Fire is hot, water is wet, God is great, the sea is salt, revenge is sweet. And shit? Shit is dirty. Through and through. Yuck.
If shit is dirty, I’m a dirty old man. All day long, hour after hour, year in and year out, I walk around with shit in my belly, warm and swaying like a foetus in a womb. And so do you. You and I, we’re walking barrels of shit, chamber pots on legs. And under their tweed skirts and pleated trousers, the classiest ladies and gentlemen also carry intestines full of shit with them. No big deal. As long as it stays inside their tummies everything is hunky-dory. There everything is safely confined, like a bear in its cage, like Jack in his box, like Dracula in his coffin.
Shit isn’t really dirty until later on, in the toilet. As soon as it comes out you don’t dare lay a finger on it, something that even now is intimately shrouded in your delicate tissues. All of a sudden you don’t want to have anything to do with it. No one to blame but itself. If only it had stayed inside, in splendid isolation. Who let it in, anyway? Not me. I wouldn’t dare. It furtively gained access under the guise of food. Only after getting past the uvula, safely beyond reach of the sensory radar, did it throw off its cloak and show itself in the stomach for what it truly was: vomit. There in the interior it found itself in the abject company of snot, piss, mucus, sperm, pus and—its own future destination—shit. This whole mess would barely interest us if the body weren’t so leaky. There are openings in it through which its contents meet our eyes, and our eyes aren’t exactly overjoyed. How much more endearing is a person’s view of himself in the mirror, no matter how ugly he may be, than this confrontation with what’s inside!
Filth is only filthy when someone thinks it is—even if that someone is you. Halfway to the anus, one half of the turd has materialised while the other half is still pristine, split in two like a frontier village where the main street is also the national border. Only if the turd gets stuck does a moment occur when you wish you could take it all back, but by then it’s already too late; as soon as the shit crosses the border it changes identity and becomes an undesirable alien. Once it’s been pushed through, the internal half becomes external as well, and now, united with its better half into a single turd, it looks you in the eye. A vague glance of recognition passes between the two of you, but not until you experience ‘the most brazen thing’ that could await your eyes, according to the essay ‘Shit’ by Henk Hofland: ‘the sight of the turd of your predecessor in the white porcelain bowl’, ‘the vilest thing of this type that could imprint itself on your retina’.
What could do no harm when it was still inside is suddenly suspect, only because it’s now on the outside. In this regard, turd after turd obey the mantra of anthropologist Mary Douglas from her classic Purity and Danger (1966), which states that something is dirty only when it is out of place. As delicious as soup can be, and no matter how good a beard may look on you, soup is dirty when it’s in your beard. Soup belongs in its bowl, snot in its nose, shit in its person. There’s nothing wrong with the snot in my nose, no matter how slimy it may be. Nor can any fault be found with the snot in your nose. But your snot in my nose—now that’s disgusting. A place for everything and everything in its place, lest the order be disturbed. This is all the truer for things that were already low in our regard. Excrement is expected to know its place, as are empty cans, old shoes, and certainly the lower classes, to keep them from pulling the higher classes down with them.
Saliva, for example, belongs in your mouth, where it performs all sorts of odd jobs in the process of digestion. Outside the mouth it’s taboo. ‘Think first of swallowing the saliva in your mouth, or do so,’ the American psychologist Gordon Allport proposed in 1955. ‘Then imagine expectorating it into a tumbler and drinking it! What seemed natural and “mine” suddenly becomes disgusting and alien.’
Any excrement encountered outside the body, like spit outside the mouth or extra-nasal snot, is a fugitive, illegal, on the run, bent on our destruction. We’re up shit creek without a paddle! Thankfully shit doesn’t have teeth or claws, so it doesn’t seem to pose any danger. That’s why shit doesn’t make us anxious. People are not afraid of their own excrement. You don’t call the police to deal with faeces (maybe you call the cleaning service). What you feel when you see a turd is not fear but disgust. You don’t flee from a turd, you recoil from it. You don’t look as if you’ve seen the turd but as if you’ve stuck it in your mouth. According to Charles Darwin, father of the theory of evolution and the study of emotional expressions, this is simply logical:
As the sensation of disgust primarily arises in connection with the act of eating or tasting it, it is natural that its expression should consist chiefly in movements round the mouth. But as disgust also causes annoyance, it is generally accompanied by a frown, and often by gestures as if to push away or to guard oneself against the offensive object. With respect to the face, moderate disgust is exhibited in various ways; by the mouth being widely opened, as if to let an offensive morsel drop out; by spitting; by blowing out of the protruded lips; or by a sound as of clearing the throat. Extreme disgust is expressed by movements round the mouth identical with those preparatory to the act of vomiting. The mouth is opened widely, with the upper lip strongly retracted, which wrinkles the sides of the nose, and with the lower lip protruded and everted as much as possible. The latter movement requires the contraction of the muscles which draw downwards the corners of the mouth.
By wrinkling the nose, retracting the upper lip, and screwing up the eyes, the innermost self isolates itself from the outside world. With this face, it’s easy to tell disgust from the five other emotions that have their own facial expressions: sorrow, anger, surprise, fear and happiness. All six are not acquired but innate; you see them everywhere. Darwin found the expression of great disgust in the most remote corner of his world.
In Tierra del Fuego a native touched with his finger some cold preserved meat which I was eating at our bivouac, and plainly showed utter disgust at its softness; whilst I felt utter disgust at my food being touched by a naked savage, though his hands did not appear to be dirty.
A century later, the existence of universal emotions was confirmed by the travels of the Austrian biologist Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt and the American psychologist Paul Ekman. Distant races of people could easily identify the emotions on photos of people far away. And blind people everywhere seem to make the same faces to express the same emotions. So facial expressions are genetic. But when it comes to disgust, there’s something quite remarkable going on. Small children are simply unaware of it. Give them something bitter to eat and you get the expected facial expression, as sure as a vending machine will cough out a snack when you drop in a few coins. But they shove poo in their mouths with a smile. They vastly prefer one type of food to another, but they are not disgusted by filth. Parents exploit this by feeding them commercial baby food that they themselves couldn’t imagine eating. The other five facial expressions appear much earlier. A baby shows happiness or sadness right from the start, followed after a few months by anger, fear and surprise, but it doesn’t learn disgust until about three years of age. Apparently repugnance needs a part of the brain that does not develop until later on in order to express the innate ability to feel disgust. That area has now been identified, with the help of adults who, like young toddlers, can recognise all the emotions except disgust. These people are suffering from Huntington’s disease, a form of physical deterioration caused by the death of the basal ganglia, a system consisting of four parts of the brain at the base of the cerebellum next to the insula, part of the temporal lobe. The insula controls things like sensualism, sexual pleasure, addiction and disgust, but also nausea and vomiting. The inability to read disgust on another person’s face is often the first sign of Huntington’s disease, which is marked by the failure of the parts of the brain that were last to develop when the patient was a toddler.
Because toddlers initially have no sense of disgust they’re not easy to toilet-train. Fortunately the penny drops by the time they reach the age of three or so. At that point it becomes evident that there really is a hereditary aptitude for toilet-training. It’s much easier to teach toddlers and pre-schoolers that shit or a dead mouse is dirty, while cake or a hamburger isn’t. As parents, it helps if you screw up your face at the sight of shit or mouse, certainly if you say ‘ewww’ or ‘yuck’ at the same time—words that almost automatically make you wrinkle up your nose and put your mouth in spitting position. As off-putting as such a face may seem, it’s also quite benevolent. Anyone beyond toddler age who sees your grimace will know they’d be wise to stay away from the food that your sense of taste has rejected. Why are the youngest children, the most vulnerable members of such a group, unaware of disgust? Maybe it’s just as well that they have a close relationship with dirt, since it strengthens their immune system before they enter the highly sterilised world of modern adults.
Turning up your nose warns those around you that the food is bad. It’s not a watertight system, however. What’s disgusting to one person is delicious to another. And everything that tastes disgusting is certainly not bad for you, nor does all bad food taste disgusting. A lot of unhealthy food—hamburgers, salted peanuts, double whiskies—arouses desire rather than aversion. Apparently it hasn’t been available in unlimited quantities long enough to horrify our genes. The consumption of such food causes a blissful expression that only makes onlookers salivate.
This doesn’t happen with shit. In order to arouse repulsion, shit has a powerful card up its sleeve. From far away, long before you run the risk of actually tasting it, your nose recoils in disgust by way of warning. Shit stinks. Like shit. The smell is so unmistakable that you’d think it was an alarm signal, much like the smell they add to natural gas to make it smell like gas. You turn your nose away out of revulsion, followed by your head, if not your whole body. There’s nothing wrong with the smell itself. Dung flies seek it out avidly, and many tropical plants imitate it to attract pollinators. But as a warning sign it cannot be ignored. It can even nauseate you. In this regard, smelling is actually tasting in a way: real faecal particles travel way up your nose and merge closely with the warm mucous membrane.
Brown, slimy and steaming with the stench, a turd is one of the most revolting things on earth. Perhaps a few improvements might make it more repellent—a bit of wiggling, sudden jerking movements, bilious green glow in the dark from the corner of your eye—but these things arouse fear more than disgust. A turd is not out to scare the living daylights out of people; inciting revulsion is enough. To this end, the turd has a whole arsenal of measures at its disposal. All our sensory organs come under fire. The ear, otherwise scaremonger extraordinaire, is spared the most, although it doesn’t take much to imagine how a turd would sound if it were a bit noisier—witness the Shlaarg! and Shlooderr! with which dogs in comic strips produce turds for their owners to slip on. Sound is mainly good for creating unrest or causing irritation. The buzzing of a mosquito is irritating but it doesn’t evoke disgust, and if the sound of farting were disgusting in and of itself no one would ever have invented the tuba. Generally speaking, the only time a sound revolts you is when you picture the corresponding action—puking, pooing or having an orgasm.
Compared with rich odour and full flavour, the voice of a turd is as quiet as the grave. Only the sense of touch comes under stronger attack than that of smell or taste. At least that’s the impression you get from the language involved. According to The Anatomy of Disgust by lawyer William Miller, most words associated with disgust have to do with touch. While nasty tastes rarely go beyond bitter or rancid, and stench also has to be satisfied with a limited vocabulary, there’s a wide range of ideas to choose from for describing disgusting experiences of touch: squishy, clammy, sticky, pitted, slimy and flaccid. In languages like English, repugnance is often expressed with ‘sl’ sounds: slimy slobbery slugs slithered through the slough like sleazy sluts. Words that start with ‘sl’ are usually up to no good. Just like slime and sludge, a slug consists of more or less stable material with lots of goo around it, along with the unexpectedly firm softness that you also find in the drooling lips of certain breeds of dogs and the little flaps surrounding those otherwise quite interesting sexual openings.
It’s the indistinctness of a disgusting thing that makes touching it so exciting. The fact that it’s neither stable nor fluid, neither dry nor wet but clammy, neither hard nor soft but flaccid, suggests that it doesn’t know its place. A fresh cow pat is less substantial than an old dried-up one, which has taken on all the contours of a thing. You can’t get a grip on fresh muck; it slithers through your fingers. But the worst is the ‘neither warm nor cold’ category. Tepid. Sitting on a cold toilet seat is not pleasant, and you risk burning your bum on a hot seat, but what’s really awful is a seat that’s lukewarm. Another person’s bottom has just sat there. A living bottom.
Lukewarm is life. Miller points out that nothing arouses more disgust within the entire life spectrum than temperature. Anything that is as lukewarm as your own body alerts you to the presence of another life—on you, under you, or in you. Every other form of life is a potential threat, especially if it’s unashamedly slimy and dripping. Inorganic things—rocks, plastic, brass—rarely incite disgust, but anything organic seems to want something from you, whether it’s still alive or already dead. An atomic bomb is not disgusting, while the man who dropped it is. We’re revolted by indefinable life out of fear of certain death. And then there’s that shapelessness! Any respectable animal has a head (you can see its respectability in its eyes), and a good, honest plant has a stem with a flower. But a slug escapes definition.
Nothing so closely resembles a slug as a turd. Although it has neither head nor limbs, there’s something in a turd that makes it seem alive. It’s only apparently dead, like a vampire or a tulip bulb. Sometimes you may even think you’ve seen it move. It wouldn’t surprise you at all if tomorrow you were to find it in a different place from where you left it. Legless yet mobile: now that’s really something for such a lukewarm extrusion.
And so the eye proves to be the ideal sensory organ for registering disgust. Our eyes stimulate the imagination like the undeniable two-eyed animals we are. Even if you’ve never picked up or eaten a turd before, you only have to bring the image to mind to make your stomach turn. Imagining yourself stepping on a turd or a slug is enough to make you jump as if it were real. Because your eyes can see the shape of a turd but not the shit from which it apparently was made, most people would refuse to eat it, even if you’ve let the cat out of the bag and told them it was really cake. If you were to hold your nose it would be easier to eat a turd in the shape of a muffin than a muffin in the shape of a turd. Thus the people involved in a test conducted by American psychologist Paul Rozin refused to drink from a glass that had held a cockroach, even though the glass had been thoroughly washed and sterilised. It’s easy to prove that this is a matter of disgust: little children cheerfully eat the muffin turd, followed by a nice glass of cockroach water. Their brains have yet to develop the imagination by which they later, as adults, will restrain themselves. A splendid example of the strength of the adult mind is recorded by Hermanus Hartogh Heys van Zouteveen, the Dutch translator of the work of Charles Darwin:
In a zoo in the Netherlands, a young giraffe had broken its leg and was therefore put down. The director of the zoo sent a piece of meat from this giraffe to a family he knew well, specifying that it was a piece of meat from a deer from Baron V.’s deer park. A few days later he paid the family a visit and asked them how the venison had tasted. ‘Absolutely delicious,’ they said. The lady companion of the family had found the venison very tender and was inexhaustible in her praise. Now the director of the zoo told them that it really wasn’t venison after all, but the meat of a giraffe. ‘What, that big, yellow animal?’ the lady companion cried out, and was struck by a violent attack of vomiting.
The image is stronger than the reality. If you don’t know that someone has spat in your food, you don’t taste it. The waiter who does it gets the usual tip. But if someone makes the claim, even if it isn’t true, you push your plate aside in disgust. In times of hunger, this was a tried and tested way of getting your hands on your neighbour’s food. According to Paul Rozin, things that have come from bodily orifices work very well: snot, drool, sperm, the remains of blood from a used tampon. But shit is always the best of them all. Shitting on a plate or eating out of a bedpan is the worst thing that can happen to you, certainly if it’s someone else’s shit or someone else’s bedpan. If you’re interested in a less lethal but equally effective variant of biological warfare, with a deterrent that’s cheap and universally available, shit is the obvious choice. It’s as if it were made for this purpose.
And it is. For a turd, being filthy is its ruling passion, the very point of its existence. The filthier the better, for it and for us. The filthier the turd, the greater the relief when you’ve got rid of it. A burden has fallen from your shoulders. But shitting is more than just a means of purging yourself of your waste. It’s also a goal. Far more than merely a negative pleasure, defecating is a positive act: with every turd that is ejected your body is left cleaner and purer. More your own.
You can’t be any cleaner than waste-free, and cleaner is better. It feels better, too. You look back on a successful session in the loo with the same satisfaction that you get from emptying the vacuum cleaner bag. The more you leave behind, the better the new person you become. There must be a market for a toilet with a built-in scale. Finally you’d be able to quantify your pleasure: another 185 grams cleaner! You could make do with a rough estimation, but that itself can be satisfying. You get the same surprise from an unexpectedly hefty haul from your ear or your nose, which makes nose-picking more popular than fishing. While fewer than 10 per cent of all Dutch people ever throw their line in the water, 91 per cent of the population regard their noses as rich fishing grounds, according to the national nose-picking test featured in the magazine GezondNU. Nose-picking can be tricky in public, but sitting in the car during rush hour and estimating the diameter of the little ball you’ve just rolled is a national pastime. And there isn’t a single healthy individual who doesn’t check to see what’s under their fingernail after having stuck it in their ear. There used to be special little spoons for this purpose, but they’ve been banned by the medical profession after having caused too many accidents. It’s better to have your ears syringed, not only because of the safety factor but also because it’s a unique opportunity to proudly share the results. Any good GP will let you peek into the receptacle to see what your ear has yielded, and you leave the doctor’s office with both ear and heart substantially lighter. It’s equally satisfying for the doctor. ‘Syringing the ear with lukewarm water to remove the mass within’ is ‘a rewarding task for the physician’, according to the hygienic advice found in the pages of Gezond blijven (1929). Even the nose was syringed back then. To prevent fluid from ending up in the Eustachian tube, the patient was not allowed to swallow during the irrigation procedure. The best results were derived by having him stick out his tongue.
All this messing about with ears and noses pales in comparison with the cleansing of the intestines. For thousands of years, people have been applying syringe to anus: the clyster or enema. The ancient Egyptians learned the art from their god Osiris, who had cribbed the idea from the ibis. As enviable as a cat can be as it licks between its hind legs with its delicious little tongue, that’s how dexterous an ibis is, reaching its nether regions with its long, curved beak full of water. In the mediaeval encyclopaedia Der naturen bloeme, Jacob van Maerlant reported the following with great admiration:
When the ibis cannot shit,
He takes water into his beak
And ever so gracefully
Purges himself below.
The Egyptians declared the ibis holy, and they imitated it. In the absence of a beak they cut off a length of hollow reed in order to divert the Nile and let it ripple sluggishly through their intestines. Specially selected doctors, the ‘Shepherds of the Anus’, administered medicines to them rectally. These doctors believed they could reach all the remote corners of the body via the rectum. Even blindness and toothache were attacked from that orifice. It would be centuries before the Swiss anatomist Caspar Bauhin (1560–1624) discovered a valve between the small and large intestine that blocks anything flowing in an unnatural direction. But this didn’t prevent later doctors from challenging even death itself by anal means. This meant, for example, that a drowning person could be resuscitated with the help of tobacco. ‘Take two full pipes of tobacco,’ wrote physician Johann Gottlieb Schäffer in 1757, ‘and light them. Put one in his bodily orifice and take the other in your mouth. Press the heads of the two pipes together and blow the smoke to the designated place.’ ‘However,’ added Johann Georg Krünitz in de Ökonomisch-technologische Encyklopädie of 1787, ‘one must take care that the pipe in the backside does not break off.’ It could take an hour to smoke out the more obstinate life spirits. Out of breath, the doctor would resort to the tobacco smoke enema. Many a sea rescue society still has one of these among its old paraphernalia.
Before the development of the syringe, the doctor simply used a funnel to clean out your intestines (1556).
The enema enjoyed its greatest triumph when bloodletting was at its peak. Both procedures were based on the same principle: getting the bad out. You flush the sorrow out of your body with tears, and in the same way you got rid of ailments by draining off the dirty blood or intestinal water. Today it’s just the other way around. In the hospital they no longer take the blood out of you but put it into you. If people from the eighteenth century were to witness a modern blood transfusion, they’d think it was the donor’s health that was being treated. Likewise, concern for healthy shitting has shifted to concern for healthy eating. As today’s thinking goes, the idea isn’t to get a bad thing out of the body as much as to put a good thing into it: fibre, vitamins, plasma, an injection. All the better when you learn that the hypodermic needle originated with the enema syringe.
The actual enema syringe was invented in the sixteenth century. Before then, people made do with their mouth, a cow’s bladder or a funnel. But even when real syringes were added to the arsenal it would take one or two centuries before the shit came squirting out of the intestines of Europe as if it were an Augean stable. First, however, there was one more obstacle to be removed: the practitioner. Administering an enema, like shitting, is something preferably done solo. Not only because of the shame involved, but also because of the clumsiness of so many domestic servants. As we read in Adrien Philippe, historian of the pharmacist’s trade, it took a long time to get the hang of it:
Now suddenly the barely practised hand begins to tremble. He searches but fails to find, hesitates, and needlessly exhausts himself. Then he sits down again, becomes entangled, and goes the wrong way; sometimes he is too lively, too enthusiastic, and is unable either to slow down or to stop; in other cases he is too frightened or too slow, and all he does is run skirmishes without daring to attack the target. Then he swings the weapon in sundry directions and touches that which should never be touched; or the hydraulic freight escapes through unobserved fissures and spurts over all the furniture in the room like wet rockets.
Those who were eager to take the business in hand themselves would have to wait for the improved enema syringe developed by Reinier de Graaf (1641–1673), today better known for the Graafian follicles in which a woman’s egg cells reach maturity. Thanks to a long, flexible tube between the pump and the mouth of the syringe it was possible to service your own backside from the front. This did not make the pharmacists happy. Now that anyone could do the job, they lost a chore whose distastefulness was more than compensated for by its remuneration. No doubt there also were pharmacists who took pleasure in it. But no sense complaining, De Graaf thought:
The loss that carrying out fewer treatments might entail is balanced by the increased demand for the substance needed for the enema, since the doctors would prescribe it more frequently and the patients, no longer afraid to show their bottoms to strangers, would be more willing to use it.
With Reinier de Graaf’s enema syringe you were finally in charge of your own bottom (1668).
In any case the path was cleared for the orgy of buttocks and syringes that took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The French court set the example. Among the courtiers of Louis XIV the syringes out-spouted the fountains. Even the Sun King had himself cleansed two thousand times before giving up hope of ever getting rid of his painful bouts of colic. Nor did the enema have any effect on melancholy, night sweats, tumours or shortness of breath, but that did nothing to hinder its popularity, much like that other old panacea, ‘bloodletting’, and today’s panacea, ‘sports’. Under French influence, the syringe conquered Holland, England, and the rest of Europe. Only the Germans refrained. The very thought of it made them blush to the roots of their hair, Krünitz wrote:
The great repugnance that all true, decent Germans harbour against enemas can perhaps be explained by their custom of facing each other eye to eye, fist to fist, and to sincerely loathe all dealings that have the least appearance of backstabbing or underhandedness.
Enemas became fashionable, especially among the ladies, who saw them as a means of rejuvenation. Now that the Sun King was having himself cleansed, even during affairs of state and with everyone looking on, the most prim and proper ladies lost their inhibitions. They would have a lady’s maid or girlfriend administer a cure when company was present, and the fact that people didn’t wear underpants back then made it that much easier. With the shameless enthusiasm that modern women have for Botox treatments, these earlier sisters hoped to syringe themselves to beauty. Thanks to the prevailing fashion you could buy enema solution in all fragrances and colours, or exchange them with your friends. The syringes themselves, with their gilded silver, mother-of-pearl or inlaid tortoiseshell, were proudly displayed on dressing tables. And, like the plastic surgeons of today, few physicians had a critical word to say about it. The doctors themselves became the butt of derision, however, led by the French playwright Molière. He poked fun at them in his L’amour médecin (1665), Le médecin malgré lui (1666), Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (1669) and Le malade imaginaire (1673). While Monsieur de Pourceaugnac fled from a pharmacist who was bearing a gigantic syringe, The Imaginary Illness originally ended with a ballet involving eight enema syringe bearers, six pharmacists and twenty-two doctors. There followed an outburst of cartoons from Holland full of syringe-happy physicians, partly meant to decry the current political abuses but also to depict ladies with their elegant bare bottoms being joyously impaled with enema syringes by well-dressed gentlemen.
Satire is more effective against peevishness than against outright nonsense. Enemas are back (though they never really left). With the help of fasting, juice cures and laxatives, people are still detoxing in search of health. ‘Detox’ is a new word for the old idea that shit becomes poisonous if you don’t dispel the last particle from your colon in a timely fashion. The ideal is to give your intestines a good purge from time to time, rather like spring cleaning: polyps on the table, baseboard and cabinets thoroughly scrubbed. In Great Britain, 5600 people a month have themselves cleansed by colon hydrotherapists; in the Netherlands there are dozens of colon therapy clinics, recommended as the way to get fit, to achieve emotional and spiritual balance, and to fight off numerous illnesses. Dozens of litres of water are pumped in through one tube and carried away by another. You can do it at home as well; in the Netherlands you’re given a sieve so that when you’re finished you can see what came out and what didn’t. American doctors associated with The Journal of Family Practice are less enthusiastic. Among the serious side effects they mention are intestinal cramps, diarrhoea, upset salt balance, kidney failure, intestinal perforations and infections. There have also been deaths. So while there is little scientific reason to scrub out your bowels, the idea of beginning with a clean slate every now and then seems irresistible.
Cleaning is nature’s obsession. Not only do humans spend the whole blessed day grooming themselves, but animals do too. Cats blissfully lick every delectable little cranny. Houseflies, which we dismiss as filthy, never stop polishing their wings and antennae. Big fish let little fish and crustaceans do their housecleaning for them by giving them access to their gills. The most important activity in the natural world is not eating or being eaten, nor is it mating and dying. It’s grooming. For many animals, being their own cleaning lady is what it’s all about. Grooming is usually more time-consuming than any other occupation. And rightly so: the tiny critters living in your own filth will do you in faster than any big predator from the outside world. That danger never lets up.
Dirt is tenacious. It obeys the law of conservation of matter more than any other material: nothing disappears into the void just like that. Usually cleaning simply means moving dirt around. From a hygienic point of view you’d be better off sniffing than blowing your snot into a handkerchief. In your trouser pocket the snot calmly keeps on brewing; in your stomach it’s rendered completely harmless. Dogs and cats keep themselves cleaner by licking than we do with our combs and brushes. To us, licking is dirty, especially if our pets try getting us involved. Sloosh! One lick from a Great Dane and it’s as if you had just come out of the shower. But clean feels different. There’s enough spit on one dog’s tongue for a thousand postage stamps and a hundred envelopes. That snout has just poked its way into a fresh turd. You feel sorry for an animal that has to walk around all day with such a filthy length of muscle in its mouth. Yet you often hold something quite similar in your hands. Just as big and slippery, just as supple, and just as filthy as the dog’s tongue. There’s no dog connected to it, however; it’s a tongue that’s in business for itself. We know it as ‘the rag’. You use it to wipe down the table, clean out the gutters, and dab out blood and egg stains. It makes things clean and dirty at the same time. As you wipe down that table, you’re introducing bacilli from the last job in expectation of a third, when you’ll rub in the filth from the previous two chores. Rags are to bacilli what aeroplanes are to us: they close the gap between two distant points. A bacterium can swim short distances by itself, as long as its watery world doesn’t dry out. Fortunately, a tidy housewife usually comes along with a wet rag to help her little housemates continue on their way.
Grease goes from your hands to your napkin, saliva from the speaker to the audience, shit from the intestines to the toilet. Dirt here becomes dirt there, dirt there becomes dirt here. And dirt that doesn’t move on just stays put. Dirt is invincible, thanks to its adhesive strength. That’s what makes dirt so dirty. It stays where it is, and if you succeed in getting rid of it, it sticks to whatever you used to remove it. The worst disgust you can feel is with dirt that sticks to you and thereby becomes part of you. Those who handle pitch are easily soiled.
Dirt on your body inspires fear. You can’t run away from it. It isn’t an enemy that you can attack because it’s on or in your body. It has taken possession of you. William Miller uses the concept of ‘horror’ to describe such fear-filled repugnance. As in a horror film, there’s no escape. The evil lodges itself in you, and when it comes out it doesn’t let you go.
Shit is right at home in the body. Shit forms inside you like a malevolent demon that won’t let itself be driven out without leaving traces behind. The turd splashes into the toilet on its way to the caverns of the sewer, but there are always little lumps that remain, brown stuff around the anus, in the crack between the buttocks, latched onto the hairs above the deep abyss like true survivors. Sometimes you can feel a speck of shit, broken off the last turd and hanging from your arse like a little tail, too light to mean anything to the force of gravity, ignoring the futile squeezing of the sphincter, a disgusting barnacle. So there you are, stuck, half upright, your trousers around your ankles, your backside too filthy to pull them up. You’ve soiled your own outside with your own inside. There’s no turning back. Nothing for it but to clean yourself up. But how do you get rid of all that goo? Lick it off?
Humans aren’t limber enough for that. Most Westerners make do with paper instead of a tongue. It’s an unequal fight. Paper is virtually powerless when it comes to shit’s sticking power. With every wipe the paper seizes remaining bits of poo, only to be forced to surrender them to the hairs of the crack in your butt. One sheet of paper isn’t enough, if only because you might perforate it with your finger. But even after many sheets, you wouldn’t dare use the last one to wipe your lips. Manufacturers laugh up their sleeves. By taking advantage of our fear of our own filth they’ve enslaved us to something we can never get enough of: one more sheet, then one more. Only after eight to ten sheets does the average user dare to re-engage with life beyond the bathroom door. So with a family it doesn’t take much to go through a roll of toilet paper. That explains the success of Hans Klenk, whose ‘Hakle 1000-Blatt-Rolle’ made him a leader in the German toilet paper market, at 500 million euros a year. Yet specialised toilet paper hasn’t been around all that long. It appeared at more or less the same time as sewer systems, at the end of the nineteenth century. ‘The original and only genuine Gayetty’s Medicated Paper’ (patented 1871) was recommended as a treatment for haemorrhoids. Gayetty claimed that haemorrhoids were caused by wiping with ordinary paper, which had become available with the distribution of daily newspapers. From my own youth I distinctly remember the old newspapers neatly cut into sheets and hung from a wire on the door of the ‘little house’, below the cut-out heart. Pages from books were also used. Lord Chesterfield (1694–1773) advised his son in a letter to always carry a cheap edition of the Latin poets around with him. Then he would have something good to read on the toilet, and with a practical application for every page he read. The letter written by the German composer Max Reger to the critic Rudolf Louis in 1906 is in the same vein:
I’m sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon I’ll have it behind me.
In America, mail-order catalogues were popular as toilet paper until the 1930s, when the switch was made from highly absorbent matte paper to smooth, glossy paper. Sulking city dwellers now had to pay good money to wipe their arses. In the countryside many people remembered that you could get by without paper by using corn cobs, and full barrels of cobs were always close at hand. Out in the fields there were twigs, stones, leaves, bones or handfuls of grass. Monks in the Middle Ages used old rags or potsherds. But for centuries, even those in opulent circles never considered wasting something as costly as paper. At the French court, Madame de Maintenon, the second wife of Louis XIV, used sheep’s wool. Cardinal Richelieu preferred hemp.
Today you’re not likely to see red-faced individuals at campgrounds walking around with rolls of hemp or sheep’s wool under their arms. It’s got to be paper. But it still isn’t something that can be openly discussed. In advertisements for toilet paper you never see turds; what you do see are teddy bears and fleecy clouds, as if the product being sold was a buttock softener and not a shit catcher. Modern people are accustomed to advertising nonsense, but in the sixteenth century the sight of little bears on a poster for bottom wipers would easily have given rise to confusion.
It’s possible that François Rabelais would have taken it literally, as his Gargantua and Pantagruel testifies:
I have, answered Gargantua, by a long and curious experience, found out a means to wipe my bum. Once I did wipe me with a lady’s neckerchief, and after that I wiped me with some ear-pieces of hers made of crimson satin, but there was such a number of golden spangles in them (turdy round things, a pox take them) that they fetched away all the skin of my tail with a vengeance. This hurt I cured by wiping myself with a page’s cap. Afterwards I wiped my tail with a hen, with a cock, with a pullet, with a calf’s skin, with a hare, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an attorney’s bag, with a montero, with a coif, with a falconer’s lure.
But, to conclude, I say and maintain, that there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs. And believe me therein upon mine honour, for you will thereby feel in your nockhole a most wonderful pleasure, both in regard of the softness of the said down and of the temperate heat of the goose, which is easily communicated to the bum-gut and the rest of the inwards, in so far as to come even to the regions of the heart and brains. And think not that the felicity of the heroes and demigods in the Elysian fields consisteth either in their asphodel, ambrosia, or nectar, as our old women here used to say; but in this, according to my judgment, that they wipe their tails with the neck of a goose, holding her head betwixt their legs.
Modern people are not likely to reach for a little bird or a teddy bear when they need toilet paper, but they’re not told how to use the stuff either. It doesn’t come with instructions. So people improvise. Staying seated while wiping is awkward because you can’t reach what has to be reached. There’s no hole in the front of the pot, as there were in the ancient Romans’ public toilets. Many people today simply stand up. But in this position you automatically squeeze your buttocks together, smearing the shit from one buttock to the other. The best way is to lean forward so your buttocks open up obligingly to let themselves be pampered.
How do you pamper a buttock? That depends on the buttock. But certainly not with paper. Even a little bird or a teddy bear would be better than that! Anyone who has tried to clean greasy hands with a paper napkin during a posh dinner will understand that cleaning an arse with paper is doomed from the start. People don’t wash their feet or dishes or brush their teeth with paper, but when it comes to the filthiest of all filthy places, the very abode of the devil on earth, paper is considered good enough. You and I, we wipe our bottoms with paper on the authority of our parents, who in turn learned it from their parents. But they never sat on clean buttocks either. I understand why people who fancy themselves clean put on fresh underpants every day. At least that helps a little in removing the brown bits that were first swept under the rug, as it were. Moving filth around in the loo is suspiciously like moving paper around at the office. It doesn’t solve anything. To really get rid of filth you have to transform it until it’s no longer recognisable as such.
This is best done with water. In the eastern and southern countries of the world that’s common knowledge. There they wash their backsides the same way they wash their feet and dishes and teeth: with water. Every toilet has a bowl of water at hand, or everyone carries their own bottle with them. In countries where water is in short supply this is a practice readily accepted. But in countries like England and the Netherlands, full of canals and rivers, mist and fog, the tap is located on the other side of the bathroom door where you can’t reach it when you need it, because that’s where people are supposed to wash the hands that they soiled with the paper that got dirty without doing any cleaning. While people in the West fill the toilet with enormous amounts of water to flush the turd from sight, they can’t set aside a little bowl of water to wash away its traces.
Water is virtually a universal solvent. Inorganic substances are broken down into their salts, the salts to their ions. Organic substances are quickly converted by the microbes that flourish there. Thus water removes practically all stains: the dirty dishes, a bad taste in your mouth, the sins of the world, and shit. In a soggy climate like that in the Netherlands, a turd outdoors disappears in just a few days. People wouldn’t complain so much about dog droppings if so many new droppings weren’t being made and if people didn’t love complaining so much.
Yet water isn’t what it used to be. These days, the symbol of purity itself is in need of a good washing. There are vast water purification plants outside every city. Natural purification by means of evaporation and precipitation can no longer keep up with the level of pollution. Before the fresh rain ends up in your glass of water, it’s already gone through the retorts of many factories. And the intestines of many little creatures. On its way from retort to intestine to retort to intestine, water has had to swallow a wealth of dirty substances. And dirty substances are only the beginning. There are dirty microbes in it too. We knew that even before the invention of purification plants. Microbes were discovered back in the seventeenth century by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, one of the first scientists to use a microscope. Water turned out to be full of ‘animalcules’, tiny animals. From then on you didn’t have to travel long distances to see strange life forms; each drop of water contained an immense universe with countless bizarre little creatures, all within reach. Never before had anyone discovered something so tremendous. But it left people cold. For two centuries, nobody cared a fig about the tiny little ‘animalcules’. Until 1876, when Robert Koch demonstrated that they could make you ill. Deathly ill. One after another, the causes of tuberculosis, cholera, typhus, diphtheria, tetanus, plague and syphilis were quickly unmasked. Suddenly we appeared to be besieged by a danger as immense as it was invisible. We’ve never gotten over the shock. In the words of medical columnist Lewis Thomas, we’re still living
in a world where the microbes are always trying to get at us, to tear us cell from cell, and we only stay alive and whole through diligence and fear.
We still think of human disease as the work of an organised, modernised kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the most visible and centrally placed of our adversaries.
Microscopic riffraff are bad company, and like all bad company they keep hanging around. If they don’t cling to our bodies directly, they adhere to the dust we inhale, the drops we drink. Every coughing fit is a form of public transport to a virus; every bystander is a terminus or transfer station. As a cougher you really don’t want this on your conscience. If you’re properly behaved you cover your mouth with your hand. But the little travellers couldn’t wish for anything better. All they have to do is wait for you to shake hands with someone else.
You can catch a cold from viruses in someone else’s cough, and bacteria in drops of saliva cause tuberculosis, a disease from which ten thousand Dutch people died each year at the end of the nineteenth century. Shit can give you cholera. The bacteria in a turd are just as skilled at flying as those in a mouth. But with ten to a hundred billion bacteria per gram of shit, when the final splash comes there are enough of them spattering your bottom, moving on to your fingers after wiping, or sticking to the rim of the toilet to put your antimicrobial toilet block to shame. Washing your hands doesn’t really help; before you even get that far you’ve dropped clusters of bacteria off on the handle of the flushing mechanism, ready for the next lift. If you really wanted to reduce the number of bacteria once and for all, you’d have to scrub your hands like a surgeon for minutes at a time with antiseptic soap without touching the tap. Nevertheless, most people—their hands full of new bacteria, having given the shit a good rub into the hair between their buttocks—are firmly convinced that they come out of the toilet cleaner than when they went in. The tidy Dutch never say they’re going to empty their bowels but that they’re going to wash their hands, and fastidious Americans call their toilet a ‘bathroom’. Actually, the toilet is more and more frequently being placed in the bathroom. With every push of the flushing mechanism a cloud of faeces particles from the toilet can easily reach a distance of five metres—over to the sink, over to your toothbrush. Even so, the toilet is to be preferred to the kitchen. Kitchen sink and kitchen towel are paradises for bacteria. This is where all the rubbish from the entire kitchen come together. If I were a colleague from Mars, an American microbiologist once said, I’d shit in the kitchen sink and eat on the toilet. But it isn’t at the kitchen counter that you run the most risk. An old-fashioned housewife is safer from bacteria than a modern career woman with her digital arsenal. In a four-year study in five major American cities it was shown that 550 pathogenic bacteria were present on a single computer keyboard, 400 times more than on a seat in a public toilet. According to an article in the Journal of Hospital Infection from 2006, you’re much more likely to contract meningitis or swine flu by making a phone call, working on a computer, or withdrawing money than by licking the seat of a toilet in a public cinema. Mobile phones are particularly active breeding grounds. Fifty million bacteria have been counted on a single phone. Yet computers and mobile phones don’t evoke anywhere near the disgust they deserve. They haven’t been around long enough. Mothers don’t yet teach their children that plastic is dirty, so it’s way too early for such an aversion to be genetically ingrained.
For pious Christians, shit is a product of the Fall. Before evil entered the world there was nothing to defecate. God never did it, of course, not even in his human form as Jesus. In the Bible he ate and drank to his heart’s content, but there’s no mention of defecating. But what happens when someone eats Jesus in the form of the host, which has really changed into His Body? According to the heretical teachings of the Stercoranists, the consecrated host ended up as a turd, just like ordinary bread or meat; so people who went to Communion during the fast committed a sin because they weren’t withholding from eating. Rome strongly condemned these ideas, which conflict with every form of devotion. No one found it necessary to test them by eating nothing but consecrated hosts for a week and seeing if any shit came out. Shitting God is simply an internal contradiction; good and evil do not go together. That’s just what Milan Kundera thought in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
When I was small and would leaf through the Old Testament retold for children and illustrated in engravings by Gustave Dore, I saw the Lord God standing on a cloud. He was an old man with eyes, nose, and a long beard, and I would say to myself that if He had a mouth, He had to eat. And if He ate, He had intestines. But that thought always gave me a fright, because even though I come from a family that was not particularly religious, I felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious.
Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God’s image. Either/or: either man was created in God’s image—and God has intestines!—or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him.
Martin Luther eagerly seized on shit’s bad reputation to sing God’s praises. ‘To illustrate his own worthlessness and that of the world in relation to the greatness of God’, he compared himself to ‘ripe shit’ and the world to ‘a gigantic arse’: ‘For this reason we had better go our separate ways’. The smell of shit rises from all of Luther’s work like a metaphor for everything that is of the devil, with the detested pope leading the way. ‘The pope is a bishop of the devil and the devil himself, yes, the shit that the devil himself has shat in the church; that is the shit by which they say you will be blessed.’ Shit was the obvious choice because Luther suffered from chronic constipation. His struggle in the loo was for him equivalent to the hopeless task of freeing himself from the evil within. But it gave him plenty of time to think. It was during one of his conf licts with his intestinal demons that the basic principle of the Reformation occurred to him—that we cannot expect to be saved by works but by faith. Luther made no secret of the source of his divine revelation: ‘on the privy in the tower’ of the Wittenberg monastery. How different the course of Western civilisation would have been, sighed shit expert Dave Praeger in 2007, ‘if Luther had eaten more fibre’.
The Lutherans of 1545 didn’t give a crap for the pope. They knew just what to do with his tiara.
Throughout all of church history, material filth and spiritual filth are closely intertwined. It begins right away in the Old Testament, when God declares a large portion of His own creation to be unclean. Seldom had He been so inscrutable. In their attempts to explain the Old Testament laws of impurity concerning pigs, newly delivered mothers and excrement, centuries of scholars tried to out-rationalise each other. Pigs are useless in the desert, newly delivered mothers need their rest, and shit carries disease. In their divine wisdom, priests and prophets were supposedly providing sensible medical advice wrapped in pre-scientific religion. For believers, however, health was of minor importance. What they were interested in was the salvation of their immortal souls, not household tips. ‘Even if some of Moses’s dietary rules were hygienically beneficial,’ writes Mary Douglas, ‘it is a pity to treat him as an enlightened public health administrator, rather than as a spiritual leader.’ The American philosopher William James called the custom of basing the religious concept of ‘impurity’ on hygienic motives as ‘medical materialism’: ‘we kill germs, they ward off spirits’. But ‘we’ are still not very different from ‘them’. Most people would refuse to accept the transplanted heart of a murderer, according to an article in Harper’s Magazine (2009), even if their lives were at stake. Likewise, Paul Rozin’s experimental subjects wouldn’t think of putting on a sweater that had belonged to Adolf Hitler, although it had been washed and drycleaned. Apparently they had the idea that some ineradicable evil from the former owner was still adhering to it. How easy it would be for that evil to permeate your own body and work its way into your very soul.
If the evil is less tenacious then at least you can try to scrub it away. Even a child understands that. A great many children have had their mouths washed out with soap after having said certain dirty words. But adults also believe in spiritual cleansing with soap and water. According to the magazine Science of 8 September 2006, people who feel guilty are more inclined to wash their hands than those who don’t. This is called the ‘Macbeth effect’ after the tragedy by Shakespeare in which Lady Macbeth desperately tries to get her hands clean after the murder of King Duncan. Although most people don’t commit murder, everybody feels a little guilty about something—guilty enough to feel like a better person once you’ve washed your hands, brushed your teeth and relieved yourself of urine and excrement. It’s as if you had washed your soul too.
Mario Vargas Llosa, in his erotic novel In Praise of the Stepmother, describes how Don Rigoberto felt after successfully relieving himself: ‘there invaded him that intimate rejoicing at a duty fulfilled and a goal attained, that same feeling of spiritual cleanliness that had once upon a time possessed him as a schoolboy at La Recoleta, after he had confessed his sins and done the penance assigned him by the father confessor.’ Nothing lends itself more readily to metaphorical use than dirt and washing. You don’t need a mop to resolve dirty business. Smut can be got rid of without soap. It isn’t the body you cleanse in the baptismal font as much as the soul. If the dirt is of the devil, then washing is a form of exorcism. In this way you can elevate not only yourself but your entire tribe as well. At least that’s what the nineteenth-century hygienists thought. While the family doctor was concerned with healthy people, the hygienist was concerned with a healthy society. In The Skin, written in 1860, Dutch physician G. D. L. Huet’s argument for washing the skin was all about body and spirit:
Who among us has not discovered the stimulating and reviving effect that a fresh bath, an adequate cleansing of the body, can have on our spirits? How unpleasant one feels in a dirty suit and grubby skin? Yes—let me say it—how more or less ashamed one feels about oneself, while after washing this shame gives way to a heightened sense of self-respect.
Such arguments were not without self-interest. The upper classes felt physically threatened by the contagious diseases that bred in the slums. Tidiness and purity could only succeed with an appeal to conscience. The primary usefulness of light and fresh air was to make you feel like a cleaner person; actual cleanliness then followed of its own accord. But the upper classes weren’t entirely sold on this plan. Even the socialist writer George Orwell took a gloomy view. No differences in education, upbringing, race or religion were great enough to shake his belief that all people are equal, yet physical revulsion for him was an insurmountable barrier. He wasn’t bothered nearly as much by murderers or sodomites as he was by people who slurped their food. Travelling through the pre-war industrial areas of northern England in The Road to Wigan Pier, he confirms the bias of the European bourgeoisie—that they could never regard a labourer as their equal—with four terrible words: ‘the lower classes smell’. Labourers would have to be cleaned before they could be uplifted. And so it was. The working class were scrubbed and polished up a rung, with tidy little gardens and clean bathrooms, but they in turn began looking down on the lower class from which they themselves had risen.
History repeats itself. In the classic The Civilising Process (1939), sociologist Norbert Elias shows how squalid manners have been tamed since the Middle Ages with the help of class distinction. Erasmus knew as early as 1530 that a snotty nose was not the done thing. A peasant blows his nose in his cap or clothing, a peddler wipes it on his arm or elbow. Using your hand and then rubbing it on your clothing isn’t much nicer. ‘It is proper to catch the filth of the nostrils in a handkerchief’, Elias writes in his book of etiquette On the Politeness of Children’s Manners. But it is not proper, adds the Galateo of Giovanni della Casa, archbishop of Benevento in 1558, to unfold the handkerchief after using it and ‘to look inside as if pearls and rubies had fallen out of your brain’. In the absence of a handkerchief, Erasmus concedes, the hand may also be used, but ‘as soon as the snot is cast to the floor, the nose having been blown with two fingers, one must immediately rub it out with the foot’. La Civilité Françoise of 1714 also allows you to wipe away spittle that has landed on the floor, as long as you never spit so far that you have to go searching for the spittle before you can put your foot on it.
The upper classes were careful to obey the rules so as not to be taken for members of a lower class, out of shame. You had to uphold your social position at all costs. And you couldn’t do that with a dripping nose or with your trousers around your knees. If people see you like that you feel as if you’d been caught, you blush to the roots of your hair, and you want the earth to open up and swallow you whole. As the lower strata adopted the rules of the upper, shame was replaced by revulsion; one avoided squalid behaviour not because it might disgust other people but because it disgusted oneself. People are embarrassed if someone is disgusted by them, and they are disgusted if someone behaves disgracefully. Civilised people defecate in isolation mainly because they are disgusted by the beast that dwells within them that has to shit so urgently. But shame came first.
In the beginning was shame. It’s in the Bible; check it out. Right in the first book, Genesis, after the Fall, describing Adam and Eve: ‘And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.’ They had each other to be ashamed in front of. But even when no one else is around to see you in the altogether, as Erasmus knew, you must expose yourself with the appropriate hesitation, for the angels are always present. There’s nothing they’d rather see in children than hesitation, the companion and guard of modesty. While few modern people believe in angels anymore, the feeling that you’re always being watched is still with us. It’s even with the current icon of shamelessness, the German writer Charlotte Roche, who has shared her most intimate perversions with hundreds of thousands of readers in Wetlands. During her adolescence she exchanged tampons with her best friend Irene. From one red cunt to the other, from the other back to the first. ‘Through our old, stinky blood, we were bound together like Old Shatterhand and Winnetou. Blood sisters.’ But in an interview with Vrij Nederland, Charlotte Roche confessed that as a teenager while getting dressed in her room at home she would suddenly find herself fumbling. She was embarrassed in the presence of the boy bands who were looking down at her from the posters on her wall.
Shame is inextricably linked to civilisation. Every turd, every fart reminds a civilised person of their bestial origins. Animals themselves know no shame. They mate openly and naked, and shit with you looking on. Except for that one cat I heard about (and with great sympathy) who refused to use its litter box if the household dog was watching.
Shit is filthy. That’s just the way it is. But shit is something you can’t live without. To come to terms with your filthy excrement there are three paths open to you. First, you can tame your shit. Keep it out of sight, eliminate the stench, defecate furtively. This will cost you miles of toilet paper, thousands of toilet doors, stacks of etiquette books, handfuls of money. The second method goes one step further: deny everything with a brazen face. Act as if human beings didn’t shit at all. Be silent as the grave about it. That’s what the Victorians did. The fact that they invented modern sewer systems is no accident. Sewers enabled them to spirit every turd away from daily life; hygiene was merely a by-product. As long as everyone pretended to know nothing about it, there was nothing to know about. We still do this. Everyone knows what kinds of unsavoury things are taking place behind the doors neatly marked LADIES and GENTS, and everyone plays dumb. But with this method you might as well not have defecated at all. There’s no fun in it.
Fortunately there’s a third way: enjoy it. Take your time. Ignore the raised eyebrows when you spend more than fifteen minutes in the loo. Relax. Wait patiently until the pleasure makes its way from the lower to the upper regions. Don’t let the smell offend you; it’s only yours. Filthy is filthy, but—like sex—it can also be glorious. As a child you knew this without thinking about it. Splashing in the mud, pinching pimples by yourself or with a friend, eating your boogers, playing with your food, looking to see who has the longest turd—you hardly had any time left for wasting. Back when you were young, party stores lived up to their name, with their fake turds, artificial puke and stink bombs. One or two kids figured out how to sublimate the fun as adults. Kids who messed around with shit became sculptors; a few boys who liked to pull the legs off flies became biologists. Most of them have lost the knack, however. For years, their passion has been held in check by disgust. But there’s no need for this. Because passion and disgust almost balance each other out, only a small push is necessary to tip the scales to the passion side. You can start on the toilet. Take it easy; don’t push too hard.
Is anything coming?