Going For a Beer by Robert Coover

Author:Robert Coover [Coover, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

As the fabler advances through the penumbral forest, creeping, bounding, stumbling over roots, crouching under bushes, zigging and zagging in the general direction of the lion’s den, he stirs a wide commotion. There are scurryings, flutterings, rustlings all around. Twigs pop, pebbles scatter, leaves and feathers float on the air like the tatters of muffled rumors, stifled panic, as though the forest were beset on all sides—and from within as well—by strange and unexpected dangers. Wild rumors. Hopes. Mad ambitions.

Much of this the fabler reads in all the shit he squats and tumbles in: the hard nuggets of avidity and pride, puddled funk, noisome pretense, the frantic scatter of droppings unloosed on the run in uncertainty and confusion—that eloquent text of the forest floor. He knows it well, he’s had his nose in it since the day he was born. “Has he lost something?” people would ask. “He’s like a hog rooting in mud.” He was pretending to be studying the ground, of course, in order to pretend he could straighten up if he wanted to, an impostor twice over. But out of adversity, wisdom. Once a famous Hellenic philosopher, his master in the dark days of his enslaved youth, had asked him why it was, when we shat, we so often turned around to examine our own turds, and he’d told that great sage the story of the king’s loose-living son who one day, purging his belly, passed his own wits, inducing a like fear in all men since. “But you don’t have to worry, sire,” he’d added, “you’ve no wit to shit.” Well, cost him a beating, but it was worth it, even if it was all a lie. For the real reason we look back of course is to gaze for a moment in awe and wonder at what we’ve made—it’s the closest we ever come to being at one with the gods.

Now what he reads in this analecta of turds is rampant disharmony and anxiety: it’s almost suffocating. Boundaries are breaking down: eagles are shitting with serpents, monkeys with dolphins, kites with horses, fleas with crayfish, it’s as though there were some mad violent effort here to link the unlinkable, cross impossible abysses. And there’s some dejecta he’s not sure he even recognizes. That foul mound could be the movement of a hippogriff, for example, this slime that of a basilisk or a harpy. His own bowels, convulsed by all this ripe disorder, fill suddenly with a plunging weight, as though heart, hump, and all might have just descended there: he squats hastily, breeches down (well, Zeus sent Modesty in through the asshole, so may she exit there as well), to leave his own urgent message on the forest floor. Ah! yes! a man must put his hand to his wealth and use it, example is—grunt!—better than precept. Just so . . . But quality, not quantity. Inconsistency is harmful in everything, though no forethought, of course, can prevail against destiny. Oof! Easy. Accomplishments are not judged by speed but by completeness.

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