Everybody Dies

Recently, Andrew Sullivan reported on his blog that he had the flu and was dividing his time between writing and shitting.  I like Sullivan, but I filed this under too-much-information.

I understand it better today.  Yesterday, I had a colonoscopy.  I had a lot of time to consider my colon, its function, and its products.  First there was the “prep.”  Then there was procedure itself and the many kind people at the clinic who were concerned with my comfort but also concerned that  my prep had produced a “clean” colon.

The procedure is probably good for my health, but it was totally unnatural.  It provoked a memory of a book I read once but hadn’t looked at in probably thirty years:  The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker (1973).  I pulled down the book and quickly found the quotation I had been vaguely remembering.  Here Becker is speaking of the “existential contradiction between a symbolic self, that seems to give man infinite worth in a timeless scheme of things, and a body that is worth about 98¢.”

[Excrement represents] the tragedy of man’s dualism…[t]he anus and its incomprehensible repulsive product represents not only physical determinism and boundness, but the fate as well of all that is physical: decay and death. (31)

Only a couple hours after my procedure, I met with some friends.  I briefly mentioned my morning.  I needed the comfort of the “oh what a morning I just had” conversation, but I didn’t want to go into detail.  There seem many reasons why that would have been inappropriate.  Two of these reasons are explained above by Becker, the paradox of our nature and the repulsiveness of my prep.

As a child, I occasionally tried to understand the weird idea that everybody does it.  I think I phrased is as “everybody has to use the bathroom.”  It was hard to believe.  I particularly found it hard to believe about the pope.  Maybe I was just a weird kid.  But I was comforted by this quotation in Becker’s book from a poem by Jonathan Swift where a young man is expressing this “grotesque contradiction” about Caelia, the woman he admires:

Nor wonder how I lost my Wits;
Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits!

And so does the pope.

It’s interesting I think that the colonoscopy is a procedure designed to postpone death.  I’ll go along with that.  But it also brings to the fore the paradox of the sublime and the shitty.

If any friends from my meditation group read this, they may want to remind me that life is not always so dualistic.  I know.  I know.