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.20 RHIZOMATIC PILGRIMAGE 105The book, like the body, was not seen as closed in the Middle Ages.21Marginal images lie between meanings, between the edge and the center,in a transitional space.As such, the presence of marginal material, matterliterally spilling forth from the margins of one s body, is an analogue forthe body itself.Being on the margin replicates the place of excrementitself.The margin is a liminal space, a bridge mediating between thereader and the central text.In Bodley 264, f.56, the defecating man andpraying nun are two ends (so to speak) of the same spectrum.The readervacillates identifying herself with the defecating and praying figures.These marginal figures suture us into the work, one that has no meaningwithout our participation.Just like the human body, the text is sacred and profane, spatialized withthe central sacred arena surrounded by the detritus, the scum spooned offthat central froth.The margin is the area that invokes purgatory, the in-between, the liminal space between sacred and profane.It is also the spaceof purgation and transformation, linked to the fragmented body capableof redemption and salvation.The Macclesfield Psalter (1330s) containsnumerous images of scatological activities, such as a contortionist expos-ing his anus.22 The urinating man in the Macclesfield Psalter oppositethe Office of the Dead echoes the transformation, decay, and rebirthin death itself.Such images can be read allegorically, but at the sametime retain a material presence.This both/and signals the rhizomaticcharacter of marginal excremental images.Grotesques, often defecatingor related to urine, are fragmented and defecatory.They comment onthe porous nature of our fragmented bodies and remind us of our owncorporeality.The Unfinished Pilgrim Body andMetatextual ImplicationsFilthy and incomplete bodies are linked with pilgrimage in this life.Excrement was literally of concern for pilgrims as we can see in theaccount by the Dominican Felix Fabri of Ulm, who traveled to the HolyLand in 1480 and 1483.In his account to help future pilgrims on theirsojourns, he describes the boat journey to Jerusalem where just being ableto defecate was a trial.As the poet says, A ripe turd is an unbearable burden [ut dicitur metrice:maturum stercus est importabile pondus].A few words on the man n er ofurinating and shitting on a boat.Each pilgrim has near his bed a urinal a vessel of terracotta, a smallbottle into which he urinates and vomits.But since the quarters are 106 EXCREMENT IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGEScramped for the number of people, and dark besides, and since there ismuch coming and going, it is seldom that these vessels are not overturnedbefore dawn.Quite regularly in fact, driven by a pressing urge that obligeshim to get up, some clumsy fellow will knock over five or six urinals inpassing, giving rise to an intolerable stench.The pilgrim must be careful not to hold back on account of falsemodesty and not relieve the stomach; to do so is most harmful to thetraveler.At sea it is easy to become constipated.Here is good advice for thepilgrim: go to the privies three or four times every day, even when there isno natural urge, in order to promote evacuation by discreet efforts; and donot lose hope if nothing comes on the third or fourth try.Go often, loosenyour belt, untie all the knots of your clothes over chest and stomach, andevacuation will occur even if your intestines are filled with stones.23Fabri also describes how the pilgrims would throw full chamber pots atthe candles of other pilgrims to shut them up at night.24 This historicaldocument records literal excremental incidents.References to excrement, the body s product, are unusually frequentin pilgrimage texts.Pilgrimage, a ritual wedded to amendment andchange, and excrement, which composts into fertilizer to be useful,both involve the process of material and spiritual metamorphosis.Thepilgrim, meant to be transformed and changed, and excrement, a symbolfor the way the body, the site where food changes into excrement, isporous, are analogous in being liminal [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]