Ode to shit

what happened to babe © Lilly Schwartz 2011

In its natural state, life is pretty balanced. Shit gives rise to the complexity of life and life again produces shit. It’s waves and waves of life, shit and death that all interrelate somehow and make sure that shit and corpses don’t take over the world. Without the continuation of life the world would gradually decay until it was just covered in corpses and dung that eventually decompose into some kind of goo. At least that’s how I imagine the end of all life. Some call this movement towards the ultimate final goo the second law of thermodynamics, some call it entropy, and other less fair-minded people, like me, just call it the shit we have to deal with, mainly because ‘shit’ is such a short and poignant word.

What people tend to forget is that shit, corpses and death are utterly necessary for life to even exist. Not plants or insects are at the bottom of the food chain, shit and corpses are. There is all the ugly iffy type of life that birds eat all the time, worms and insects and these wouldn’t exist without heaps and heaps of dung and dead goo. There is a somewhat disgusting, somewhat beautiful relationship between life and death that needs to be spelled out in these terms somehow, so that people are reminded of how life really works and make their choices accordingly.

We go into a supermarket and buy a piece of flesh from an animal that was at some point a living, breathing entity. This being had a mother and possibly big eyes that let humans go “Awww cuuute”, because we’re genetically inclined to care for cuddly little things with big eyes. Well, until one day the cuddly little thing isn’t little or cuddly anymore, and then we have it for dinner. Just, that nowadays people don’t even see anymore that they’re eating a part of a corpse, unless someone makes it real obvious and sells a whole dead piglet. Yes, we eat corpses. Chilled corpses maybe, but still, we have something in common with the worms and insects that are at the bottom of the food chain. We don’t want to be reminded of it, but it is true nonetheless.

We don’t want to see corpses, we don’t want to see death in its reality. We don’t want to be reminded that one day the worms and insects are going to get us all, unless we give ourselves to the fires of hell, no wait, the fires of the crematories. We wax our relatives up, paint their faces so that they somehow don’t look so dead. We don’t leave them lying around until they start to look somewhat disgusting, no we chill them and then we bury them six feet under. It’s more hygienic that way.

The same we do with shit. It goes down the toilet and is flushed somewhere, God knows where, and that’s the last we see of it. Dog shit lies in the street and we feel inclined to fine the dog owners if they don’t make the shit disappear. It’s just not very nice is it? We don’t want to see shit, just like we don’t want to see corpses and dead relatives being eaten by worms.

However, without corpses we don’t get our steak or Sunday roast. Without shit there is no food chain, no life, no world as we know it and sometimes it’s important to spell it out. Even our own deaths are necessary, because without it there is no room for the children of our children.

Now, the problem with avoiding shit, death and corpses all the time is that we tend to forget how to live. We don’t take risks that might get us killed. We eat only healthy food that doesn’t make us happy, we take all the excesses out, the extremes, the jumping of cliffs, hitchhiking with strangers, walking through parks alone at night. Those might even be reasonable precautions, but what’s even worse is that take it one step further. We don’t do stuff that involves paddling through valleys of shit. With this I mean that we try to avoid doing things that confront us with heaps of stuff that we don’t want to do. Maybe it’s bureaucracy, maybe it’s talking in front of a lot of people, maybe marketing or putting yourself on the line. And we all try to avoid this shit as much as possible, because it scares us.

Without shit, there is no beauty though. Musicians have to face the whole industry if they want their albums to be bought. And without their albums being bought, they will stop being musicians, unless they’re terribly idealistic and have too much time on their hands. Full-time musicians have to go on the road to play shows, with the right timing, the right publicity and terribly uncomfortable circumstances. They have to face labels and even the worst of the worst, music journalists, who to musicians often seem like vultures, because they turn the words in your mouth so that it actually gets them a story, even if there is none. Also writers have to face similar things. They face the critics, the publishing industry, book signings, reading tours, book fairs and the likes. No job is without its own valley of shit that you continually have to cross, just to get to the blooming mountains with dew sprinkled flowers.

The point is, those dew sprinkled flowers are worth it. How many people end up doing a job they hate, because they didn’t want to be facing one of these big and obvious valleys of shit? And how many of them still cross their own version of this valley every day? Annoying customers, bosses, efficiency ratings, monthly and yearly appraisals, layoffs, backstabbing co-workers and the rut of producing shit that nobody really needs anyway. And no dew sprinkled flowers whatsoever, because in the end you just look back and think “Whoever needed the crap I wasted my life with for the last 45 years?”

Whatever you do, there is shit all around, and that’s normal. Shit can only be avoided, by not living life altogether. The question really is, whether you want to spend your life waist deep in shit shovelling it from one side to the other, or whether you want to build a boat and enjoy the flowers on the other side. Either way, we just have to accept the shit, the corpses, even the worms, the insects and the vultures, because it’s all part of the circle of life. What we do with that is our own choice though.

And even if this all might sound somewhat dreary and depressing, from time to time someone actually has to write an ode to all this shit, because it’s all around us and somehow it fulfils its function. It enables us to live and do the things we like, even though we find it all pretty disgusting and terrible if we give it too much thought. And here it comes, an ode to the shit we all have to deal with, day in and day out:

It’s an ode

Oh, it’s an ode
to the trains that are late every day,
the dumb students you have to teach,
the idiots to whom you serve food,
to abusive customers all over the planet
and to all the pathetic bosses who don’t know shit,
to the people who walk slowly right in front of you
although it’s obvious that you’re in a hurry.

It’s an ode
to the tax return forms,
or your apathetic unemployment agency case worker,
to the nonsensical phone calls that keep you from working productively
and your old computer at work that keeps crashing,
the rancid coffee in the office that smells somewhat burnt
and the milk that has gone off again
because you’re never home.

It’s an ode
to the cat that always jumps on the table
although you keep telling it to get down,
to the screaming kids on all the airplanes in the world,
to your neighbours who wear high heels in their flat,
to the squeaking door in your office,
or the architects who enjoyed designing a building without windows,
to the oil refinery of which your town stinks
and the flatmates who steal your orange juice.

It’s an ode to this,
and to all the other lovely shit that keeps driving you insane.

And now you better go back to paddling, my little sailors.

March 19, 2012 | Categories: meta | Tags: art, death, existence, life, literature, music, opinion, photography, photos, pictures, shit, writing | Leave a comment