The Story of Shit

It doesn’t take much to enjoy yourself. You, in fact, are your own pleasure machine. Crowing with delight, you put it into operation the minute you’re born. There are real little feet for kicking, eyes for looking at everything in dumbfounded astonishment, and a mouth to cram the whole world into. As for your nose, there’s a set of fingers thrown in to pick it with. And when your fingers start getting too fat for picking, your nostrils just grow along with them. No toy store can beat it.

When all the growing is done, it’s time for a new form of physical pleasure: sex. Back in my day (‘make love not war’), sex was regarded as pleasure par excellence. Full of expectation, we brought organs into play that up until then had just been hanging there. Our highest hopes were occasionally confirmed, but not without a struggle. A regular revolution had to be fought, and it raged like a whirlwind. Compared to the French and the Industrial, the Sexual Revolution was over in the twinkling of an eye. Sex today has become as commonplace as universal suffrage or electricity from a plug in the wall. Every department store now sells the kind of flimsy ladies’ underwear that you used to have to pay an arm and a leg for at your local brothel. You pluck hook-ups like daisies right from the internet. Who’s bothering with wife-swapping anymore?

Sex is no longer something to get worked up about. Our little flings have moved from the bedroom to the kitchen, where we get off on juicier flesh and the voluptuous curves of blushing fruit and exotic aromas until the promises of the cookbook photos are fulfilled course by course. Molars chew, saliva slobbers, papillae quiver with excitement in sensuous intimacy. Tenderloin steak, aged port and velvety ice cream grope each other in the dark oral interior until everyone collapses, appetites sated. Even outside the home, pleasure has migrated from the southern to the northern regions of the body. Whereas in the last century there were red lights pointing the way to the bordello, now they direct us to the restaurant, where the naked ladies of the boudoir have yielded to naked poultry served on a bed of exotic lettuce. If you want to be famous, you don’t get a job in the movies as a sex bomb anymore. Now you become a top chef. ‘La cuisine,’ says French chef Pierre Gagnaire, ‘c’est l’amour, l’art et la technique.’ And if you aren’t able to master the art of seductive cooking yourself, you watch others do it. Top chefs and housewives who have cooked their way up the ladder dish out their secrets in books and on TV. Bookshops used to sell sex manuals featuring positions you’d never before attempted, but now there are cookbooks with recipes you’ll never cook, full of nude photos of chickens and rabbits. Looking at the pictures is about as far as you ever get. It’s all ‘gastro porn’, according to foodie Johannes van Dam, who once had a shop full of them. The attention being paid to food is approaching the obscene. Food is the sex of the twenty-first century.

So it’s all the more remarkable that a third form of physical pleasure has remained in the shadows. While adventures in the bedroom and kitchen are openly discussed in the living room, bathroom experiences go unmentioned. Defecating is reserved for private whispers (if it’s talked about at all), and the results are furtively flushed away as if a crime had been committed. When was the last time you saw your uncle or your secretary empty their bowels? From how many of your best friends’ buttocks have you actually witnessed a turd making its appearance? You don’t see sex every day in real life either, but it’s all the more common in films and advertising. Defecation today is at the same stage that sex was during the reign of Queen Victoria. It’s more done than talked about. Anyone who spends fifteen minutes a day on the toilet will have led a secret life of approximately one year by the time they die, and not a word is said about it. Books about shitting are limited to the children’s department of the bookshop. The only books on the subject in the medical section are concerned with the care and behaviour of the gut. And what you may find in the gift department—humour having to do with the lower body orifices—is best given away as soon as possible, preferably not to friends.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Dutch tiles featuring shitting figures made for a light-hearted touch, even in stately canalside houses.

You don’t shit with friends, you eat with them. When asked what they like to do best during their free time, modern people are unanimous in their response: ‘Eat with friends.’ Free time is when you have nothing to do, and the best nothing to do is eating. Preferably eating out. Eating out is the nothingest; you don’t even have to cook. You go to the theatre first, or afterwards, or maybe even not at all. People don’t eat before or after the theatre anymore; they eat instead of the theatre. And thanks to the open kitchen it’s easy to follow the meal’s progress. But no one pays any attention to the doors in the restaurant behind which all the food and all the drinks from all the menus finally end up. Those who feel the need to go there slink away from the table like a thief in the night and then hurry back, for, while a meal that you could have polished off in ten minutes can easily be stretched out to last a whole evening, people look at you suspiciously if you’ve spent more than five minutes in the loo. Yet a good shit is in no way inferior to a pleasant little dinner party. It involves the same sense of satisfaction. Although defecating, unlike love, has never been the subject of poetry, although no newspaper has a regular shitting column next to the cooking column (what should we eat today that we can relish the memory of the day after tomorrow?), it’s still one of life’s most elementary pleasures. You don’t need to take any courses—there are no diplomas for this particular skill—yet people who can’t make a simple clay ashtray can produce turds to die for. If eating is simply a matter of breaking things down, shitting is a matter of putting them back together; after destruction comes creation. Many people reappear from the toilet with a barely concealed smile. What you’d really like to do is show your artwork off to everyone, but that’s a no-no for grownups. Taking pleasure in both ends of your digestive tract is a privilege reserved for the very youngest. As a toddler you’re taught that anything having to do with poo is dirty; the entire southern end of your body is declared a no-go zone. Part of that region is given unrestricted access during puberty, but only the northern end of the intestines is reserved for metabolic pleasure. So there’s always something childish attached to enjoying your own bowel movements.

What gives eating its exalted status? What advantage does a chop or a bunch of escarole have over a load of faeces? Food looks more appetising than shit, of course, although some sausages have a suspicious shape, and many a casserole doesn’t look much different coming out from going in. It’s mainly a question of smell and taste. They either draw you in or put you off. But not every stench or nasty flavour is an impregnable barrier. No matter how bitter Belgian endive may taste, no matter how much sulphide gas is produced by Brussels sprouts, we eat them anyway. It’s a question of upbringing and getting older. Children are simply too young for endive and Brussels sprouts. Their intestines aren’t up to it and their tongues can’t stand it, and rightly so. A good glass of cognac and a lovely cigar are also beyond a toddler’s ability to appreciate. Even beer is enough to make a healthy child gag. At the insistence of parents (endive, Brussels sprouts) and bad friends (cognac, cigars, beer) people learn to ignore the warning signals of their noses and tongues. But there are also tastes that even children are cured of. A newborn baby doesn’t see anything wrong with poo. It’ll grope around in its nappy searching for nice sweet titbits. All of us have grown up big and strong with a bit of sweet poo in our diet. It takes years of upbringing to keep a child away from the snacks produced by its own body. Learning to turn up your nose at shit is just as acquired as learning to like endive.

What you can learn you can also unlearn; things that are relinquished can also be acquired. It’s called culture. Finding food delicious and poo filthy is as accidental as finding poo delicious and food filthy. The Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel understood this. In his film The Phantom of Liberty, five dinner guests take their places on toilets instead of chairs. To remove any doubt, the gentlemen first take down their trousers and the ladies pull up their skirts. As they engage in dinnertime conversation, they make unashamed use of their extraordinary seats. Toilet paper is passed from guest to guest with a flourish. But when the child at the table happens to mention eating, she’s told that one doesn’t talk about such things. When one of the guests gets hungry, he leaves the table discreetly and asks one of the staff for directions. ‘Last door on the right,’ he’s told. There he finds a cubicle the size of a toilet and closes the door carefully behind him. Then out of a dumbwaiter appear a plate of food, a chunk of baguette and wine, which he greedily wolfs down. There’s a knock at the door to which he responds with an agitated ‘occupée’, and this is answered by an embarrassed ‘pardon!’ The scene is world famous, and deservedly so. Yet Buñuel had been preceded eleven years earlier by Gerard Reve in On My Way to the End (1963):

Filmmaker Luis Buñuel turned the world on its head. Instead of a dinner party he filmed a shitting party, where eating, not defecating, was nasty.

Restaurants in general make me miserable because my convictions demand that an individual partake of his food in secret, alone, preferably behind a burlap curtain, and that this food consist of the very simplest sort, with lots of raw carrot, boiled horse heart and raw swede, all of it consumed from waxed wrapping paper with a bottom layer of newspaper.

He then adds, ‘Eating in the presence of dozens of other people, and strangers to boot, is something I find much more lewd than engaging in the act of sex in their presence.’ When it comes to defecation, however, Reve is extremely frank. In his letters to Teigetje and Woelrat, Reve’s life companions, he feels the need to keep them constantly informed of the status of his latest bowel movement. His partners manage to take this for what it’s worth:

That last item is very important: the time of day, the shape, the colour, and the smell of his turd are decisive for the success, or failure, of the coming day. In addition, it makes a great deal of difference whether he produces the whole pellet in the morning all at once or distributes it in dribs and drabs throughout the entire day.

But nothing is better at demonstrating the pleasure Reve derived from shitting than his fairy tale about Quackie the Duck, from the LP Laying It On Thicker (1969):

Quackie the Duck was not at all happy that his house was clean again. So Quackie went into his little kitchen, and there he crapped a great big piece of shit out of his bottom and put the shit in an aluminium saucepan. The turd that Quackie the Duck had crapped out of his arse must have been a winner, because the shit boiled up higher and higher till it boiled out of all the windows in Quackie’s little house! Now finally he was happy. He stretched himself out in the middle of the hall and lay down in his own gurgling and foaming shit. Soon he fell into a deep and satisfied sleep. And if no one had turned off the flame under the pan, it would be boiling still.

So when it comes to pleasure, pooing is right up there with eating. And then there’s sex. As they say in southern Germany, ‘guat geschissen ist halbat gevöglt’—‘a good shit is half a shag’. By insisting that sex and shitting be done in isolation, society creates a climate of furtiveness that appeals to many. Even solo sex is generally regarded as a primal need, just like defecation—something that can be indulged in as long as you keep it to yourself. Both of them sweeten life in a natural, casual sort of way, without all the fuss and bother attached to planning a dinner party or conducting a romantic affair. While these little pleasures may not be everyone’s idea of an exalted experience, a life full of secret amusements can actually be lots of fun. ‘A nice big bowel movement is the common man’s orgasm,’ according to the Austrian magazine Der Wiener. But a few uncommon men have also come to appreciate its delights: ‘Nothing surpasses the pleasure of a good solid crap,’ Balzac once opined.

As easy as physical pleasure can be, for many people it’s problematic. While babies take an instinctual delight in their bodies, adults act as if they’ve misplaced the instruction booklet. They just can’t seem to get the hang of it. Even after years of anatomical study, physiological testing and a professorship in internal medicine, it’s still difficult to feel physically at ease. Intestines and kidneys are not part of one’s self-identity.

We are strangers in our own bodies. We have no idea what’s going on inside us, only what goes in and what comes out. We don’t inhabit our bodies, we just serve as customs agents. We don’t need to know what’s taking place on the domestic front as long as we keep an eye on the incoming and outgoing goods. Once you’re inside the country the customs officials are no longer interested in you, and once you’ve left they’re even less interested. Only the border itself is closely guarded. All imported items must pass through sensitive scanners. The eyes inspect potential immigrants from a distance, even before they arrive. Mounted directly above the mouth is the nose, which extends to the throat by way of the nasal passage and makes sure the taste buds have done their work properly. Even the ears join in. They listen to make sure the food has the right crunch in addition to tasting good. Only when the scary bits of the outside world have a fully stamped passport are they permitted to enter the country’s interior.

Everyone guards their throat like a virgin guards her vagina. Whether it’s dubious food or a dubious guy, it’s all about preserving the body’s integrity. Forcing something unpleasant on someone bears a suspiciously strong resemblance to rape. The most important difference is that there’s a set of teeth behind the lips of the mouth which victims of sexual assault might have found helpful—behind their other set of lips, of course.

All technical accuracy aside, getting your food cleared through customs before it enters the intestines is anything but disagreeable. Rarely have the beneficial and the pleasant been so intimately combined. As far as the senses are concerned, there’s only one criterion: that it taste good. If it does, then you have everything the world has to offer from which to make your choice. The sensation we call ‘delicious’ is an ample reward for all the trouble involved in foraging and meal preparation. Occasionally something slips in that isn’t good for you, and occasionally you refuse something disgusting that’s supposed to be good for you, but all in all it’s a simple system that works for a lifetime. Thanks to a bit of education, and with the support of the pure food and drug authorities, there are surprisingly few cases of food poisoning, and most people think back on their meals with pleasure. If anything goes wrong it usually isn’t a question of quality but of quantity. Your uvula is not fitted with a pair of scales. Good food is something many people can’t get enough of.

The epicure may rub his belly with contentment, but there’s nothing more to report from the meal just polished off than a vague sense of satisfaction. The belly could just as easily have felt bloated from the inundation of food or sick from indigestion. Throughout the alimentary journey—from stomach to intestines—eyes, nose and taste buds are conspicuous by their absence. Digestion does not need the approval of the senses. It works at a steady pace, without so much as a by-your-leave, under the direction of the autonomic nervous system. This system regulates everything you’re too dumb to manage yourself: sweating in the heat, shivering in the cold, not falling from your bike, having erections on time, and emptying your stomach before the arrival of the next meal. Conscious supervision would only be counter-productive; it’s best not to trouble yourself with these things, no matter how personal they are. Just trust your gut. No news is good news.

The only thing you have to do is gobble down the chow; as soon as it gets to your throat, your body takes over. Your body sees to it that the food is transferred into the energy you need to bring in more food. It’s like being on a plane trip: once you’ve paid for the jet fuel you can leave it to the flight engineer and the captain to turn the fuel into energy, and to turn that energy into your journey. When the captain is speaking you don’t even have to listen. Until the landing of the plane he has your fate firmly in his hands.

The process is reminiscent of pregnancy. Much of what takes place inside the expectant mother’s belly occurs without her consultation. How to make a baby’s head, or at what point the hands sprout fingers, or how many vertebrae go into the spinal column: it’s all decided for her. The body knows just what to do, under the direction of the autonomic nervous system. The only time the mother plays a conscious role is at the beginning—mating—and at the end—giving birth. But giving birth isn’t nearly as nice as mating. Here, we’ve got a bone to pick with the body. How about rewarding the woman during childbirth, too, if one reward—during mating—is enough to set the entire chain of cause and effect in motion and keep it going until the reproduction is a fact?

Fortunately, eating is rewarded twice: first at the table, then on the toilet. Apparently the body wants to be doubly sure that it gets rid of its burden. In childbirth the body doesn’t have that much to worry about since the baby plays an active role. It wants to get out on time, before it gets too big and accidents start happening. For a baby, that’s when life really starts. It’s quite different in the case of a turd’s birth. For a piece of excrement, excretion is almost certainly the end of the story. Excrement does not cooperate with its own downfall. In fact, at this point the excretory organs can really use a bit of encouragement from the body. An internal pat on the back, so to speak. Only then comes the satisfaction of delivery, as with a child.

The senses around the mouth are reminiscent of a front door and its paraphernalia: doorbell, name plate, mail slot, welcome mat, umbrella stand, all neatly polished and vacuumed. This is where you enter as the honoured guest. The back door is more appropriate for thieves in the night, making their stealthy escape. Nature has a good building code. The head faces forwards so it can see where it’s going; the bottom faces backwards, where you don’t want to know what you’re leaving behind. While the head is very fussy about its incoming goods, the bottom drops its load and doesn’t look back. There are some mighty weird animals in the world—sexual orifice next to the ear, ears on the knees—but no animal alive eats from the back and shits from the front. The strangest animal of all, the human being, spends billions of dollars on cosmetics for the front of the body, but there’s no such thing as lipstick for the buttocks. ‘Nobody lives out back,’ as my mother used to say.

The enthusiasm with which you greet a meal at the front door does not have to be repeated when you bid it goodbye. The imported goods may have been screened down to the smallest detail, but the exported goods are released with barely a nod. There are no eyes or noses in the vicinity of the anus. You have to have eaten something terribly hot to experience a sensation that comes close to tasting when a turd is emitted. Generally speaking, the anus’s lack of taste is seen as a blessing. So how do you reward it for getting rid of the body’s rubbish at times and places we consider appropriate? The autonomic nervous system is not sensitive to pats on the back, so the central nervous system would have to be engaged. While that system may not have any idea what’s happening to your food on the way down, your excrement breaks the silence at the end of the intestinal journey. You feel the need to go. ‘The call of nature’, as the English say, as if they themselves were unaware of it. At first the summons feels like a friendly tap on the shoulder, but woe be unto those who think it can be ignored. The friendly tap becomes an urgent tap, and then a smack. The discomfort increases until you think you’re going to explode. Finally nature takes control, stops calling, and forces its way out. The urge is inexorable. I have friends who have quit smoking, friends who give alcohol a miss, and friends who have terminated our friendship. But I don’t have any friends who have stopped shitting. Nature’s call is an order.

Pleasure is unthinkable without the senses. They tickle the nervous system when the body is being pleasantly stimulated, or evoke memories of some delightful tickle from the past: that sultry night with her, that cake from the baker who has since moved away, sweets at a children’s party long ago. But if the back door has no sensory apparatus, how can you enjoy the exit? With an old trick. Instead of offering a reward, the body starts punishing. The punishment is gradually increased until it’s practically unbearable. Then suddenly it’s all over. What a relief! This kind of circuitous reward is called a catharsis. Filled with gratitude, you throw your arms around the torturer’s neck—in this case your own body. But for what? Compared with the actual situation at the exit point you haven’t gained a thing, but compared with the miserable situation your body has intentionally put you through you’ve gained a great deal. Your body makes you hungry, and thanks to hunger even raw beans taste good. But they’re still raw beans. Happiness exists only in relation to unhappiness, as Sigmund Freud already knew in Civilisation and Its Discontents:

One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be ‘happy’ is not included in the plan of ‘Creation’. What we call happiness in the strictest sense comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been dammed up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon. When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.

No unloading without a load. Before defecation can take place, the intestines are pumped up by their contents like a balloon. There are no eyes to see the swelling or ears to hear it, but there are stretch receptors that warn the nervous system of the danger of bursting apart. When the nervous system gets this signal, it sends you an uncomfortable feeling. If the nervous system is favourably disposed towards you, it will search with increasing desperation on your behalf for an opportunity to reduce the pressure, which is constantly mounting. Is the meeting finally about to take a break, has the car finally turned off the highway, is the toilet finally free? Then the tension can be released—pfffftt—like a punctured balloon. Muscles relax, stretch receptors turn off their sirens, the guys in the emergency centre light up their cigarettes, and your entire being breathes a sigh of relief. This climax may be less fully articulated than the enjoyment derived from the meal that caused it, but it’s no less inferior in terms of satisfaction. And as hard as it was to keep the load in, it’s that much more delightful letting it go. Every now and then your efforts are rewarded with a feeling of euphoria and ecstasy that under other circumstances can only be achieved after forty days of fasting, forty kilometres of running, or forty minutes of sex. A gorgeous turd stretches the colon so far that the vagus nerve goes wild, and your heartbeat and blood pressure drop in order to cut off the blood supply to the brain, which makes you high. Mmm! Although not every bowel movement can measure up to a run-of-the-mill orgasm or a tender Christmas turkey, shitting is among the simple pleasures that make life worthwhile—such as a drink before a meal, a grandchild on your lap, a grandpa under your bottom, and a well-orchestrated sunset. This pleasure is democratically divided: anyone can retreat to a sanitary confessional from time to time in order to reappear physically purified. Orgasms are not granted to all of us, but a life without defecation is inconceivable. Even the strictest celibate enjoys anal pleasure. As a child you’re not the least bit interested in sex. Eating and pooing are distraction enough. Pooing unites necessity with pleasure better than eating does. That’s why it’s such a shame that so many people go to the loo with the same indifference that characterised Dutch eating habits in the fifties: just mash it up and wolf it down. Something seen as a necessary evil never has a chance to shine. Who would have thought back then that haute cuisine would gain a foothold in Holland, and that so many people would be eating more out of hedonism than hunger? You don’t have to be a gourmet, however, to enjoy your daily meal, nor do you as an ordinary frequenter of the toilet have to have any particular specialities. Do what has to be done, but do it with a smile.

Nothing resembles faeces more than food. Both are organic substances that come in every gradation of tint and consistency: sometimes almost fluid, sometimes hard or fibrous, usually served up lukewarm. It isn’t because of the material, however, that shit is held in such low esteem. What does it in for shit is mainly the lowly status of the organ in which it is housed, the intestines. In every living body, as in every business enterprise, there’s a hierarchy of departments. Even though you can’t do without a single one of them—except for a few, such as the appendix or a wisdom tooth—some organs are valued more highly than others. At the very top, literally, is the brain. In no other organ is the difference between us humans and other animals more evident in terms of size and complexity. High in the ivory tower of the skull, the brain receives only vague reports of what’s going on down below, both in front and in back. Due to a lack of eyes, the control panel receives no images. Bright flashes and loud blasts of the siren are the only things that make their way through. It’s only when this alarm is sounded that the intestines actually count, and only by calling in sick do the gall bladder and the pancreas get the attention they deserve. In many cases this is for the first and the last time, and you run aground due to lack of cooperation from organs you never even knew you had.

The more bestial a part of the body is, the less esteem we grant it. That’s why so many ladies are glad they don’t have tails, no matter how handy such a thing might be for chasing away flies. The mouth, on the other hand, is accentuated with lipstick. As an element of the face, it is among the dignitaries occupying the body’s most chic neighbourhood, the head. Here the lips serve as a refined advertisement for the actual sex organs located elsewhere in the bestial hills. What happens there cannot tolerate the light of day. But this is more than compensated for by the brain at its most fanciful, as it drowns out the sloshing of sexual mucus with love songs and passionate poetry issuing from the highly-placed mouth. In the absence of such compensation, the booby prize goes to the lowest organ, the body’s galley slave, the intestines. According to Plato, the head is separated from the torso by an isthmus, the neck, and the diaphragm divides the chest from the belly to prevent the lower region from besmirching the upper.

Hierarchy is a question of perspective. We regard our intestines as an auxiliary organ that provides the brain with energy. They’re the stokers deep in the belly of the steamship over which the brain exercises authority. And that brain is us, according to Dick Swaab in his bestseller We Are Our Brains. Because our consciousness is located in our heads, that’s also where our identity is. Unfortunately for our intestines, the nerves in the intestinal walls are less self-conscious. Otherwise we would have known better. It isn’t the brain but the intestines that are the centre of life. Life is primarily the conversion of energy. In the intestines, energy from the outside world is converted into our living interior. Seen from the perspective of the gut, the sole purpose of all the other organs is to provide it with nutritious chunks of the outside world: hands to pluck them with, legs to reach them, teeth to grind them, a brain to know how to get at them. Of all those errand boys, what my intestines have the least regard for are brains. Can’t stand them. Even though they’ve had to process their share of strange stuff. They’ve eaten rats, worms and beetles. Had to, for the TV shows. One director fed me sheep’s balls, bull’s cock and pig’s cunt. His main purpose in filming me was to see how I would react. I cleaned my plate in every case. But I won’t eat brains. I’d rather eat a shit sandwich.

What keeps me from eating brains is the texture. They’re mushy. Mushier than most shit. It’s like a limp handshake in your head. A slut of an oyster. I don’t like oysters, either. I don’t even dare shake hands with the kind of men who do slurp oysters. So what about the men with brains in their heads?

Why don’t I like brains? And why do I like meat? There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with eating meat; all that muscle can only make you stronger. Spaniards eat bulls’ balls for their potency. In certain restaurants you can even order the balls of some bull that has really outdone itself in the arena, by name and surname. Would I want to eat the brains of a particular individual? Einstein comes to mind. There have never been better brains than his. And they still exist. After Einstein’s death in 1955, his brain was preserved in formaldehyde. There are photos of it. When you look at the photos it’s hard not to feel disappointed. You’d expect a big carpenter to have a big hammer, but Einstein’s brain is barely normal size, 1350 grams. After being weighed it was cut up into at least 240 little blocks. Choosing which block to eat wouldn’t be easy. In which of the 240 is E=mc²? That idea must still be in there somewhere. After all, every thought, every memory, is preserved as a set of connections between nerve cells, the way music is preserved in the grooves of a phonograph record. But you’re no more capable of guessing what’s in a brain just from looking at it than a man from Mars would understand that there’s music in a CD or a whole story in a book. It’s as if you had found a uSB stick in a car with a forgotten police file on it and you had no playback equipment. The only playback equipment for a human brain is a human being. You’d have to transplant them. Oddly enough, the body would not think it had acquired a new brain—the brain would wonder how in the world it had ended up in that strange body, like a man realising he’s sitting on the wrong bike.

Before we encountered our selves in our brains, we identified with our hearts. Civilised peoples like the ancient Egyptians believed that you thought with your heart. When they mummified their pharaohs, they threw the brain away and treated the heart with great solicitude. Modern Brits and Americans still don’t know any better; they learn their examination material ‘by heart’, and not ‘from their heads’, as the Dutch do. In countries where Romance languages are spoken, the heart is invariably exalted above the head as the source of love. But there are other places as well where the heart is in charge of happiness. When cards are dealt, you always stand a chance of drawing a queen of hearts, but never a king of brains. There’s no card game in which a jack of kidneys is played against the king of livers in order to trump the ace with a pancreas. We still love with all our heart. That’s why we hate it so much when something goes wrong, and we’re willing to spend so much money to have our heart and blood vessels repaired. Heart surgeons and blood specialists share in the honour that accrues to their favourite organs.

Gastroenterologists gnash their teeth. They know that the only purpose of blood vessels is transport. Real life takes place in the intestines. Here the substances from the environment around us are converted into the energy that makes life possible. For someone who studies the stomach and intestines, the heart and the blood vessels are mere intestinal accessories. There are oodles of lower animals that don’t have hearts or brains, but an animal without intestines doesn’t exist. Life began as intestines. The polyps in the ditch behind your house are nothing but tiny intestines on stalks. An intestine is all you need to be.

You are not your brain; you don’t love with your heart; and even the horniest man is more than his dick. We are our intestines. At one time love may have been promoted from the heart to the brain, but as all cooks agree, love goes through the stomach.

Eating has status because it is social. It reinforces the bond between the eaters. Members of social species welcome any kind of behaviour that brings individuals together as a counterweight to the egoism that undermines the group’s interests. The most well known means of strengthening group ties among people are religion and war. Eating is another.

Sex connects the best. You can’t get any closer to each other than that. But there has to be an ‘each other’ involved. If you’re all alone, the social bonus of sex is lost. The Bible says you must not spill your seed upon the ground because it does not serve the purpose of reproduction. But now that sex and reproduction have been disconnected for most people, solitary sex is not as highly rated. It isn’t illegal, it no longer causes spinal tuberculosis, and most gods let masturbators into heaven, but you shouldn’t be proud of it or talk about how great it was. In this regard it shows a remarkable similarity to that other source of solo satisfaction. After a pleasant dinner or a satisfying round of sex, it’s customary to praise the performance of the cook or the partner to the skies, with accompanying facial expressions. But after leaving the bathroom, it’s best to look as neutral as possible and to modestly maintain a stony silence about the pleasure your shit has just afforded you. It is of no social benefit. If you can’t talk about it you can’t share it, and unshared delight is no delight at all. How wonderful it would be to dish up your faecal adventures in all their fragrant and colourful glory! But you’ll find no sympathetic ear at birthday parties for these particular feelings. It’s as if you were talking about some family member who had made a bad investment, was still alive, and may be in need of discreet support, but about whom it’s best to keep silent. People would rather talk about food and, after a couple of drinks, about sex. But as soon as the conversation switches to shit and piss it’s time to be on your way.

Shit puts asunder what food has joined together. It’s a perfect example of something you do outside the group. Yet shit also possesses an unexpectedly strong power to bind. It’s true that shit drives people apart, but what makes it uniquely social is when you voluntarily set aside your repugnance of the distasteful stuff for the sake of another. Cleaning up someone else’s shit creates a bond as strong as a secret pact. It’s intimate material; shit is the currency of the love trade. Underlying this altruistic behaviour is the care of your children. Shit is always part of the picture. Your first thought, that people love their babies despite the stench of their nappies, is belied by the first pair of fresh young parents you see in action. The care they give to their baby is not in spite of the poo but thanks to it. Fathers and mothers do honour to their parenthood with offerings of poo and piss. After overcoming their initial revulsion, they actually grope around in it, greedily inhaling its odour and showing their unconcealed pride in an especially successful quality or quantity. On all baby poo and toddler muck, all snot from all little wiped noses, all drool and goop, love thrives like a rose on hog shit. It’s precisely because it stinks and slithers that faeces can help you show how much you love the little pooper, how much nothing—not even poo—can come between the two of you. On the contrary, never do you feel so deeply connected as when the moist warmth permeates the nappy and your trousers and makes its way to your lap. As if it were your own.

While there’s always a certain embarrassment involved in buying toilet paper for yourself, young parents—or old grandpas—on the checkout line at the supermarket flaunt the gigantic packages of nappies they’ll soon be throwing away with their load of baby shit. A kinship of shit is a stronger confirmation of family unity than blood. While mother and child also share the experience of childbirth and nursing, shit is really the main means of connection between fathers and their children.

If you pay close attention you see that shit and healthcare are inextricably linked. With the help of the bedpan, hospital nurses forge an intimate tie with their patients that they never could have achieved with a needle, washcloth or IV drip. It’s their job to save your life, no more and no less, but cleaning up your diarrhoea is always an act of mercy. If shit isn’t the best vehicle for expressing unconditional love it’s certainly the cheapest. In a society where love for animals is more easily exhibited than love for one’s fellow man, an excellent role has been reserved for animal poo. Cat litter boxes are cleaned with averted gaze but quiet dedication, and guinea pigs get a handful of love with every handful of wood shavings. Poo is a godsend for lovers of fish and fowl. What better way to express their love than by the cleaning of the cage or aquarium? Telling people how much you love your canary doesn’t make much of an impression; giving your neon tetra a gentle pat is likely to do it in. Feeding is better. Every mouthful of feed is a mouthful of love. Tenderly you watch your pet eat. It’s still a cheap gesture, though, like a stale sandwich for the ducks or a spoonful of aquarium feed for a few cents. Shit is best. Cleaning up excrement is the essence of every form of house-pet affection. Every turd that makes its appearance is an opportunity to offer yourself up, the ultimate form of love in which you put the interests of others above your own. The high point of this shit cult is walking the dog. Its pooing takes up more of your time than its eating. What connects owner and dog isn’t the leash so much as the shit. You have to go out at ungodly hours, but at the same time you can let the whole neighbourhood see how much you’re prepared to do for your best friend. Walking the dog has long been the most important form of outdoor recreation in our country; for many streetlights, providing illumination is only a sideline next to their main job as dog toilet. The intestines that are lovingly filled at home are emptied outside. Men who have never seen their own wives defecating are willing to stand in rain and wind to enjoy their dogs relieving themselves. But all too willingly they pick up the warm and steaming excrement in a plastic bag and throw it away, something they’d never dare do with their own turds. After the walk, many a dog owner feels a sense of relief, as if he himself had just defecated. The dog curls up cosily in its basket. It knows it’s done its owner a favour.

It even works with plants. Respectable women who discreetly cleanse their hind quarters with wet wipes dump huge amounts of manure on the roses in their garden, on condition that the gardener has brought them real cow shit. Plunging their arms in up to the elbows, they mix the shit with the soil and feel at one with nature. In this fusion, the smell of manure serves as incense. But the love that every garden flower or household dog gains from a little shit is not granted to everyone. Old people have a great deal of difficulty getting nursing care. Personnel are hard to come by, nursing homes are full, and many an elderly man or woman is given less attention than their cat. Yet when it comes to defecating they hold their own with their pets. Back when the old person was a baby he was passed from hand to hand and people willingly and lovingly cared for him, day and night; his bottom was washed till it shone and then royally powdered. What’s the difference between a baby and a geriatric patient? Not much. Both drool, both have to be driven around, both know next to nothing about their own health, and both lie in their own filth. There’s no use trying to give either one of them a good talking to; in both cases you’d be well advised not to wear your best suit when they press themselves against you. The biggest difference between a baby and an elderly person is the desire of others to care for them. Men who can’t even imagine wiping the bottom of their old uncle poke around in the shit of their youngest offspring with a whistle on their lips.

Does old shit really smell worse than young shit? No, the shit is not to blame. It all has to do with the patient. People are born with an exceptional ability to elicit care. As babies they know just how to touch their parents’ hearts by crowing, laughing and blowing bubbles. But that ability wears away, and by the time they reach adolescence there’s almost nothing left. So most children leave their parental home, and not a day too late. Now they’re on their own—until an accident puts them in the hospital. Or until they reach old age. At that point it’s a good idea to activate the nurses’ caregiving instinct. But how did you do that again, way back when? There are patients for whom nurses would gladly do anything because they don’t moan and groan, they laugh. They have easy bowel movements. But being cheerful doesn’t cut much ice if you’re deathly ill or as old as Methuselah. Some patients wisely resort to acting like a baby. This is made easier by the nurses, who treat you like a baby anyway. It doesn’t come naturally anymore, though. The ability to elicit care that you had in childhood no longer works. How could evolution have known that you’d still be a useful member of society in your old age?

How it all ends is a question of character. To elicit care, you have to live among a social species and be recognised as a member. Human beings are a social species, but they don’t always regard everyone as fellow humans. While many people from human society are banished to nursing homes and institutions, non-human species like dogs and guinea pigs are taken into our hearts as honorary humans.

Shit plays a big role when it is being decided who does or does not belong. Michael Leahy, an Australian adventurer, found out how much shit connects people when in 1930 he went searching for gold in the most inaccessible parts of New Guinea, where the people lived as they had in the Stone Age and had never seen a white man before. Leahy and his group were received hospitably but with suspicion. When Leahy took off his hat, the natives next to him recoiled in terror. What kind of creatures were these? The most probable explanation, the tribe thought, was that they were dealing with reincarnated ancestors or other spirits. To find out for sure, they decided on an empirical test. Kirupano Eza’e reported as follows:

One member of the tribe hid himself and watched to see how they defecated. He came back and said, ‘The men from heaven went over there to defecate.’ As soon as they were gone, many men went to have a look. When they noticed that it stank, they said, ‘They may have different skin, but their shit stinks just like ours.’