The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking by Matthew Hutson

Author:Matthew Hutson [Hutson, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780741093
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

Gods with Anuses

‘No mistake – the turd is mankind’s real threat.’ Becker could be referring here in The Denial of Death to the spread of disease in developing areas due to inadequate sewage disposal, or describing a fictitious supervillain named The Turd who stomps cities flat and leaves nations besmirched. But no, he’s claiming that the lonely turd sitting in a toilet bowl can arouse mortal terror – terror worse than any giant monster, because it’s immune to heroics.

To achieve symbolic immortality, we must live a life of meaning; we must fashion a symbolic existence. So we define ourselves by our thoughts and aspirations and memories and intelligence and morality, things that can be transmitted through culture as abstractions. We extend our identities beyond the natural world; we become supernatural. But there’s another side to our existence, one less angelic. It’s the side that shits and bleeds and oozes and breaks and eventually stops working and rots away, just like every other creature on the planet. In Becker’s terms, we are ‘gods with anuses’. And this fact tears us apart; to the degree that we are mortal animals, we are not immortal souls.

Becker really gets going when discussing the conflict between our embodiment and our ethereality, and how turds are the poignant, pungent essence of that problem:

Excreting is the curse that threatens madness because it shows man his abject finitude, his physicalness, the likely unreality of his hopes and dreams. But even more immediately, it represents man’s utter bafflement at the sheer non-sense of creation: to fashion the sublime miracle of the human face, the mysterium tremendum of radiant feminine beauty, the veritable goddesses that beautiful women are; to bring all this out of nothing, out of the void, and make it shine in noonday; to take such a miracle and put miracles again within it, deep in the mystery of eyes that peer out – the eye that gave even the dry Darwin a chill: to do all this, and to combine it with an anus that shits! It is too much. Nature mocks us, and poets live in torture.

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