Spartacus: Blood and Sand: Poetry of the Soul

"words fall from your mouth as shit from arse" 

The composition beautiful. The language, eloquent. The sentiment, profound. 

The writer of the Shakespearean megalith, Spartacus: Blood and Sand, here is again displaying his exceptional talent for simulating human discourse, and yet simultaneously makes an intelligent philosophical point. Shit falls from arse. It is part of the natural cycle of creation, the unavoidable offense of voiding oneself. And yet it is somehow hideous, the equation of of the excremental act to speech offers profundity in the wholesale rejection of the words as naught but filth. Feces (Lation for 'sediment') is the great first means of creation to a child, proof of their ability to be more than passive recipients, and yet here that very creative spark is derided; their words are nothing but dregs, and all their great inventive potency and magic is wasted, they are but the rejections of the body, utterly useless, and nothing more.

Nevertheless the act of making stool is (generally) deliberate, an assertive evocation, and a symbol of domination. An image that is turned on it's head here. The shit here does nothing but 'fall' from arse; there is no action, no deliberate push, rather it merely slips from lo the crystal battlements and falls without intervention. The great assertive act has become nothing but the passivity of the dripping faucet; it is an emasculating insult, the victim has no control over either his words, or his shit. Excrement, that gold that is valued above all external commodities, has become unattainable to him. He is not only unable to control his words or his bodily functions, he is now also impoverished, his wealth in shit slipping from the grasp of his miser's arse like so many golden coins.

In the Roman context, this loss of Denarii is a critical insult. The target loses his wealth, his influence, and his entire life may well be at risk as a result. And yet there is a beauty to it in its simplicity. The symmetry of the sentence is undeniable. The four nouns act as punctuation points, each itself an epithet. They pin the sentence in place, and give it a very strong rhythm. The conjunction of arse and mouth reminds us that there is very little difference between the two, and 'words' and 'arse' at the beginning and end frame the phraseology of the piece, keeping it stripped down and nuanced, plain and clear.

The alliteration of the 'f' sound is onomatopoeic, mimicking the sound of shit literally falling from arse. The flat dropping sound resounds like the infertile speech of the target – it is nothing but a background noise, and so on a subliminal level his speech is further derided. By starting with 'words' there is already one trochaic foot, a falling sound that is echoed in the dropping pace. This too already introduces the mood of the falling shit, before the shit is even evoked.

Clearly I have merely scratched the surface of this poignant statement, but words cannot do justice to such a well constructed and considered triumph of the English language, exceeding even the championing creations of Milton, Donne or Wordsworth. Nay, it may even be the greatest poetry since time began and the firmament rose from the ocean itself to drape stars across the hopeless void.

Contemplations on Cock.

"the Gods part cheeks and ram COCK IN ARSE" 

The recurrent anal imagery again intercedes into dialogue, a poetic leif motif employed by the author that goes hand in hand with his explicit phallic imagery. The penetrative member here is divinely assisted, and yet it's presence is very much within arse; despite the characters expressive arm gestures, the final emphasis is not on the violation of penetration but the habitation of "cock in arse." possessing the anal cavity like the holy spirit inhabits the disciples, the cock is nevertheless a physical being. The author stresses the physical interplay of tactile forces, the pressing presence of the cock rammed against the wall of arse. It is both obscene aggression, the sinful presence that plays on the primal male fear of violation; the emasculation of sodomy and the disruption of the natural order. By conjuring the image of this inversion of primal unity, the author is attempting to unsettle his audience. What they had once taken for granted is now disturbed , the rhythm of the world is broken and the audience can now identify easily with the grief of the character. 

 

And yet there is something more to this than simple evocative imagery. The Gods themselves intervene in mortal affairs to 'part cheeks.' This divine assistance in an ultimately violent sodomy speaks to a deeper level. The Gods are representative of the world, of natural forces, and here the speaker laments how the entire world has turned against him, the Gods themselves participating in his anal intrusion. The once beatified deities that looked down upon and guided man in his endeavours have become nothing more than degenerate perverts, gleefully opening the way for the violation of the arse. There is something profoundly eschatological about this. It is as if the order of the Universe is crumbling, that what was once good is in decay, that new definitions of morality must be drawn in a pestilent world. The author is clearly dissatisfied with the state of creation, and laments the coming storm, and yet welcomes it as expiation from the moral degradation that has left the world naught but cock in arse.