The truest poetry is the most feigning.

— Shakespeare

Howl Like A Beast

You can see it in the way they walk,
The strain in their eyes,
The quiet desperation.
They hurry across parking lots.
They stare at the ceiling in elevators, arms akimbo.
They run their hands over their beards in the check-out lines at Menards,
stacks of porcelain glistening behind them.

Who are these people hurrying about their day with so much sincerity in their step, so much alarm in the setting of their jaw?
These people, these women and men
waiting
hoping, praying for a private moment.
Their lives interrupted by forces greater than themselves.

And so they pay the cashier, and they fumble with their keys at their front doors, and their lips purse, and their brows furrow, and they gallop through the hardware store
For quiet peace, and
They find their little moment behind closed doors.
There is soft running of water.
The rustle of linens and rattling of belt buckle.

A duck barks angrily in a public restroom.

But no,
that was no duck. It is

Relief
Equanimity
Peace.
The murmurings of small paper.
The washing of hands.
The straightening of ties.
The primming of dresses.
The jaw unset, the brow eased,
The day has regained a deeper range of possibility.
The sense of immediacy lifted.
A god has come back to Earth.
That you are still an animal is imminent.
And what a relief it is to not be a god!
What a circus this all is!

Now come down again and join us, and we will howl as beasts!

Ahhhhhhhh-woooooooooooo!

Here Robin Williams is reminding us with his offering of toiletries to Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker that the god we call Rationality is in fact no god at all and, therefore, perfectly capable of producing shit just the same as it’s human progenitors.

Despite what Rodin might tell you, his The Thinker is not a likeness of a god but merely an aspect of minds, minds that are fallible and, moreover, not simply fallible because of the fallible bodies they are attached to but are literally predicated on bodies that do defecate — both in thought and in action.

As absurd and so near to toilet humor as this may seem, we are all too often preoccupied with the majesty of human accomplishment and often gladly stuff our shit into the subconscious along with the fact that minds are at best predicated on brains if not utterly contingent on them — just as is the symbol of rationality that the The Thinker is — and thus our existence is in turn predicated on a return to the dust by which we have evolved. And, of course, dust is basically just dried up shit.

So rejoice! Perfection is for the gods and you nor anyone you have ever met or any creation of humanity, whether intellectual or concrete, is of them. Truly, we are all fallible beasts. And what a circus it all is! and how much better it could be if we would only bring closer to our hearts that perfect human truth of fallibility in each of us.