the locker room, continued: the defecatory posture as acceptance
The defecatory posture is an accepting posture, it occurs to him. Head down, elbows on knees, the fingers laced together between the knees. Some hunched timeless millennial type of waiting, almost religious.
Context
Watching Schacht's feet under the stall door, Hal reads the body's most abject posture as a kind of patience — "an accepting posture," head down, elbows on knees, hunched in "timeless millennial type of waiting, almost religious." It's the same "defecatory posture of all athletes at rest" that surfaces in the Arizona interview (001); here it's expanded into a meditation on the body's humble waiting, the athlete at the far end of exertion reduced to a supplicant's hunch.