"[There are] three different attitudes towards excremental excess: 
an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; 
a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way."

- Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (1997)


I.

Faced with a 48-hour (non-figurative) shitstorm, I've come to the conclusion that there's really nothing funny about anorectal dysfunction and that bowel incontinence is not only beyond the pale, but beyond a joke.

Scatological humour might solicit laughter, but I agree with Cindy LaCom that this laughter is always rather hollow and "limited in its power to diminish public shame around the biological fact of shit".

Indeed, we might think of such gross-out comedy as a nervous defence mechanism designed to reduce anxiety and distance ourselves from the grim - often disgusting - reality of bodies subject to chaotic violence (bodies that have lost all integrity and self-control).     


II.

If the obscene is a loss of perspective that renders aesthetic judgement impossible, then horror might be defined as a shattering of taboo that results in a loss of illusion; i.e., it's the way in which the world rubs our noses in our own filthy mortality and its own base materialism. No matter how idealistic you are, you can't polish a turd. And you can't stop it stinking. 

Thus, even if there's nothing to laugh about when a frail and demented old woman shits her pants seven times in a weekend (the consequence of prescribing an aggressive laxative administered during a month long stay in hospital), there is something philosophically important to reflect upon ...


III.

Whilst clearly understanding the complex psycho-cultural reasons behind coprophobia, Georges Bataille and D. H. Lawrence both affirm the fact that human beings shit. Indeed, rather than seeing the act of defecating as something shameful, they think it should be acknowledged and celebrated.

Thus, in Lady Chatterley's Lover, for example, Mellors famously tells Connie as he strokes her soft sloping bottom and fingers the two secret openings to her body - "'An' if tha shits an' if tha pisses, I'm glad. I don't want a woman as couldna shit nor piss.'" 

I understand the point that Lawrence is trying to make here: he wants the human mind to free itself of its fear of the body and the body's potencies. For in his view, "the mind's terror of the body has probably driven more men mad than ever could be counted" and it's monstrous that anyone should be made to feel morally ashamed of their natural bodily functions.

That's fine. But I can't help wondering whether Mellors would be quite so un-Swiftian if Connie experienced a catastrophic loss of bowel control during the night of sensual pleasure ... Further, I have to admit - following recent experiences - that perhaps we need our illusions, our taboos, our lies surrounding the body.

Ultimately, perhaps it's preferable to have stars rather than shit in our eyes and not so unforgivable to find comfort in the reassuring smell of bleach ...


Notes

Cindy LaCom, 'Filthy Bodies, Porous Boundaries: The Politics of Shit in Disability Studies', Disability Studies Quarterly, Winter/Spring 2007, Volume 27, No.1-2. Click here to read online. 

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover and A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 223 and 309.  

To read a related post to this one from March 2015, click here