Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Saturday, September 19. 2015

Saturday Verse: Crazy Jane (and the evolution of the anus)

Many animals, like birds and reptiles, have a cloaca (or "vent" - hence the word "venting"), which combines urinary, defecatory and sexual functions. (Most birds copulate via a "cloacal kiss," but a few lucky birds, notably ducks, swans and ostriches, have penises.)


This reminds me of the Yeats:


 


Vl: Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop



I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'


'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.


'A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.'


Posted by Dr. Joy Bliss in Saturday Verse at 05:16 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

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Yeats was a cunning linguist.
He expressed his thoughts with taste.
He only asked one question:
How is love akin to waste?
#1 Jephnol (Link) on 2008-10-11 07:06 (Reply)
More on the evolution of the anus here.

Somebody had to do it.
#2 Dr. Mercury (Link) on 2008-10-11 08:50 (Reply)
haha. hahaha. I didn't even let the page load..... saw the headline and that was enough.
`
#2.1 Meta on 2008-10-11 12:24 (Reply)
This is most interesting. Trivia Q: What mammal, often clustered in urban areas, "combines defecatory and sexual functions?"

I'll take bottom,
You'll take top.
Hit my cloaca
Till I tell you to stop.
#3 FMercury on 2015-09-19 10:30 (Reply)
Two guys arguing whether G-d was an architect or civil engineer: G-d was obviously an engineer as only an engineer would put the sewage disposal plant next the main recreation area.
#4 Blick on 2015-09-19 10:35 (Reply)
I do not think, whenever I look upon, or think of, the naked human body, ``How right it is that the parts and features of the body are all just where they are!'' I may of course from time to time be struck by this fact. I may also from time to time be struck not by the rightness but by the dumb fortune, or irony, of certain placements of the parts and features of the body, as Yeats was, for example, by love's having pitched its mansion in the pace of excrement
... Certainly any changes I can dream up in the arrangement strike me as quite insane. It is so human a fortune. Not the fact of it is so human; the fact is shared by other animals. What is so human is that we share the fact with other animals, that animals are also our others. That we are animals. Being struck by this is something one might call ``seeing us as human.''

Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason, pp.411-412
#5 rhhardin (Link) on 2015-09-20 21:48 (Reply)

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