LAURA ADAMS
205
well, not necessarily .
You
see, there 's always been this sort of passive
confidence implicit in Christianity, the confidence that things are going to
work out all right. One does have to die, that's true , but if one keeps one's
nose reasonably clean , one is going to heaven . That gave security to
everybody. The ship ofstate was built on that security. The ship of state was
nailed down . It didn ' t travel the stormy seas. Rather , it was carried by the
strongest pallbearers of the nation . And what 's happened now is we're
entering an existential period in our history where nothing is nailed down.
All the American faiths, one by one, are being exploded. We lived for too
long in a paranoid dream world that believed communism was the secret of
all evil on earth because it was the social embodiment of the Devil.
Int :
That's paranoid .
Malier:
That 's paranoid . But I don't believe the Devil is the secret of all evil
on earth. I believe something more complicated than that. I think God
might be the source of a considerable amount of evil. Because if God is
embattled, He could fail to take care, much to His great woe, of people who
are devoted to Him , in the same way that a general might have to surrender
soldiers on a hill. And those soldiers could give up with great bitterness in
their hearts .
Int:
You 've talked about evil in one sense as God's shit, God's excrement.
Mazier:
Where did I say that?
Int :
It
comes up in " The Metaphysics of the Belly ." A colleague of mine once
remarked that it 's but a step from scatology to eschatology and I've often
thought of this remark with regard to your work. Now I'm interested in the
relationship between excrement and eternity. IfGod's shit is evil, but shit is
as ociated with the Devil , doesn ' t this imply that God creates eviP
Marler:
There are references in my work to the idea that shit and the Devil
have an umbilical relation , but it 's not my idea after all. Luther had a few
notions about it.
Int :
As did Jonathan Swift.
Mader:
It 's an idea {hat goes- it starts with the most primitive peoples. It
goes all the way. There 's a reason for it. Shit is what we reject, at least to the
degree that the shit felt it deserved a better end for itself. In other words , a
lotofourshit has nutrients in it , worth in it. It 's just that the body couldn't
take it , and so passed it out. Some of the best of the food goes out with the
shit as well as some of the worst. That 's what I said in "The Metaphysics of
the Belly." All right. To the degree that we can loosen our imagination to
assume this stuff might have a soul, after all we're beginning to discover
now that plants have feelings and sou ls, so it may be that food , even though
in a peculiar relation to life , not as alive as a plant , let's say, or as an animal ,
but still alive to a degree , has a mood , has a spirit, has something. If food
