Silly farts

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Farting is not a subject polite society ever considers.  It is one of those inconvenient little reminders - like death - that we are not gods, however smartly we may dress and talk.  As a result, farting has become a subject colonised by children - who are in any case rightly fascinated by all the mysteries of the human body - secure in the knowledge that no adults will come along and start asserting their superior experience in this field as they do in most others.

When the fart occurs - in life or in literature - there is always a shocked pause, as if leaving space for it to pass.  In society, the instinct to pretend that the unpleasant never happened manifests itself as usual.  With art, which habitually comes freighted with explanations and interpretations, this is not so easy.  For example, in the thirteenth century round 'Sumer is icumen in' - a virtuosic essay in double canon, one of the earliest in music - there occurs the line which is usually translated as "bulls leap and bucks fart."  Despite valiant attempts at emendation, the phrase still crops up in books on medieval music and poetry.  Because of the work's historical importance, its text must, of course, be glossed - a task which leaves the rigorous but prim scholar appalled and red-faced.  At moments like these, art seems to be blowing a raspberry at the world and its prudishness.  And aptly: raspberry in this phrase is short for raspberry tart - cockney rhyming slang for a fart.  

But imagine for a moment a world which does not have this rather queasy Victorian attitude to what is, after all, just another bodily activity.  In this world people would be free to fart in public without embarrassment just as they might at home.  There would be nothing unusual about entering an office to be greeted with a rich and overpowering melange of such odours which would linger in your clothes and hair for days.  Sometimes special rooms would be set aside specifically for those who wished to indulge themselves in this way, and areas allocated in restaurants for those who felt the need to fart during meals.  

Because of the social acceptability of farting, we can imagine that organisations dedicated to widening the constituency of farters would mount advertising campaigns in magazines and on hoardings to encourage more people - and especially the young - to fart in public as well as in private.  There might even be fads associated with the activity: for example young men might consider it particularly cool to fart in a loud and demonstrative way, while the most refined and soigne of women might take up farting not for the pleasure it gives them, but purely as a sign of sophistication.

The idea of such a world is plainly ridiculous.  And yet we live in that world.  Substitute the word 'smoke' for 'fart' in the above description, and the fit is perfect.  Or nearly.  It must be conceded that for all the superficial similarities, there is one crucial difference between farting and smoking: breathing in someone else's fart, unlike breathing in someone else's smoke, does not give you cancer.  It is an interesting question as to who are the sillier farts in this situation: those who selfishly inflict their loathsome and lethal smoke on others, or those who let them.

(1988)

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Accidents and substance

Download audio file read by Glyn Moody.

Some people seem to have aerodynamic souls.  They go through life causing barely an eddy in the great stream of the world.  After painless childhoods, they grow up, get a job, get married, get a family, get old and die - all as effortlessly as a fish moves through water.  Often, they are deeply content; but they never appear in history.  They are completely invisible, and live, if at all, only through their children who carry their name and perhaps a faint memory of endless summer holidays spent with a smiling, faceless couple.

Contrast them with those who travel through life with all the grace of a thrown brick.  Whatever smoothness existence requires at a particular moment for an easy passage, they proffer only corners and edges.  They have desperate, terrible childhoods which they carry around for the rest of their lives like criminal records.  Adolescence is a painful cosmic joke.  If they marry at all, it is always the wrong person; if they have children, they have too many or at the wrong time.  Their home is a disaster: constant repairs, burglaries, fires.  In old age they are plagued by illness, and are abandoned by their relatives.  Death, when it comes, comes too late, or at an embarrassing moment, or messily.  But these are people whose days are richly textured, and who wear life's scars like medals.  And you remember the look in their eyes for ever.

Most of us fall between the two, divided between a cowardly desire for an easy, painless path through this world, and a craving for incident.  As ever, we cheat and compromise: we seek comfort in reality and fulfilment in fantasy.  We may daydream about the ideal partner; imagine the success and riches of our own business; begin to think about planning that daring holiday; but we make do with a nice semi-detached, 2.4 kids and a dog.

To compensate, we turn to the great surrogates.  There is entertainment, whose constant, specious excitement fills temporarily the yawning gaps in your soul, without real engagement or risk; and there is art, whose basic premise is that its creators offer you their suffering and exaltation in return for honour, a little money, and absolution for their lives.

Absolution because the greatest artists have always failed, have always been social misfits, bad wives and husbands, spendthrifts, political dupes, cripples and emotional wrecks.  They were profound creators not just because they suffered, but because they were able to channel that anguish into art, to win from it self-knowledge, knowledge about life and death which we gratefully receive.  Genius is never enough; to create a masterpiece, a Mozartian facility must be married with a Mozartian misery.

When we envy unthinkingly the great writers, painters, composers and the rest, we should remember the price they paid - usually unwillingly - for their glory.  And when we are in pain, or robbed or beaten, when we are tricked by shysters, when we are burnt by deep and hopeless love, lacerated by loss of family, or ravaged by disease, we should remember that like those artists we too have the possibility of seizing from vicissitudes something other than raw despair, of gaining through these accidents of life a real and lasting inner substance.

(1989)

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