A Fart of Gold and the Science of Flatulence

In ye heat of ye talk it befel yt one did breake wind, yielding an exceding mightie and distresfull stink, whereat all did laugh full sore.

—Mark Twain 1601, Conversation as It Was: by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors

In ancient Japan, public contests were held to see who could fart the loudest and longest! And this popular Fart Battle scroll, which is called He-Gassen, 屁合戦, literally fart competitions, or Houhi-Gassen 放屁合戦) is believed to have its origin in the 1840s. (Image: Adapted from a collection on He-Gassen images on WUL)

The Science of Flatulence — An Overview of the Hidden Diversity of Passing Gas

A not-so legend has it that there was once a gracious yet shy girl, who went out with her friends for an alfresco meal somewhere in northern Imphal. It was a foothill, a kind of place where nature generously presents its magnificence. It so happened that that day the girl had passed, oops, gas.

It happened while they were chatting, chatting real, before the meal. Apparently it was the breakfast or particularly those breads the girl ate earlier in the day. Those gas-producing breads! Experts say yeast worsens falutulence. And it was not even the worst kind of blowing wind — you know those types, which can cause commotion or loud condemnation. However, our girl was so self-conscious that she died of embarrassment.

This is not a fart joke. Indeed, it was a tragedy, a sort of fall from grace, if we consider the girl’s helplessness and all because of a low and odourless gas. She ‘passed’ away. I feel she should have been the kind of person who after farting stares at you suspiciously as if you have done it. That could have been, in spite of its malice, quite a life-saver.

In a way, a fart is a non-attention-seeking and bighearted fellow who likes sharing excessively. It is the smell that tags along it which spoils the party.

flatulence
/ˈflatjʊl(ə)ns/
noun: flatulence

• the accumulation of gas in the alimentary canal
• inflated or pretentious speech or writing; pomposity

On dictionaries, such a grand word as ‘flatulence’ would mistaken to be a brilliant leadership quality of our elected representatives. However, the term describes the process of a fart. It is ‘the accumulation of gas in our alimentary canal’. It is also pretentious speech or writing. For example, this post.

The term may not produce giggling whenever one hears the word because of its scientific overtone but ‘fart’ always does, regardless of the level of ‘science’ in it. It seems that fart has a great sense of Russell-Petersesque humour as much as it is funny and embarrassing at the same time.

The royal composition

Stop and smell the roses

Are you familiar with the story of The Historic Fart? It is an all-sound-and-fury-signifying-many-things tale in 1,001 Arabian Nights. In the story, a brief moment of sound and fury completely changed the life for Abu Hasan. He was a successful merchant who thrived in the town of Kaukaban in Yemen. After the demise of his first wife, and upon insistence, he agreed to re-marry a lady who was ‘as beautiful as the moon shining over the sea’.

However, on the wedding day, Abu Hasan had apparently too much beans and sprouts that when he was called to the wedding chamber, where the bride was already present, he blew a hard royal wind from his rear. He was so mortified that he fled all the way to the Malabar Coast in India. 

And meantime we know the story of Scheherazade. She was the story-teller of the Arabian Nights. She knew that she cannot afford to tell a story so short or else would share the same fate as those of Shahryar’s first 1,000 wives. For details, you can read The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments, which is translated by Richard F. Burton. So, Hassan had reached India and she further stretched the story.

So, out of homesickness, Abu Hasan returned to his native place ten years after the incident. There in his hometown, he found that his bong of the bum on a failed wedding evening had become a sort of fable. He also found that the his Great Wedding Night of Sound and Fury had become a memorial day. Unable to bear it, he went back to India, and this time, for good.

اللہ اس پر رحم کرے۔

That is the end of the story! 

For that matter, literature as a loyal reflection of life is filled with fart. We can cite the aforementioned Mark Twain’s 1601. In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, remember how Absalom almost died when Nicholas attacked him with a rear outburst in their feud over a girl. Well, a fart is indecent and sometimes it is too vulgar even to mention the word.

Yet nobody can deny its literary charm. It can even make a rat’s ass out of morally superior people around us. It ought to be indecent though, because what was just up behind somebody’s ass is now up your nose!

After literature, the category of fart jokes in silly joke books and websites are one of the most popular sections. Sample these (Source: multiple joke websites).  

Q: What is the sharpest thing in the world? A: A fart. It goes through your pants and doesn’t even leave a hole. 

Or this. Q: What’s the definition of bravery? A: A person with diarrhea chancing a fart! 

And if you are a general-knowledge kind of guy, this is yours: A fart travels at the speed of 4.017 metres per second. 

Another GK bonus: Farting is a form of greeting for the Yanomami people of South America. Hola! Dooongggs!

Nobody can deny the literary charm of a fart. It can even make a rat’s ass out of morally superior people around us. It ought to be indecent though, because what was just up behind somebody’s ass is now up your nose!

A rose by any other name

Closer home in my town we are a decent society. We do kill each other for a piece of territory. The army and police also help us generously in this killing department. We murder as well for a few thousand of rupees but Manipur is very decent. We are very decent so a fart is strictly a private matter. Never mind our obsession with ‘yongchaak’.

In Manipuri literature too, there are allusions to smoking marijuana and opium or in direct references, drinking booze, but a fart is always a loud ‘No’. So is the case with sex — both are vulgar than our competition in looting from the public treasury and spilling blood at every chance we get. FYI, we are also very mindful of our deco-fucking-rum in the same degree as we hold in our gas.

Decency, however, does not mean we have to cover up the sound and the smell! Of course it is gross but my point is we have to take it out from our internal secret chambers. The least we can do is to understand our own body. Particularly for us as a nation, we are frugal when it comes to making contribution to things that of global relevance. We do have Polo which originated in Manipur, but this exception proves the rule.   

Elsewhere, scientist are yet to invent a bum calipers to measure the great gas of gloom or devised a scientific formula to assess its lethal power. Still they have already speculated some reasons why a fart is always funny. If we admit it frankly, both farting and hearing a fart are hilarious though the reason can be diagonally opposite. In this context, the theories behind humour and laughter explain why a brash bowel horn is so rib-tickling at times. (Check The Story of Laughter on this blog for more), with the phenomena falling the closest to the Incongruity Theory of humour.  

In the Incongruity Theory, thinkers like Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer theorised that laughter and humour are a sudden result of the incongruity or absurdity of what we expect and what we get in reality — or what we expected and what we experienced. In Kant’s word, laughter arises ‘from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing’.

—    The Story of Laughter

In other words, we expect decency but when someone farts, it is funny because it is out of the ordinary. You must NOT say that you are doing an extraordinary thing after farting! And I hope you are getting my point. Human beings have a unique power to observe the self but more than experiencing spiritual epiphanies, we are also more amusingly conscious with the discernible sound and fury in our own body.

A fart is a literal relief from the gravity of a situation in a comfortable way. Fartologists have found that no matter how much we hold in, we just cannot clutch it in our sleep, which is usually when we are relaxed the most. What could be better in this life than a relieving slumber!

The concept of age eighteen in schoolbooks as the base year of adulthood is so over-rated. When we were comparatively young, we considered those people in their 20s and 30s to be ‘old’ or that they were mature adults, who would not fight with their siblings over a piece of chicken wing. Only when we reach their age we find how wrong we were in gauging their adult-ness. No age knows the division between immaturity and maturity. It is this same reason, particularly the former that makes us ‘dig’ at a bottom burp.

That is to say, in other words, mature people handle farts well. Needless to say, it is natural so why bother about it. Good work, mature people.

Some fart experts consider that the funniness of a fart owes it to relativity. For instance, we can hear the movement of our bones, say, when we are sick. When you are bed-ridden for two days, you can hear it when you move the least distance. However it is not funny at all because of its seriousness. Yet, if we consider fart and its cousins like poop and pee, there is no kind of danger; indeed it entertains us!

But once in a blue moon it could end in a tragic way too. Once on a fateful night in the US, a wife was jailed on the charge of domestic violence. Her crime: She had attacked her husband because the guy just could not stop his back crack track. (Read about it on the Huffington Post) A wife beating up her husband because he farted and getting imprisoned — that is funny on so many levels!

Conclusion

A few things appeal to us on a global level. No prize for guessing but a fart is one which people love or hate equally regardless of which corner of the Earth we belong to. That is at an individual level. Socially, a fart is always against conventions. It is one of the taboos, but it must not matter any more because it is all relative. Just compare it with the issue of sex.

In many parts of the world and cultures, including ours, sex is a taboo. However, educationists around the world have been realising the importance of sex education. Clearly, there can be no fart education but at least, we can come to a consensus that it is natural and it is OK to talk about it. We can even bring in scientific approaches to study it, just as we can apply the Incongruity Theory to explain how a fart is funny. For such a common thing as a fart it would be so ignorant of us to not know about it.

It is funny most of the time but on rare occasions it can be deadly too. As long as we know where to draw the line, it is OK!      

Finally, I would like to dedicate Neil Young’s Fart of Gold, errr...I mean, Heart of Gold on YouTube to the lady who died for a fart while she was out with her friends.

—Concluded.

P.S.   Many artists in my town have creatively transformed the wisdom of art for art’s sake into fart for fart’s sake. Apparently they love ‘yongchaak’ too much, even more than how the Thais, Burmese or whosoever relishes this seasonal delicacy does. The credit must also go to their originality in aping others.

Try a bonus tongue twister for the Fart of Gold readers: Crisp back crack track.