The Mortal Anus

Everyone knows that you shit yourself when you die. The last moment of life in the body is purely the body. The last exhale, the final surrender to nothingness, is when the gut lays still. What of the head? The head dies early, it dies when consciousness fades, starts dying first in the process of life’s end–I imagine death is terrifying, so what does consciousness make of that? It panics, likely, but cannot deny the reality of what’s happening, the closing of the curtain, the encroaching pure light which means a lack of vision, a lack of orientation for the head. The head dies soon and is starved of oxygen, but the body carries on. Until it doesn’t. The gut is like a giant worm in the belly, a being operating on its own drive–consumption to excrement. The gut always makes demands of the head. It is hungry, it wants to eat, and it writhes in pain when it can’t. The head must oblige, but it does so reluctantly. The head is not the anus and thinks itself superior–it is at the top by its own design. The head is like the Mercator Projection–it inscribes itself as the top of its own domain, and the whole body truly is like the world; all the dramas of conquest and revolution take place within it. The head thinks that it has won, and makes demands of the gut, too. It demands silence, obedience, cleanliness, and sometimes the gut has to rise up and remind the head where it gets its resources to carry on by vomiting and shitting profusely. Revolting. 

And the McArthur map? What of a topology that puts the anus, the base, the final process, at the top? Bill Burroughs wrote it. He wrote a talking asshole, a crass being which behaved like its name suggested and vocalized its demands because it could. But it demanded more. The bottom became the top–the anus became the head, and it began to think like a head. “It would get drunk, too,” writes Burroughs, “and would have crying jags no-body loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth.” A disgusting farce. Eventually the man succumbed to his asshole and could eat no more, because the anus thought itself a head and the head is much less a necessity. So we keep speaking and the gut keeps working. We keep it healthy and the body lives on–the head is allowed to think what it will so long as the gut continues. 

But what’s crucial to understand is that this, we, are the head. This text is the head because it’s read by the eyes and understood by the brain. Your gut doesn’t know that you’ve read this and it will make no difference when the gut is hungry or full and ready to carry out the corresponding operation. The head goes off and does its own thing, tries to ignore the worm breathing inside until it can’t anymore and then it copes. It makes fun of the gut, laughs off the process of shitting or recoils in disgust, and could not stand the idea of this brute making itself heard in public amongst the other heads (who cover everything else in cloth with an extra layer for the anus). 

The head continues to cope. To preserve the illusion of dominance it tries to subsume the anus and make it its own function. It establishes routines for the anus, limits its appearance, cleans it, mocks it, sexualizes it, whatever, but the head can never succeed in removing the function of the anus nor the need for the gut and is instead simply swirling around the fact that the body exists past the head and the head is only a component. The head is the puppet of the gut and hates it, giving every indication that it wants to be just the head, praising its own

intelligence, nobility, and morality. The head is championed for its appearance as if it’s a fleshy reflection of the lauded abilities inside. Movie stars, singers, celebrities, all presented as the peak of the head’s achievement. Of course we’re comforted by their beauty, as if it comes well earned. An obvious collective denial that the body comes first and then grows the head, powered by the engine of gut. 

And what becomes of the ungrateful head? It’s finally freed… after death. The open casket funeral is explicitly for its viewing, for the send-off of the ideal of what the person was. This is the true nature of the head–it is an ideal which has been given the biological tools to almost trick itself into believing itself independent and in charge. But really it’s the excess of a system which appears entirely unconcerned. That ideal is freed from the body at the funeral. Many other heads congregate and spew speech, reiterating the history of the head on the pillow displayed for everyone mourning. Comfort. The funeral is where the head, the soul, can finally come into its own via agreement of the other heads, no longer reliant on the organs which it is not. The person is remembered as their head as they lay pale with embalming. 

As you can see, this ritual around death has nothing to do with the process itself. The body is already dead and at this point is supposed to remain untouched–there is no hope of a resurrection. The reality of the situation is that the person is dead and their head is only able to be extracted in such a manner because they never were the head to begin with. 

When the brain is dying it supposedly releases DMT, a powerful psychedelic, which is speculated to be the real cause of the “light” on the other side. By the time the body enters shut-down the head is so out of it it believes itself to be in heaven. Certainly, it has no more concern for the body. But the body dies, and the last function to go is the anus. It relinquishes itself. From birth when the umbilical cord becomes obsolete to death the anus functions and does its duty. It was consistent. It was there all along. 

The social head takes a while to be formed, and in old age goes well before the body. Even when the death is violent or unexpected we’ve seen that the head goes early. But then there’s that final close, that moment where the gut finishes its project, the engine powers down, the body becomes inert. Anything that was is now gone and the gut dies in solitude, alone once again as the only operation, faithful to the last second as the truly living thing. The anus shits and the human being dies. This is the truth of death. It is that final operation, the melancholy triumph of matter over spirit, the assertion that the gut was all it was ever for. 

The funeral exists for the remaining heads. A somber assault on the ugliness of finality, on the horror of the close. The gut will never squirm again. The anus exhumes and the whole thing collapses into waste.