Marquis de Sade

“No habit is more easily acquired than mard (excrement)-savoring; eat one, delicious, eat another, no two taste exactly alike, but all are subtle and the effect is somewhat that of an olive.”
--M d S

de Sade's descriptions of eating excrement may be the most repulsive images in all of literature. To the human mind, there is something so incredibly reprehensible, foul, repugnant, objectionable, nauseating, gruesome--whatever word you prefer--about eating shit. I can count on two or three fingers the number of times I recall the act of excrement appearing in literature (there is of course the famous Ulysses scene), but to celebrate in a literary work the willing ingestion of excrement is pretty twisted. And fascinating.

From Court TV's "Crime Library: Criminal Minds and Methods":

"Eating feces represents the figurative extreme, the furthest end of the spectrum of human behavior from that end which represents the height of ecstasy and self-fulfillment."

And Sir Thomas Moore, author of the original Utopia, once declared, “Love has its excremental component, and this, along with the more wholesome diet, has to be consumed.”

Shit, like love, is pleasurable. The physical pleasure induced by taking a dump can border on orgasmic, certainly, and there is something commendable about having the stomach to take the load down the throat and savor the tangy zest. But love, like shit, can also be painful. This type of behavior, both eating shit and expressing and experiencing the painful aspects of love, represents the "dark self," the grungy underworld Herman Hesse dissects in Demian which is the opposite of comfort, enlightenment and security, but which inevitably must be confronted and embraced to reach complete artistic freedom.

My interest in the Marquis de Sade was sparked by a series of 3 or 4 dreams I had two nights ago. In my dreams, I was studying the work of a de Sade-type character (it wasn't actually de Sade himself) whose writings were destroyed by the church after he was burned alive for crimes inherent in his lifestyle and writings. What remained of my de Sade figure's body of work was both beautiful and repulsive, like the complete artistic human being.

Interesting that my dream positioned the church as the destroyers of the de Sade figure's writings. According to de Sade's biographies, as a child he was exposed to outrageous orgies, scarring sexual abuse and fetish behavior by nuns and priests of France's high society in the Jesuit seminary where he was studying to be a man of God.

Again, from the Court TV crime library, "the men and women of the cloth availed themselves to the pleasures of the flesh to no less extent, and probably more so, than the lay worshippers to whom they were responsible for providing moral guidance. It was not unheard of for orgies to be held within the walls of convents and abbeys, wherein priest, nuns, prostitutes and nobles commingled to partake of the most scandalous and debauched activities."

This disillusioning hypocrisy, combined with de Sade's horrifying experiences, at the age of 15, as a soldier during the Seven Years War, created the beautiful monster who praised eating shit, and perhaps more than any other figure in history personified the Blake ideology that "the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."