Unbearable Shitlessness

'Shitlessness' is the forgotten definition of kitsch. Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being includes a section that details this. To put it another way, Kitsch is a world without shit. Kitsch isn't just those idyllic pictures of landscapes with cottages in the snow, kitsch is the political speech made to win you over - the world of the political ideal, where the shit of life does not exist. In those speeches, shit is reduced to nothing so that man can build his foundation of a good society.

But we must not be fooled, for shit is essential. Shit, decay and death are parts of life that will always be. Any political vision of the future worth listening to will talk about shit. For shit does not just means the sewage system, that we would sooner forget about than remember, shit connotes the 'shit' parts of life. There is shit in all our relationships, our food, our economy, our thoughts, our health.

In the SCA, I heard the following statement: "we're recreating the past 'as it should have been', no pests, no disease, and no prejudice." This is one of the clearest examples of shitlessness, or kitsch. Re-enactment groups will inevitably make kitsch. The worlds they build will be kitsch, for the shit takes place in the rest of the year when they are not '(re-en)acting'. This is the principal reason why these people (of whom I am currently one) do not attempt to live in this enjoyable way in the rest of their lives. They know it to be impossible, for it does not take account of the shit.

I'm now going to quote a part of Kundera's book that is important to me, if unrelated to the above:

[An] image comes to mind: Nietzsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman's very eyes, put his arms around the horse's neck and burst into tears.
That took place in 1889, when Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture has broad implications: Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse for Descartes [who held that animals had no soul and were machinae animatae]. His lunacy (that is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse.
And that is the Nietzsche I love.... [I see him] stepping down from the road along which mankind, 'the master and proprietor of nature', marches onward.

I want to become like Nietzsche. I also suggest that you read The Unbearable Lightness of Being. If you've read it, read it again.