izzy walter
I could no longer survive without it
demoralizing shit
‘I have no idea what this text is or ought to be’ (feedback from an editor of a highly esteemed magazine that I also really like)
Recently a receptionist at the Roundhouse rehearsal studios made me feel embarrassed about taking a large plastic water bottle from their recycling to wash out and reuse at the water fountain (I forgot my bottle and they didn’t have any cups). It reminded me of a recently heard fact: that if you leave your toothbrush on a sink near the toilet, it’s likely you’ll ingest those fecal particles as they leap from basin to bristle in the post-poo spray of an unlidded flush. I wondered if the receptionist left her toothbrush on a basin near the toilet, or if she ever took her phone with her on the long-shift poo break (a crucial mechanism for rest in the front-of-house roles I’ve worked). I considered the speculative poo particles on the phone sitting beside her monitor. Defensive and a little embarrassed, I comforted myself with the arbitrariness of her hygiene standards and the weight of the 2L bottle between my breasts, as I carried it back to the studio like a small muscular child.
To focus on the hermeneutics of shit is to take the peripheral to the podium, and enquire after what is lost in the rampant and exclusive sort of heliolatry that divides our experience across this, but really any, arbitrarily moralizing binary. I’m less interested in bringing shit, or waste, out “into the light” than I am in the rich avenues of writing and enquiry that open up when we trample over the kind of logic that makes a plastic water bottle from the supermarket acceptable, and a rinsed, used one from the bin not.
Then again, British toilets are designed to be peripheral, to sweep the waste product of our life away from public discourse, despite its daily and fundamental relationship to human life. Slavoj Zizek (who I slightly hate except this excerpt which has achieved reddit thread fame) compares the German, French and Anglo-Saxon toilet bowel in The Plague of Fantasies. The German toilet preserves the shit on a small platform prior to the deep connecting drain ‘so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness’ (the reflective thoroughness of German conservatism). For France the hole sits far back in the basin so that fecal matter is sent quickly off to the drain like a naughty child (the revolutionary hastiness of French radicalism). The Anglo-Saxon toilet compromises these opposites, bobbing the shit in water, visible but unavailable for rigorous inspection (the utilitarian pragmatism of English liberalism). Whether you agree with this analysis or not, it’s a struggle to argue with Zizek when he points out these variations simply cannot ‘be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms’. Before it is a receptacle for waste, the toilet is a design – an urging towards an ideological treatment of waste. The design comes before the manufacture, and the metaphor before design.
On the lookout for unblinking treatments of shit, I came across the poetry of Slava Mogutin (Ярослав Юрьевич Могутин), and his deep affection for the stuff. Mogutin finds in the toilet a blooming myth for the masochist’s experience. He orates his poem ‘My Life as a Living Toilet / Toilet Dreams’ in Bruce LaBruce’s ‘art/porn’ epic Skin Flick: ‘I would become his living toilet and wake up in the middle of the night because he’d piss in my mouth instead of running to the pisser . . . I could no longer survive without it. He’d forbid me to wear clothes, and would feed me only his tasty faeces and sweet sperm. I’d eat and swallow all of it without any leftovers’. Here, the toilet, a receptacle of human excess and waste, is made mobile. It travels in the embodied form of Mogutin himself, whose ultimate submission is a bodily devotion to this widely denigrated matter. He forgoes his worldly duties to catch the invention of his lover’s organs and this act of taboo brings him into being. In his own words, ‘I transgress, therefore I am’. In transposing the toilet from its claustrophobic architecture, Mogutin exposes its ideological significance, and metaphorical richness.
The toilet is not dead time nor is it just another frontier of the political productivity impetus, it is a daily miracle of surreal bodily explicitness. It is holy.
The daily ritual of submission brings Mogutin’s poetic voice into being, but it also points us again to the arbitrary attitude towards waste products. His glorious depravity, however imaginary, is only narratively possible because of shit’s commonplace character. The idea that he can survive on his lover’s excrement is a testament to its immovable character. Shit’s endless reiteration gives his fantasy both longevity and coherence. Produced daily, from a renewable resource, what act of puritanical dishonesty strives to make this fecal crux so peripheral to our lives? Surely some existential fear of waste has extended far beyond an evolved cognitive disgust.
In the following excerpt from Steve Mentz’ Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green,
from its chapter Brown: The Once-Living Brown: Shit, Mentz argues for the underlying
significance of shit to Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, and opens with an epigraph paraphrasing the Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar as a narrator describes the metaphysical wonder of looking down into the toilet bowl:
“How could I possibly have made that?” Shit here represents the miracle of the physical world, the shocking createdness of real things. The world as it is, staring up at you, undeniable proof of your body’s fetid entanglement with matter . . . The physical and metaphysical mystery lies in shit’s not-quite appearance, in our unwillingness to look again even when we know it is there. Read only once, before flushing
I think that taking your phone to the toilet is much more disgusting than re-rinsing a stranger’s bottle or digging a bag from a skip, another thing I’ve been told was ‘gross’. The the peripheral positioning of waste works directly against our critical agency and, in a time of climate crisis, makes rocky foundations for the adoption of sustainable life cycles - which require an unblinking turn towards and, ideally a reluctant affection for, our waste. On a larger scale, these sites of sacrifice – these waste zones that are necessary to the advancing frontier of accumulation and extraction – are too big for our brains, so perhaps the brown substance we dump into our toilet every day is a good place to start.
“How could I possibly have made that?” Shit here represents the miracle of the physical world, the shocking createdness of real things. The world as it is, staring up at you, undeniable proof of your body’s fetid entanglement with matter . . . The physical and metaphysical mystery lies in shit’s not-quite appearance, in our unwillingness to look again even when we know it is there. Read only once, before flushing
I think that taking your phone to the toilet is much more disgusting than re-rinsing a stranger’s bottle or digging a bag from a skip, another thing I’ve been told was ‘gross’. The the peripheral positioning of waste works directly against our critical agency and, in a time of climate crisis, makes rocky foundations for the adoption of sustainable life cycles - which require an unblinking turn towards and, ideally a reluctant affection for, our waste. On a larger scale, these sites of sacrifice – these waste zones that are necessary to the advancing frontier of accumulation and extraction – are too big for our brains, so perhaps the brown substance we dump into our toilet every day is a good place to start.