Beetle
and Flea
"Entomologically-speaking,
you’re as primitive as can be,”
Beetle said to the wayward Flea.
“You hop about strange flesh all
day,
drinking blood. But do you stay?
I, all day, roll Pharaoh’s dung
into clever balls—I construct my rung;
I have my place. Can you say more
to defend your race?”
And up spoke Flea:
“Father, no more I’ll
add
to what you’ve said,
save I’ve bit the Pharaoh
and he’s dead.”
THIS POEM WAS WRITTEN A YEAR OR SO after I started writing poetry in the early ‘aughts’
of this century, and it is one of my favs, because I enjoy the humor and the
message that complacency leads to a dangerous arrogance (hubris, the great destroyer of us all). Besides, who doesn't like to see
a stuffed shirt get his comeuppance? The moral is that
it’s never a good idea to get too comfortable; life has a way of slapping you on
the side of your face with a wet fish.
And for those who really want to know, there are indeed beetles that specialize in poop: they eat it, live in it, and they use it to incubate their eggs. Female dung beetles bury their larvae in balls of dung (“brood balls”) that they then carefully roll away and store. I bet that’s more information than you really wanted to know.
Dung beetles are mentioned in ancient Egyptian writings* and are part of their mythology, so we really shouldn’t be so squeamish. Poop was important to ancient Egyptians, just as it is today, for us. It’s part of our own history and literature.
And for those who really want to know, there are indeed beetles that specialize in poop: they eat it, live in it, and they use it to incubate their eggs. Female dung beetles bury their larvae in balls of dung (“brood balls”) that they then carefully roll away and store. I bet that’s more information than you really wanted to know.
Dung beetles are mentioned in ancient Egyptian writings* and are part of their mythology, so we really shouldn’t be so squeamish. Poop was important to ancient Egyptians, just as it is today, for us. It’s part of our own history and literature.
Who
can forget the scene from Don Quixote
when hapless, loyal Sancho Panza, unwilling to leave his master’s side as they stood
guard on their horses, surreptitiously defecates while remaining in his saddle,
which is quite the accomplishment! In Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver is forced to defecate on the floor
in his new Lilliputian home, no doubt involving a cleanup operation that
must have taxed Lilliputian environmental services considerably. Or in James Joyces's Ulysses, Leopold
Bloom sits in an outhouse doing his business:
"Quietly he
read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began
the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease
themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that slight
constipation of yesterday quite gone."
IN LITERATURE, science and medicine, "poop" through the ages has been an integral
part of human existence. And don’t get me started on compostable toilets
and the uses of humanure in organic
gardening. We flush the good stuff away, people! But that’s a whole other post.
The study of poop (scatology) leads
to many fascinating discoveries about the kinds of diets we had as ancient people, for example and…oops!…all
this pondering on poo has made me in need of answering the call of nature. See ya
later…Oh, and all this talk about nether matters helped me avoid talking about my poem. Sweet!
Cheers, Jake
Cheers, Jake
* In ancient Egyptian religion the scarab was also a symbol of immortality, resurrection,
transformation and protection much used in funerary art. The Egyptian sacred scarab is a dung beetle.
The
life of the scarab beetle
revolved around the dung balls
that the beetles consumed, laid
their eggs in and fed their young, representing a cycle of rebirth.
In
addition, The Egyptian god Khepri (Ra
as the rising sun), was often depicted as a scarab beetle.. The ancient
Egyptians believed Khepri
renewed the sun every day before rolling it above the horizon, and then carried
it through the other world after sunset, only to renew it, again, the next day.
-Wikipedia.
-Wikipedia.
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