Food for thought, sh-t for brains

As a graduate student, I’ve been teaching a 12:50-1:40 class. Since I am cheap–um, er, conscientious in my spending habits–this means that I eat lunch at home around 11:45 rather than buy a lunch on campus. Sometimes, like today, this means that at the same time that I am rushing to eat and rushing to prepare for class so I can leave, another need rears its ugly head–um, er, butt. At the moment that I have designated for eating lunch, I suddenly needed to use the restroom. Refusing to sacrifice my lunch habits or my bathroom ones, and refusing to be a bad teacher by showing up late, I decided to integrate the experiences by
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eating my lunch at the same moment that I was availing myself of the facilities. Surprisingly, I had a truly aesthetic experience. I don’t have to tell those of you who have read James Joyce’s Ulysses that the bathroom can be a source for artistic expression; if Leopold Bloom’s bathroom visit transformed literature as we know it, why may not a visit made by me, Leopoldtulip?
As I sat there, eating, etc., I couldn’t help thinking of what William Blake might call a "fearful symmetry," a daring harmonization of form and balance that is both beautiful and frightful–the food was entering me at precisely the moment that former food was departing, flow and ebb, ebb and flow. Food still in its prime, and elderly food in its last stages of decay, both merged together to become one within me. I was the chronicler, the biographer extraordinare, compiling not simply the history of an isolated piece of food but the history of every piece of food ever eaten, where it began and where it must inevitably go.

Going to the bathroom was not art, eating lunch was not art, but by doing them together, I had become art. This is what Alexander Pope is trying to get at in "An Essay on Criticism": "In wit, as Nature, what affects our hearts/Is not th’ exactness of peculiar parts;/’Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call,/But the joint force and full result of all..../No single parts unequally surprise,/All comes united to th’ admiring eyes." The beauty was not in the isolated parts of the experience, but in the whole, the "joint force" of fear and beauty united, of the life-force of food and the death-force of defecation.

If one had taken a photo of the moment–which I did not–but if one did, you would not even see me–or rather, you would see me–but I would be looking as if I were Rabelais, as if I were Bakhtin, as if I were all peoples and all foods at once, yet none of them. I would show you eternity in a grain of bread, would show you infinity in the palm of your hand.
-Leopoldtulip