In a recent conversation about the celebration of birthdays, a fellow journalist extolled the idea that we should coddle ourselves in the notion of our individual importance because, as she put it, “We are all moving through singular experiences of life that deserve to be honored.”
I doubt this is so.
I suspect that human individual importance is surpassingly tiny, approaching the infinitesimal, and to think otherwise is the sickness of our species, the pathology of anthropocentrism. The lesson of nature is that the meaning of any specimen among any species is neither to be honored nor dismissed. We are animals colliding with chance, nothing more.
Alas, with Homo colossus, such humility is unacceptable. We are supposed to be giants, the best, the most loved, and therefore we must celebrate our birthdays and proclaim ourselves significant, as if the particular birth of you or me means anything beyond a biological event. This primary error of self-regard quickly leads to epic nonsense, the topping of hills with parthenons and oracles, conquest of the highest mountains (because we can, therefore we should), the polluting of deserts with human sign where no sign should be, the masturbating on every possible landbase, the loading of rockets full of cumshot to the moon and beyond, and so on.
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- To say that such madness starts with the innocent celebration of one’s birthday might seem too much, yet it is the remarkable fact.
Therefore a poem…
Man is not the center of all things, but is a shithead
Man is not the center of all things, but is a shithead.
By that I mean he’s got his head filled with the feces
Of his looking in the mirror.
I know, that’s all I do, look in the mirror.
Man shits and thinks it’s property.
He shits, scoops it up, and finds a world.
Here’s Man in the canyon nearby, the sun blazing,
The water running, the sky cloudless:
He squeezes out his turd, squat as an angel,
proclaims that it looks like him –
Proclaims he has given birth! –
And molds it under the blue sky: This shit is his,
It’s got his name on it, the shit looks likes his fist –
It’s a shit-fist! It’s darling, this fist,
It’s better than all loves and trysts.
It’s the awaking of his higher self,
It’s a pin he can wear,
It’s a flag, it’s a name, it’s what sets him apart
From the other shitting creatures who wisely
Bury their shit.
Shit-Man has a festival. He makes music
Of his dried turds on a rock
And sells tickets.
He jumps and cries, he fingers it,
He trembles, he murmurs, he babbles.
He calls it a play, a poem, a book.
He runs to the stream and wonders why the water
Runs clean – shouldn’t it be full of shit?
The enormity of sky in morning should be shitting
Free as I am, but it doesn’t.
I have created this turd Word
And all you have, God, is the dawn
Which doesn’t shit?
God, I have feces that can smear letters
On your creation faster than your magpies and coyotes
Scream for a place under the weather.
I can shit and make weather!
I can fuck and shit at the same time!
Who in your Creation, God, can do as I?
Let me tell ya
(no God answering)
I shit in your mouth,
I shit on your cousins, your brothers and sisters,
your grandfathers and uncles,
Your friends, your loveliest friends,
I shit and fuck and shit and fuck.
And what are you, God, to do?
Look at the mountain where I have my toilet:
My shit has dreams made of cities.
My shit is the raging of computers.
My shit is the white light of Skype and Zoom and Facetime.
Look at the green-stripped trees where I can have more.
Look at the fine flesh of the little woman grass where I eat Your world.
Look at the rivers where I drink and You can’t.
Look at the boundless prairies where I make bread
And no grass grows except where I tell it
To fill the guts of men who smile and shit.
Look at the teeming frost of the north which is full of oil.
Look at the warm white ocean where all fish swim to me (not to You!).
Look at the time I impose until the world boiling
Can be cooked for me and me only.
I am the greatest thing ever – don’t you know?
This is the wise, the callous, the luminous, the large
Eye of Man who is great to tell all things I have come,
Sitting on my toilet, chewing on my thumb.