POSITIONS
We shit in the hands of those who love us, is how the writer Andre Dubus, who has had the experience on a literal level, put it the other night at the end of a series of benefit readings to help pay the medical expenses brought on by his recent accident… thereby making, perhaps, a more literal and de-sensualized restatement of Yeats‘ famous acknowledgement that „love has pitched its tent/ in the place of excrement.“
The irony of this comparison, however, perhaps reveals something of how strangely, and poignantly, the erotic and tragic aspects of love connect– for it is from the center from which we expel our waste that we also waste ourselves in a rage against those we ought to love. So that it is no accident that we speak, quite literally, of shitting on those we love… and that the prospect, though we hate to admit it, somehow erotically excites us.
Turning our living face (into which we take food and oxygen, the sources of life… and of waste) away from them, we present them, instead, with the orifice from which we expel other life sources (carbons, nitrates, etc.), but life sources only for those forms that will mark our graves… grass, shrubs, trees. Face to face, two livings– in all their fear, terror, rage and vulnerability– meet and confront one another. Anus to face, however, it is life and death– eros and thanatos– that meet and confront.
Both of these meetings can be ways of saying I love you. Each speaks the other as its opposing possibility. Each wishes, at times, to escape from what its counterpart has to say.