Of Merdia 21 - 25

Ms. Denum continues ...

21.        Rarely, I approach the seat of high humility and awaiting me is the sweet creation of another member of our race.  I often don't know whose, and this ignorance is the source of many hours of imaginative pleasure.  Unlike many others, whose practice it is to rapidly render the foreign creation absent, I revel in this uncommon democratic opportunity, of two strange children mingling, and retain the old creation to receive the new.  I do not see the other’s delight as anything particularly odd¾no more than mine, which is new and wondrous with each passing¾but familiar; cousins in the arms of Merdia.  This rare event¾a family reunion in Merdia’s diverse and royal kingdom.  Merdia, great goddess of democracy.

22.        My love for Merdia enables me to love all things, whereas my love for other members of the pantheon enable me to love one thing.

23.        Merdia gently brings me to reject the world¾for I must daily reject the world's foundation¾and accept it, for I am brought to accept this rejection as a portion of the world's foundation.  Merdia brings forth, her bringing forth disappears.  I bring forth from her bringing forth, my bringing forth disappears.  For this space of rejection and acceptance she gently leads me to, this space known by the sages as the height of spirituality, I am most grateful.

24.        Merdia, soft brown goddess of the little seas, proud, ever naked, full of gentle curves.  If I were so formed, so flexible and ripe, would I not be the proudest of men?  But I am not … this is why I need her.

25.        Merdia brings dignity to our vicious race.  She brings grace and hope.  Because of this, she is the greatest of goddesses.  I imagine her at the end of time, when all human achievements are ripe with desinence and have lost their smell.  She will be vigorous, waiting for another better race to replace us and bestow her verdant blessings.  Then the world will know its pantheon was inverted, due not to Her deficiencies but ours.  Our cowardice.  Our mediocrity.  Our indolence.

Of Merdia 16 - 20

Cloa Denum, of Of Merdia fame, was sighted recently by a hysterical Catholic near the rear buttresses of Notre Dame.  Paris City Council and The Vatican are deep in session, discussing the possibility of erecting a shrine in honor of the sighting.

16.         The future, as everyone knows, is in waste management.  Only those who love Merdia will enter the future singing.

17.        The collegial attributes of our race are most fortuitously shown when two members are placed by fate beside each other to sing Merdia’s praise in chorus.  Whether barriers mute the singing or the voices are free to blend in the thankful air, a spontaneous duet erupts from Merdia's generous lungs.  In such circumstances, it is not unusual to hear the participating humans trying to imitate the melody with their lesser, upper mouths, gently envying the purer sound of the symphony below.  Nevertheless, despite their humbling, the two orchestrants arise in gratitude for their small part in Merdia's eternal magic and it is my hope that one day soon it will be common practice for the two, upon exiting their joint impromptu bliss, to embrace and thus physically consummate what was begun by Merdia in spirit and in song.

18.        Some among us have been given the rare gift of reading scats.  We are not rewarded by society, which degrades such divination, but by Merdia, whom we love because she first loved us.  This gift, so common among the ancients, so common there were competing schools, has declined in these constipated times.  Yet some remain who read Merdia's jewels.  They are skilled in the arts of selection, drying, penetration and discernment.  They generally do not share their knowledge.  They are prized in private.  But there will come a day when these scatomancers will be raised so high they will glimpse though darkly Merdia's resplendent buttocks on Heaven’s shining throne.

19.        Particularly ennobling is the dump's pinnacle, when a significant mass sustains it and it rises triumphantly out of the water like Neptune's hair above a gratified Pacific.  Then I know anything is possible and the heights achieved by man thus far will be superseded by even greater heights, that the umbilical waters will continue to be hovered over by the divine forces that run through man long after I and my little graces have been flushed into Sheol.

20.         In a contest involving Hera, Aphrodite, Athena and Merdia, my goddess would win “most beautiful.”  She turns nothing to something and something to nothing; she fertilizes everything and is never far from our thoughts.  All lovely things are built on her magnificent rump; the more beautiful, the more her urgent passions form the beauty's blueprint.  She is fine, my love, the glory of goddesses, the Hole of Ages, omnipresent and fertile.

Of Merdia 12 - 15

Cloa Denum continues with her scatomystical obsessions.

12.         Jesus, Aeneas, Blake, Lear--they descended into Hell, that brilliant sewer of creation.  These men, whom our society now so easily adores, knew they had to drink the most putrid waste of our kind to know how to transcend our kind.  They fell in love with God¾or his equivalent¾only through God's waste.  I'm more efficient:  I fall in love with the God of waste.  I make everything my toilet, I therefore never have to leave my love.

13.         As I age, the act of voiding does not become less novel.  (And I am not one to void infrequently, I am blessed among women.)  If anything, the experience heightens.  Each new act contains not just itself but every previous void--the unique discoveries, the manifold personalities.  I wish I had a gallery containing a photograph of each dump I’ve ever bequeathed to the world.  But this would be inadequate; so much of the joy is not captured in a cold image:  the sensuous ambience, the communion with nature and creation, the deeply visceral pushing, the sound and the blurring, the distinctive focus in which all of one's faculties are brought to bear on this singular act of grand and primal expulsion.  Such historical weight makes me tremble with anticipation as I contemplate even my third dump of the day, and this before lunch.  Past and present fuse, the future trembles with me.  All is light and glory.  All creation sings.  I am brought face to face with my responsibilities to transcend my mother¾these daily, hourly, reminders of who I am and what I can still become.  I climb the stairs to the only throne in the universe, my fingers fumbling at my fly like a teenager’s attending her first sexual experience, dropping my pants and undergarment to the floor with the vast knowledge of what is about to take place.  Memory and hope join, become incarnate, take wing and soar like eagles far above the thoughts of men.  They will fly and not be weary, they soar and do not faint.

14.         I am made new with each passing dump.  The busy factory of my body is cleansed through Merdia's magic.  Not only do I see the handwriting of the gods below my reeking heaving ass, but I myself leave this room of wonder and decisions lighter than the dump I left behind.  It is as if all the weight I have carried within me since the last transfiguration has been borne by my creation.  This is cause for dancing, for believing in the gods.

15.         Merdia, goddess of cleansing and purification, goddess of strength and overcoming, goddess of holiness and creation, goddess of light and pushing, of withholding and revealing, of anticipation and sweetness, the transcendence of Hell, time's redemption, history's urgency, God's envy; goddess of binding and releasing, goddess of pleasure’s emptiness and fullness, goddess of mystics and saints, of legions and visions, of profits and prophets, of shame and innocence; goddess of singing, art, religion and love, bless us today and for evermore.  Amen.

Of Merdia 7 - 11

Sadoo Diaper continues with Cloa Denum's

gripping scatomystical saga and liturgy, Of Merdia.

7.            I begin by testing my ability to control and soil.  I refuse the controls of my body and my mother, who emerge in my toddling mind as horrible allies, in secret league, with their own private language they share in silence and refuse to teach me, less from cruelty and more from their hard knowledge, gained through millennia of observation, that I am incapable of learning it.  Merdia's language is mine to learn, the language of angels and excrement.

8.            Through the beneficence of Merdia, I build small graceful statues instead of napping.  I line them on the parapets of my crib.  They harden in the heat and wreak their defiance at my mother's turgid assault.  The statues are destroyed, the war seems lost; but I have gained knowledge that is worth a thousand losses … I have learned how to rouse my mother's passion.

9.            I join the watery gangs of global children, floating efficient brown boats on our waves of freedom.  Though the Yellow Duck that Squeaks may initially appear to dominate the seas, it soon is clear that the small brigade of rafts, canoes and flotsam are clever: they surround the Fowl, their crafty tactics bring that duckie down.  It is wrought by standards in gross and metal tombs; we unthanked gangs create our toys from our natural exuberance.  This is why the Plastic Monster cannot win.

10.         I never lose the thrill of taking a dump.  It is an act of worship, a cry of triumph.  It unites savagery and inspiration.  It precedes God, civilization, art.  It precedes and predicts them, it’s their necessary womb.

11.         When I have the good fortune of using an outhouse, particularly the crude kind where the pit is shallow, open to the air and light and thus my eyes, I peer through the dark triangle formed by the rugged seat and my naked thighs and watch my creation piling, forming, steaming, rising¾live and virile and lovely.  I see the immediate gratitude of bugs, many of whom seem designed solely for this, who fight gloriously for a small patch on which to pitch the hungry tent of their body.  I see gods and masterpieces in the fresh sweet reek; these are the nutrients the bugs and I desire.  I rise from my proud production and know my goddess lives.

The New Mysticism

Mysticism, as everything, gets tiresome after a while.  Sadoo Diaper has thus decided to leave the Tao Te Ching behind for a time and introduce its readership to a number of new voices in the literary gaggle. It begins with Cloa Denum's 1777 Of Merdia, recently discovered at the bottom of a Parisian toilet, smuggled to the New World in a Somalian pirate ship, and introduced here, in The Secular Sadoo, for the first time to a human audience. Specifically, today, the Sadoo publishes Cloa's bio and Of Merdia's opening vignettes.

Of Merdia

Cloa Denum wrote Of Merdia in 1777 in The Bastille; legend has it that she wrote it on the first roll of toilet paper, which she invented for this purpose.  A mystic by training, she angered the French aristocracy when she, vaguely anticipating Marx, claimed that the peasants had insufficient access to the porcines of production.  For this she was incarcerated and, according to official prison records, went mad shortly thereafter, frequently giving lectures to her dumps, with the length of the lectures not incommensurate with the length of the dumps; comparing the taxonomies of clouds and dumps; sculpting with the available material and presenting said sculptures as gifts to her favorite guards; and so on.  The roll was preserved by her cellmate and lover, Gloria Gaither, who was released in 1789 during the storming, subsequently applying the roll to the purposes we are intimate with today—a notable exception being, of course, the majority of the Indian subcontinent and a few other scattered freaks—making later interpretation of the text challenging.  What happened to Ms. Denum is not known.  There is a growing consensus among recent feminist scholars that Denum is the authentic founder of Scatomysticism, some going as far as positing that she retains the same role in Scatomystic Semiotics, although this is hotly contested.  Psychology has only just begun to explore the significant implications of Cloa Denum’s insights for itself and humanity.  The significant number of shockingly precise technological and commercial prophecies was the prime cause enabling her to be fast-tracked by the Vatican to sainthood in 1801, an effort nobly spearheaded by Pius VII himself despite the obvious heresies in the document.

1.            I am deeply in love with Merdia, goddess of first creations.  She shows me my true destiny; she, more than any of the millions in the teeming pantheon, smells of truth.  She, not my mother, was my first love.  My mother I cannot help but resent; I am her creation, not she mine.  We both know this, and this is her eternal power over me.  How do I transcend this knowledge?  To whom do I turn to draw power to combat my mother's supernatural strength?  Merdia, she is the goddess of my first creation and the power of my once and future combats.

2.            In the low is the high, in excrement are mansions.  Every artist and homosexual knows this.  Art swirls in the toilet.  Sewers give birth to visions.  Should I ignore Merdia, my life will be a suburb, smelling only of Mr. Clean and Lysol.  Merdia is my fire for another world, a world I create to set against the power of my mother.

3.            I cannot create from the power of myself, for what am I but the extension of my mother?  Yet when I look at the perfect brown spirals curled happily in the tranquil waters awaiting their fate with dignity and silence, I know I too am capable of extensions as holy as my mother’s.

4.            I develop mythologies for myself--potent complex narratives processed in the infinite intestines of my soul.  These are Merdia's gifts to me, celebrations of my separateness.  Mythologies are our first defense against the world.  We realize after deconstructing the illusion of maturity they are our only defense.

5.            Merdia enables me to invert the natural order of existence, for in my mythologies I imagine myself as more powerful than my mother and this imagining suffices for its actuality.  The wonder I feel before my ability to create and overcome gives birth to powers in me that didn't exist before.  Merdia, not Christ, makes all things new.  These powers are such that my mother's fade in comparison; even her creation is nothing next to this feeling, which is so virile all other births seem small.  How this inversion occurs is the greatest mystery, greater than all natural births.

6.            At first, my creation is beyond me.  It controls and soils me, like my mother, who controls my existence and soils me with her superiority.  But gradually, I sense an unnatural force, pressing deeply against the membranes of my spirit.  It is vatic, guttural, urgent, hot.  It steams like a thousand stallions of Hell crossing Antarctica through pitch.  It hisses through its nostrils that this creation which surrounds and sullies me is not beyond, but within.  And anything within is mine to bring without, but more than this, far more than this, is solely mine.

Tao Te Ching LXII

The way is the refuge for the myriad creatures.

It is that by which the good man protects

and that by which the bad is protected.

Beautiful words when offered will win high rank in return,

beautiful deeds can raise a man above others.

Even if a man is not good, why should he be abandoned?

Hence when the emperor is set up and the three ducal ministers are appointed, he who makes a present of the way without stirring from his seat is preferable to one who offers presents of jade disks followed by a team of four horses.  Why was this way valued of old?  Was it not said that by means of it one got what one wanted and escaped the consequences when one transgressed?

Therefore it is valued by the empire.

One of the astonishing aspects of the Tao to a traditional Westerner is how little it cares about whether a person is good or bad.  The Tao acknowledges the distinctions:  some people are oriented to behavior we typically call good, others to behavior we typically call bad; whether these interpretations and naming are socially constructed, whether genetically defined, whether rooted in some objective reality is largely beside the point:  the roots of the causes of our naming, as is typically with the Tao, aren’t particularly relevant.

Unlike the Christian god, who supposedly rewards good and punishes evil—though we see little evidence of this on earth—the Tao (perhaps because it tends to being the this-worldly spirit of nature rather than the other-worldly spirit of spirits) neither rewards nor punishes, but quietly accepts.  So the sage quietly accepts, but does not do so stupidly—as the naïve and inexperienced might—but as one who has sojourned through the cold-hot expanses of the human soul and says without despair or exuberance, Well, this is it, this is existence … oh well.

But this subversion of the traditional western polarities—good and evil, of course, only being one—is not done to be subversive, not performed from some theoretical tour de force, not arrived at through nihilism or amorality … but is maintained as the best possible way to survive.  If you stroke the good for being good, they begin to behave well to be rewarded (then, naturally, they are no longer good); if you punish the bad for being bad, they naturally feel alienated and vengeful and one way or another, from time to time at least, the punishment will return to confront the punisher.  So the sage doesn’t flash and bribe, doesn’t scorn and destroy, but walks alongside the seemingly eternal struggles of society and accepts them the way she accepts water.

Tao Te Ching LXI

A large state is the lower reaches of a river—

the place where all the streams of the world unite.

In the union of the world,

the female always gets the better of the male by stillness;

being still, she takes the lower position.

Hence the large state, by taking the lower position, annexes the small state.

The small state, by taking the lower position, affiliates itself to the large state.

Thus the one, by taking the lower position, annexes;

the other, by taking the lower position, is annexed.

All that the large state wants is to take the other under its wing;

all that the small state wants is to have its services accepted by the other.

If each of the two wants to find its proper place

it is meet that the large should take the lower position.

When one falls into the boggy depths of consciousness, one finds mud.  There are those who say that, upon emerging (should one emerge), one wears the cloak of light—spun from detachment and freedom from desire.  Hippies, New Agers, the Buddha, and an eclectic mix of charlatans and earnest well-intentioned fools.  Others, far more rare, such as the Judge in Blood Meridian, emerge in puissant darkness.

But in mud there is neither light nor darkness, morality nor immorality, male nor female, life nor death.  So the sage, having visited the muddy way and never really feeling inclined to leave, promotes nothing in particular—not war, not peace, not good, not evil.  The sage knows the enlightened one is bound to the unenlightened, the redeemer to the unredeemed.  The sage, though, being bound only to mud and its murkiness, sidesteps allegiances and the common opposites of the human spirit.

So the Tao recognizes that in the world there are pieces—large and small, annexing and annexed—which need each other.  Without the small, the large is excessive, imbalanced; without the large, the small is insecure, imbalanced:  finding each other, they temporarily unite that which is irreconcilable in the world and so find balance for a time.  Of course, the rule of the world is such that they rarely find each other, the one too obsessed with its excess, the other too insecure to act.  So the sage, finding the irreconcilable reconciled in mud, stays in mud and lets the world do what it is inclined to do.

Tao Te Ching LX

Governing a large state is like boiling a small fish.

When the empire is ruled in accordance with the way, the spirits lose their potencies.

Or rather, it is not that they lose their potencies but that, though they have their potencies, they do not harm the people.

It is not only they who, having their potencies, do not harm the people.  The sage also does not harm the people.

As neither does any harm, each attributes the merit to the other.

The soul is a many-headed many-faced many-tongued beast.  Each head is a god, each face a spirit, each tongue a demon.  The processes of education and enculturation typically are processes of numbing—of building internal and external barriers between individuals and their souls, between selves and the divine; this numbing is for good reason:  the soul easily devours the faint-hearted, the serious, the glib, the naïve, and the coddled.  The primary function of society—its processes and structures—is to offer this protection.

Yet those who do not wish to be numbed, to be protected, against the soul’s vastness, its dark empty spaces, its potencies and surprises, must themselves develop strategies to avoid destruction, for the soul is always larger than anything that inhabits it.  We have a sufficient number of great explorers of the soul—from Baudelaire to Nietzsche, from Kierkegaard to Simone Weil—to know how it treats those who neither numb themselves nor appeal to the method as large as the soul—the way that accepts and walks but does itself become any aspect it sees.  Thus the soul’s potent spirits—whether they’re named Apollo or lust, Yahweh or pride, Aphrodite or despair—are not ossified, succumbed to, worshipped, or ignored … but simply acknowledged.  The sage knows the words and methods of each spirit, each god, each demon; she knows them but does not feel inclined to identify with them.  She walks, and in walking she passes from voice to voice, spirit to spirit, potency to potency … and in passing does not harm.

Tao Te Ching LIX

In ruling the people and in serving heaven it is best for a ruler to be sparing.

It is because he is sparing that he may be said to follow the way from the start.

Following the way from the start he may be said to accumulate an abundance of virtue.

Accumulating an abundance of virtue there is nothing he cannot overcome.

When there is nothing he cannot overcome no one knows his limit.

When no knows his limit he can possess a state.

When he possesses the mother of a state he can then endure.

This is called the way of deep roots and firm stems by which one lives to see many days.

Western causation—scientific, measurable, reproducible, abstract—differs from the way’s causation, which is mysterious, elusive, and embodied.  The Tao begins in restraint and ends in life, passing through an overcoming which is no transcendence but an immanence, no acquisitiveness but an abundance, no leadership but a following.

Physical survival at the writing of the Tao Te Ching was far more dubious than it is now for those living behind the increasingly precarious fortress of the First World.  Yet look at what many of the world’s privileged are focused on—extending life, maintaining and increasing health.  But this is presently done not by being sparing but by being excessive, not through virtue but through extravagance, not through serving but through arrogance.  Individual physical survival may no longer seem like an issue for the world’s entitled, but our species’ survival is—and so each individual is bound.  Thus in ruling ourselves and in serving the earth, it is best for us to be sparing; we might then endure and live to see many days.  But, first, we have to know that it is not better to be a human than a butterfly, to be a ruler than a bum.