20131231.0814

It seems that I am unable to resist retrospection.  I can, at least, do better than simply recapitulating 2013 broadly; if I am going to look back, it will be across a longer time and with a narrower focus.

Yesterday, I made the comment that there is a metaphor in part of my view on writing.  If there is one, it is one dealing with sewage and plumbing, and it is not the first time I have ventured into such discourse in this webspace.  Examples are here, here, here, and here, and there are likely more that can be found by going even further back, or out from this webspace and into my other writing (I recall a poem I wrote for my brother some years back...).  I may not do it frequently, but I do from time to time indulge in what can easily be called shitty writing.

That someone who makes much of being a scholar in the academic humanities would do such a thing, would wade into stalls with shovel in hand and spread around the stinking piles I find there, will no doubt strike some as odd.  Traditional wisdom holds that one of the hallmarks of erudition, one of the typifying qualities of being educated, is the ability to avoid the indecent, to keep bodily odors down and out of speech and writing, to not spill blackwater where it ought not to go--which is most everywhere.  Those like me are not supposed to be night-soil men; we are supposed to pretend that the ivory tower has no facilities for that sort of thing.

It is a pretense, and pretensions are supposed to be execrable.  Those in the academic humanities are often...earthy in their senses of humor, and those who handle the medieval are particularly prone to being so.  The materials we treat demand it.  The masterwork of the Well of English Undefiled rattles on in heroic couplets about farting, oral sex, and a gag that Mel Brooks appropriates.  Beowulf has "a great ale-sharing" among people who took no kegs with them into the woods, as my late Anglo-Saxon professor pointed out to his classes.  And one of the most notable medieval lyrics, a sweet song of reverdie to celebrate the return of spring, flatly states that the buck will fart with the re-greening of the world.  How, then, can my colleagues and I refuse to speak of such things?

The question then arises of whether those who have such senses of humor are attracted to the medieval and, more broadly, the academic humanities, or if the study of those things develops in the student such a sense of humor.  There is also this: what does it show of people that they have for hundreds or thousands of years continued to send forth such exhalations and extrude such products, for even now such things as farts are funny.