excrement

Rereading Peter Matthisen's "The Snow Leopard" I am returned to the mule yard where I removed the dung from a winter's droppings last week. This is valuable stuff for the compost, chicken and sheep shit will be added, along with leaves and grass. The book's travels through Nepal and Tibet has references to dung throughout, and when Matthiessen descends out of the mountains to the first villages and to the flatlands he laments the "portents" of approaching civilization: "the little of Chetri villages, ubiquitous police, dogs, human excrement, the blare of transistor radios," etc.

At higher altitudes his travel companion, George Shaller laments excrement as a sign of civilization too which, of course, he doesn't miss. At the same time, both Shaller and Mathiessen depend for their cooking on the dried yak dung which the sherpas and others use to prepare the meals, heat the water for tea. It turns out that this dried dung burns clean and hot, and does not smell that bad.

Several months ago, a NRP/WPR program host, Jean Ferraca, took on an hour program about shit, head on and without reservations. It was amazing, and great radio, the kind of radio the so-called conservatives are trying to do away with. In this program it was pointed out that the majority of human beings have no toilet paper, have to resort to all kind of methods of removing shit from their buttons, including their fingers (primarily ones on their left hands, as the guest expert pointed out).

So what? Well, it is often the absence of information from a publication, radio or TV program which tells the tale. & it is hardly missed by humans who are only too glad to be spared information they would rather not contend with. What are we talking about? Well, the Farm Bureau and its' publications, for one, and the AARP would be another. If they can get by by being information deniers than all the better. Meanwhile, shit and toilet paper (or the lack of it) are with us every day.

I think somewhere else in this BLOG I mentioned the story about the aged woman in Iraq who was interviewed standing in front of her bombed out dwelling ... in which she still lived, had no choice. And she lamented being without three things: running water and her toilet, and hot coffee. Toilet paper was not even a consideration.