People don’t come in single units. They come in pairs, in teams or in hordes. Ladies come in reading clubs, old folks come by bus, soldiers by graveyard. We are a social species. Although the newspapers are full of anti-social behaviour—man hit on the head with a blunt instrument, woman raped—these are exceptions. Otherwise they wouldn’t end up in the newspaper. You and I, we went another day without raping anyone, and our blunt instruments have never come out of the drawer. We put the rubbish bin out on the kerb and wished the man next door good morning. Because we cannot do otherwise.
Most animals aren’t so stupid. They don’t live social but solitary lives. A tiger doesn’t need the company of another tiger until mating season. A real cat walks by itself, unlike wolves and dogs, who like to stick their noses in the bums of their fellows and vice versa. For them there’s strength in numbers. But they, too, suffer from the curse of every social animal: never-ending conflict. They may work together to snatch a cake, but once that common cake has been snatched they fight each other to gain possession of the biggest piece. A solitary animal like a cat looks on such behaviour with disdain. It doesn’t need a slice of cake; it would rather have a cake all its own.
Our species is social, alas. Like a stray horse along the roadside or a wolf without its pack, a human being is constantly yearning for fellow humans. If they’re not at hand, loneliness threatens. You see them in the newspaper or on television, and, if you look carefully, behind the curtains in your own street: lonely people, waiting for the son who never comes to call, for a strolling cat in need of patting, for death. Deeply distressing. But the opposite can also assume unbearable proportions, and there isn’t even a word for it. I can feel awfully excessified sometimes. After a whole day in groups—the family, school, work, card club—you can get fed up with your own species. Sometimes, in the middle of a party, I suddenly wonder what I’m doing there. Then someone will say we to me again. The we that suggests we’re all in this together, the we that fortunately is not them—the we that they conclude I am a part of. The we of the nurse in the hospital. When you’re lying there helpless in bed, and you know that tomorrow she’s going to ask you again, ‘So, Mr Dekkers, have we moved our bowels today?’ That we. If ever there was a place where you’d rather be an I than a we, it’s in a hospital room when you have to go. How many sick people blanch with the embarrassment they feel at such a time among their fellow humans? I’m a loner, personally. Rather than doing big things in a team, I prefer doing small things in a corner. But where? In this vast sea of humanity, where can you find a deserted island to recover your equanimity? Where they finally leave you alone?
On the toilet. There’s privacy in the privy. You can withdraw into a public loo without anyone saying a word. A toilet is an escape capsule for fleeing from excessification. In solitary seclusion you find the rest you need for the one thing that has to be done there. If you have to be alone to shit, you have to shit to be alone. Here you can do what is strictly forbidden everywhere else: sit on your bare arse, stink to your heart’s content, pull globs of poo from your bum hair, and—a mortal sin for any social animal—be by yourself for a few minutes. For this little space of time the individual is more than a part of the masses.
As a pretext for these privileges the toilet is designed as a more or less refined shit sanatorium. Over the centuries humanity has devoted to this effort the same abundance of ingenuity as it has to all those patented mousetraps, cherry pitters and nutcrackers. But all the toilet variants are based on the principle of the hole. Whether it’s a pit in the ground, a platinum pot, a French squat toilet or the most modern Japanese facility, they all consist of a hole with something attached to it. The excrement comes out of your body via your arsehole and passes into oblivion via the hole in the toilet. You cover the pit over, toss out the contents of the pot, or flush the toilet. In all three cases the actual work is done by gravity. In a mediaeval castle, the turd fell out of the hole in the toilet, went between the walls of the tower and into the moat. Privileged citizens had an oriel—a garderobe—with a hole in it. Little had changed since our ape days when we just shat in the open whenever the need arose. In the eighteenth century you still had to make sure you weren’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. The residents of Edinburgh would call ‘gardy-loo’ every morning before tossing the contents of their chamber pots onto the street from five storeys up. As a respectable passer-by you had to understand that what they meant was gardez l’eau (watch out for the water) and call back ‘haud yer han’ while making yourself scarce before your wig got covered in shit.
But even without gravity you can run into problems. Weightless shit floats through a spaceship just as easily as the space traveller himself does. On short journeys the first astronauts did what many insects do. These insects collect their faeces in their intestines until they moult, when the shit is shed with the skin. The astronauts ate mostly low-fibre food before take-off and held their shit until they were released from their spacesuits. For emergencies, NASA supplied gloves and plastic bags. It was a messy business, but the bags were designed to adhere to the astronaut bottoms with self-adhesive strips so they could be filled before the shit escaped and soiled the buttocks, trousers and cabin. Today the excrement is sucked out of the anus by means of an ingenious vacuum pump.
On earth, gravity has traditionally been given a helping hand with a splash of water from a cistern. This method has been known since 1596, when the poet John Harington, godson of Queen Elizabeth I, described it in detail in The Metamorphosis of Ajax. With its cistern, flush pipe and odour valve, this toilet (known as a jakes) looked remarkably modern. Sir John built one for himself in Kelston (near Bath) and one for his godmother at Richmond Palace. But his brilliant idea failed to catch on. He had forgotten to invent a sewer to go with it, and without good drainage a water-f lushing system makes little sense. In addition, the lower classes didn’t have the money for such toilets and the upper classes had no need for them. Well-to-do citizens preferred a French invention: the back stairs. Servants could discreetly carry off the turds of their master by going down the back stairs without anyone else in the house noticing.
By the end of the nineteenth century the water closet was complete. The only thing that would change was the fashion.
It would be centuries before the water closet became commonplace. The name took hold in the nineteenth century as a counterbalance to the earth closet, which was invented by the Reverend Henry Moule in 1860 and which produced compost. You sat on a toilet seat, shat into a bucket, and pulled a handle, thereby covering the poo with soil or ash. But what good was a bucketful of night soil in a metropolis like London? That’s when the new sewer system came in handy, especially now that inventors like Thomas Crapper had introduced improvements to the water closet such as an automatic cistern and an S-bend. After that, one nouveauté followed another. In 1863 Crapper took out a patent on the self-rising toilet seat, which would lift up after use with the help of weights. Production was suspended after complaints came in from clumsy users who kept getting slapped on the bottom. The deep flusher was more successful. Here your excrement was immediately plunged into the water with a splash, after which it sank into a bottomless pit. This has been the standard model in many countries for more than a century, but in countries like the Netherlands many health services prefer the plateau toilet, in which the shit remains displayed on a plateau until you flush so you have a chance to say goodbye. The deep flusher qualifies as the most hygienic, but it can cost you your life. Flushing away your turd before you can inspect it is just as foolish as emptying your plate with your eyes closed. You should never let reports from your own insides go unread. They might contain a cry of distress: a strange shape, a trace of blood. If automobile seatbelts are compulsory, then plateau toilets should be, too, and for the same reason.
For all the technical innovations, the main purpose of the toilet has always been the same: seclusion. Whether you dive into the bushes at the edge of the village or pamper your buttocks on a heated seat, privacy comes first and foremost. Even a nudist likes to sit by himself behind a sand dune. In order to survive as an individual in a social group you need your own little domain. A territory. Within the cacophony of a colony of seagulls, every gull has its own nest; in the tangle of skyscrapers, every New Yorker is able to find his own apartment. Your own front door, your own garden fence and your own nameplate all protect you from your fellow humans. Both in the zoo and elsewhere, fences don’t so much keep the residents in as keep the visitors out. Cheetahs and antelopes can easily jump over their railings, but they’d rather sit safely behind them. Set your parakeet free to fly around the living room and it will fly back into its cage as soon as it smells danger.
For many animals, having their own territory is just as important as having their own nose, their own stomach and their own intestines. Just as their body consists of organs, their territory is divided into sectors, each with its own function. The same goes for humans. The bedroom is where your bed is, the hall is where you hang up your hat, and the living room is where the biggest television is located. And there’s sure to be a fixed place for the toilet. You don’t shit in bed and you don’t eat in the loo.
Nothing beats your own toilet for the best defecating experience. When you leave the house you just have to make do. Many people hold it until they get back home. So you’re very privileged if you have your own toilet at work. But possession makes you vulnerable, as we learn from Über das Klo by journalist Horst Vetten:
I had a Büro mit Klo [office with toilet]. Naturally everyone knew that it was meant for the boss, extra-territorial, off limits, privato. No one touched my toilet.
After a while I had a falling out with my partner on the staff floor. He did not have a toilet. But one day he used my Klo. Our relations reached the stage of a Sicilian vendetta. From his own office twenty metres away he wrote me letters that travelled by roundabout route via the city post office because he wanted to send them registered. And he used my Klo. He would walk past me, bound for the toilet, grinning broadly. I heard him shut the door, then nothing for a very long time, followed by a flush, seat banging, door opening and closing. Him walking past my door again, with the broad grin—I thought I was going to explode.
My career as staff member foundered on this toilet. He stole it from me. He occupied my intimate domain. He emasculated me! I sacked myself—but it was his fault. He didn’t give a shit about me!
Vetten’s story is one that many animals would understand. Although animals don’t have toilets with flush mechanisms like we do, they set great store in having a territory of their own with their own shitting corner. Even pigs instinctively seek out a fixed location for their excrement, as far from their sleeping area as possible. Flies use our lamps as toilets. My mother couldn’t stand it, all those little turds on the cloth lampshade over the table. She didn’t understand. Why there, of all places, in plain view? At first we thought they were drawn to the light. Later we found that the flies liked the lamps even when they were switched off. It would take years before I learned at biology school what it is that attracts flies. They do it for the company. And to mate. Flies like to be where other flies are, and a lamp is often their first choice because it hangs in the middle of the room and makes a perfect point of orientation for excursions and round trips. And a perfect toilet. In addition, flies are capable of performing a trick that we have yet to master: they crap in two colours. Among the black turds you can clearly distinguish little white ones. The black turds are the real ones; the white ones indicate that the fly has been too greedy and has thrown up. My mother would turn red with exasperation; my father quoted the only German poem he knew, something he had found once in a toilet:
Scheisse in der Lampenschale
Gibt gedämpftes Licht im Saale
Shit on the lampshade at night
Gives the room a mellow light
The flies don’t care if the light is gedämpfte—mellow—or not. As for other animals, their shitting territory is usually clearly marked by smell. The same is true with people. For a long time after you’ve used it, your smell keeps other people from taking over the territory you’ve leased. But what we want more than anything else is to be screened off visually, with a bush if need be but preferably with a real, honest-to-God cubicle. Better a stinking barrel in a cubicle than a high-tech super pot out in the open. My loo is my castle. But there’s something quite remarkable about such a castle. Consider this:
Go to a toilet. It doesn’t matter where or which: your own, in the pub, at work, or at an elevation of ten thousand metres in a 747. Shut the door and sit on the pot. Look around you. What do you see? That you can’t see very far. The mark of a good toilet is that it’s small. A cubicle, a cell, a booth. A good toilet gives you the impression that it’s been built around the user. He just fits. Custom made. Nicely done. If you build a large house, resist the temptation to equip it with a grand toilet salon. Better to make several small toilets than one big one, so everyone can realise their ideal: your own shit in your own pot. Reaching out from the pot, you should be able to touch most of the walls if the toilet’s any good. Not hygienic, but instructive. A biologist in a good toilet can see it right away: these distances are not random. Here Protagoras’s statement that ‘man is the measure of all things’ is all the more valid. Just as an acre traditionally was understood as the size of a piece of farmland large enough to feed one family, so one toilet can be the size of a piece of house large enough for one person to relieve himself in. The architectural dimensions of one toilet correspond nicely with the biological dimensions of a special little area: your individual territory.
Every person has one. It’s the area around you within which you will not tolerate any other random human. Anyone who manages to penetrate this space one way or another is either a loved one or an arsehole. Unless there’s no choice, like in a crowded train or a lift. There, too, you’re quickly overcome by embarrassment. Just exchanging glances can become too much. Try it. Fix your gaze on the train passenger sitting across from you. That’s all. No matter what happens, keep looking. First the person being looked at will act as if they don’t notice; at the very most they’ll cling a bit more tightly to the book they’re reading, not a single word of which will now get through to them. Then they’ll try to avoid your gaze by looking in another direction. Quickly the avoidance becomes a struggle. Like a snake in the throes of death, the gaze wriggles through the train carriage. But your looking also sets off a series of internal changes in your fellow passenger. Their breathing visibly increases, their heart starts racing, their blood pressure rises, hormones sow panic everywhere, muscles refuse to do what they’re told. And all this because of a glance. Your eyes have bored through the invisible wall around your fellow passenger like a battering ram through a mediaeval castle gate.
To keep everyone from going through life with heart palpitations and screaming hormones, we usually respect other people’s borders. The reason so many newspapers were once sold at railway stations is not because passengers are excessively interested in the news of the world but because they need a way to withdraw from each other’s gaze in crowded commuter trains. We do the same thing today with our mobile phones. This isn’t possible in a lift, where there’s neither the time nor the space for reading. Here, all eyes are directed past the other passengers’ heads and are focused on a counter, which officially is meant to indicate the number of the floor. Breathlessly the lift passengers follow the numbers as they slip by, looking at them with wide eyes as if they were football scores. Once outside the lift, the individual territories expand like air bags to assume their normal proportions. Their size depends on the circumstances. In the city you’re lucky if you can manage to keep everyone at arm’s length. That’s the distance at which you can welcome someone else with a handshake and still hold them back. In the countryside, which is less densely populated, people insist on two arms’ lengths. There they shake hands with outstretched arms. The extra distance is compensated for by simply speaking louder, which doesn’t really bother anyone.
The individual territory goes with you everywhere like a voluminous, invisible garment. You see it in animals too. Cows like to walk together in a herd. Yet they will never touch each other, unless it’s unavoidable or sexual urges are involved. Finches sit neatly spread out along their telephone wire as if they had measured each space. Scientists have measured the spaces for them. Apparently the birds maintain a distance from each other of from eighteen to twenty-five centimetres. If you’d like to divide a telephone wire into equal lengths, you might consider using a flock of finches instead of a ruler. It’s a good system. As long as each one respects the others’ territory, there are no quarrels. If all your senses decide that your entire individual territory is free of infringement, they give you the ‘all clear’. Peace.
If it’s peace in abundance you’re looking for, go to the toilet. No territory is better respected than this one. To be absolutely safe the lock has to be turned to read OCCUPIED. It seems like such a big word for such a small room, more suitable for war and oppression. In war, on the footpath and in the toilet, the OCCUPIED status alternates with the FREE status. If it’s free, that means someone else is free to occupy the country, the footpath or the toilet. At least that’s the way occupiers see it. And they cheat, too. Look at all the rulers who have been murdered while defecating. Pope Leo V and the King Henry III of France are only two examples of people who imagined themselves safe on the loo with deadly consequences. But there’s not a lot you can do about it. You may be more vulnerable than ever with your trousers around your knees and your bottom bare, but you can’t be on guard on the toilet because once you’re on guard you can’t shit. You don’t have to be safe to defecate as long as you imagine you’re safe. The smaller the space, the better your chances.
Every biologist is familiar with this illusion of safety from their knowledge of cockroaches. As alien and as remote as cockroaches often seem, that’s how familiar they appear to me at other times. The most blissful moments I’ve ever experienced are those I have in common with the cockroach. I can easily recognise in him that one quality that has kept the cockroach going as a species for 250 million years and has provided me throughout my life with moments of the most supreme comfort: thigmophilia. Thigma is touch, and philia is to be fond of something. Cockroaches are fond of feeling something on all sides. They want to be surrounded, with their bellies on top of something, their backs underneath something, and their sides pressed up against something. This propensity leads them almost automatically to seek out safe cracks in tree bark and spaces between fallen leaves, behind the wallpaper, or under a carpet. Eels wriggle in the water under tree roots, behind rubbish, into the mud, and within the remains of an old cow carcass. In 2006, while searching for a way to make life in fish farms somewhat more tolerable for them (larger tank? more oxygen?), the researchers from Wellfish discovered that eels prefer ‘to lie against something’. People have the same penchant. What’s more glorious than being in bed, wrapped up on all sides in down or blankets, only the tip of your nose poking out of the sheets? The cockroach’s cracks and crannies are our foxholes, darkrooms, Fiat 500s, sunbeds and the sandpits we dig on the beach. And our toilets. Nice and cosy. Cocooning. The human being is a thigmophile, heart and soul. And stomach and intestines, too, of course.
People are afraid of the big bad world outside. That’s why they become social: there’s strength in numbers. But once we’re together we begin to fear each other. That’s all right. Fear is a good counsellor. It keeps you from being overconfident. Truly fearless people are generally never long for this world. Better to take a tip from the animals: the mouse looks around ten times before gobbling a mouthful of bread, the fish is always ready to dart into the waterlilies. A rabbit that doesn’t pay attention is an ex-rabbit. If you’re an animal you’re not safe anywhere. A life like that is hardly worth living, or so you would think. Your nerves alone would kill you in nothing flat. But evolution has found a way to deal with this. Safety may be a rare commodity, but the sense of safety is everywhere. The rabbit feels safe in its burrow, the mouse nestles under the roof tiles without a care in the world, the eel finds something to snuggle up against. Thus despite all its cruelty, nature is merciful. Even to the human. Our last resort during the day is the toilet. At night there’s always bed.
For the human thigmophile bed is the ultimate experience. When night-time falls, when the witching hour strikes, when the cold creeps in and the cockroaches actually abandon their safe cracks, human beings dive under the blankets. Powerless while sleeping, prey to burglars and murderers, they feel safer than ever there, lulled to sleep by the murmuring of touch receptors.
One person swears by a cover of light down, another by the weight of real blankets, but the principle is always the same. The womb-like warmth that the down or blanket radiates does not come from the thing covering you but from yourself. It’s you that warms the down or blanket, and not the other way around. The glow comes from the depths of your own body. It isn’t the arms of Morpheus but your own intestines that warm your skin, even on the outside; the blankets only serve as out-testines. You’ve been turned inside out, as it were. That’s why after a few minutes the blankets no longer feel like strangers to your body. Man and blanket melt together; bed becomes man, man becomes bed.
In a spaceship there would be little sleeping done if you were to float weightless through your capsule. That’s why Wubbo Ockels came up with a sleeping bag for outer space. During his journey, the Dutch astronaut crept between the blankets with an air hose. ‘When you pumped up the hose, the sleeping bag pressed tight against your body. It made for very comfortable sleeping.’
Many people wouldn’t sleep a wink in such a situation. Here on earth they already break out in a sweat just by entering a lift or a tunnel. This is called claustrophobia. Claustrum is Latin for enclosed spaces, phobia is Greek for fear. The fear of enclosed spaces has two components: fear of suffocation and fear of being trapped. Claustrophobia is the opposite of thigmophilia. Yet often these are two souls in the same body. The air-raid shelter you fled to in order to feel safe makes you feel anxious at the same time because you can’t get out. Fortunately the dangers during peacetime aren’t so threatening. You can venture outdoors and stay there all day, which makes coming back to your cosy lair in the evening all the more delightful.
Heaven for a thigmophile is hell for a claustrophobe. On the toilet, too. Even people with a bit of claustrophobia soon become anxious in such small cubicles. But something has been invented to deal with this. Take a look at an old-fashioned outhouse with its cramped surroundings and your eye falls on a detail as secretive as it is indispensable: the window. There are good toilets in abundance without flushing mechanisms, but a toilet without a window doesn’t count. A window seems inconsistent with the need for seclusion in a toilet, and that’s exactly what it is—on purpose. It’s a safety valve to keep the seclusion from becoming too intense, much like the valve that allows the carefully built-up pressure in a steam locomotive to escape before it gets too high and the boiler explodes. If you used to feel unsafe riding around in a Citroen deux-chevaux, which wasn’t such a crazy reaction to being in a biscuit tin on wheels, you’d clap the side window open and breathe freely once again.
In order for you to feel comfortable in a closed space there has to be some contact with the outside world. A standard feature of a bunker is the chink in the wall for scanning the surrounding area (and through which the enemy will finally toss the grenade). The most important part of a submarine isn’t the propeller or the tail fin but the periscope. To see without being seen, that’s what makes the periscope perspective so attractive. Which is not to say that you can actually see out when you’re sitting on the toilet. Usually the window is simply too high for that. But it doesn’t matter. It’s all about the idea of not being a prisoner. A window is a good addition to a toilet. Unfortunately, in modern building construction it doesn’t stop with the addition of a little window. Glass is taking over the entire facade.
The ones who profit most from the glass house rage are the curtain manufacturers. When evening comes, the people who live in glass houses shut their curtains with a sigh of relief. No shutting curtains during the day, when they have to make do with the only space not yet infiltrated by the outside world: the toilet. But you only go there when you really have to go. It’s almost impossible to escape the new dictatorship sweeping the world under the banner of transparency. Everything and everyone has to be transparent, from buildings to opinions, from trams to politics. It sounds attractive, transparency—free of shady practices, underhandedness, covert goings on, or guile and deception; what you see is what you get, and what you get is what you see. With transparency you know precisely how things stand. The problem is that most things aren’t precise. A lack of privacy turns a transparent building into a closed institution. If you listen carefully to a transparent argument you recognise the thinly veiled flimflam. Keeping your cards close to your chest has always been a good strategy. True thigmophiles are horrified by transparency. They live by the grace of non-transparency in the dark crack in their arses. Their pleasure is epitomised by animals like the caddisfly, whose house is attached to its body, both fused into a single entity. It is the crack in its own arse. Caddisflies live in protective cases made of the rubbish they find in river beds. One species spins twigs together, another does the same with pebbles, and yet another uses minuscule snail houses (tough luck to the snails still living in them).
No matter how remote and odd a caddisfly may seem to the human eye, the feeling of being entirely encompassed, closely fitted, with only head and foremost claws sticking out, is not the least bit odd. We spend more than two-thirds of our lives walking around in clothing that leaves little more than our head and hands exposed. Clothing is a mini-house, the smallest conceivable one-man tent, a mobile crack in the arse.
~
Yet you can also be cramped for space. There’s no room in your clothes to install a decent toilet. Now what? Nothing is worse than pooing or peeing in your trousers. In order to allow for the timely release of faeces and urine, openings have been strategically placed in your clothing. The first requirement is that when closed these openings must look as if nothing is going on underneath. Openings in the wrong place or at the wrong time are not tolerated in a society that prides itself in openness. A hole in your sock today is already a scandal.
Whether Scottish men really have no underpants under their kilts ought to remain an everlasting question. At one time Dutch women also had people guessing. Back when the Jordaan district of Amsterdam was still a slum, the women wore split underpants under their long woollen skirts. Standing with their legs wide apart, their skirts as round as hoops, they pissed in the middle of the street with the sanctimonious expression of a child peeing in the swimming pool. Men had both a fly in the front and a flap in the back to allow access without having to drop their trousers. Unfortunately these styles are no longer available. Even underpants don’t always come with flies anymore, which means that men, too, have to pull the whole business down. So there you stand with your bare arse, and your most vulnerable bits exposed, of course. Never was the need for a fully sheltered cubicle greater.
All the horrors of the past aside, there are trousers that are expressly intended to be shat in. You yourself wore them for years, and it’s quite likely you’ll have to wear them again later on for several years more. Many people start and end their lives in nappies. Fortunately this great discomfort is compensated for by the thigmophilial pleasures of the beginning and the end, in the cradle and the grave. Unfortunately, a thigmophile reaches this high point when he is least aware of it. That’s all the truer for the thigmum of all thigmums: the womb.
As a fertilised egg grows into a baby, the womb grows along with it. When empty, the womb is an unsightly, flattened sack with the capacity of a shot glass. The embryo stretches the sack into a succulent pear with the neck pointing down, a neatly maintained dwelling in the slums of the belly, behind the bladder full of piss and in front of the shit-filled rectum. There it is nursed by juicy flesh and rocked in amniotic fluid, setting the benchmark for your sense of security. You’ll never again be so well protected. For many animals, the party’s over as soon as they leave the womb. A foal has to stand on its legs right after birth, a duck immediately starts swimming with its mother. Human babies would never survive something like that. They come out of the birth canal half-baked and are pampered in an artificial womb long before they can be let loose. From the mists of antiquity until well into the eighteenth century, newborn babies were swaddled as a matter of course. Wrapped in cloths and stiff as mummies, little arms and legs encased like flea larvae, babies were consigned to their embryonic paradise for months. This made them more or less equivalent to the other little monkeys, who cling to their mothers’ fur for that extra-uterine sense of security. You’d never manage this as a human baby, though; evolution has heartlessly robbed your mother of her fur.
Swaddling has now fallen into disuse. Many people who care for infants swear by freedom of movement for the whole baby, although no one has ever demonstrated that Mozart would have composed better or Napoleon would have slaughtered more people if these men had never been swaddled. All we know for certain is that babies in countries where swaddling is still practised cry less and sleep more than the Western breed, who thrash about freely in their cradles and are pushed around in baby carriages. What it’s all about, of course, is striking a golden mean between freedom and security. For such a mean to be golden, however, children need a good helping of security in their youth in order to take on the world as adults later on. But even with a happy childhood behind him a person will have to soak up the security of beds, toilets and telephone booths from time to time before surrendering to the dream destination of every thigmophile: the coffin. By that time there’s little left to enjoy, but until then it’s all preliminary fun.
When you reach the end of the line, the need for freedom of movement gives way entirely to the need for security. It isn’t until your relatives have packed you in snugly that they dare commit you to the earth. In order to convince themselves that you’ll like it there, the coffin is usually furnished like a bed. But if there’s one thing you are not free to conclude it’s that you are what you are: dead. You’re laid down as if you were asleep. It would be more convincing to turn you on your side, your legs drawn up, preferably in the securest of all secure positions, the foetal position. Your eyes and mouth shut, your relatives entrust you to the bosom of Mother Earth. But she isn’t keen on eternal rest. As far as nature and the funeral director are concerned, your decomposition couldn’t happen fast enough. Surrounded by the silence of the cemetery, the body processing machine is running at full tilt. If you could hear the gnawing of insect mandibles, the sucking of trillions of bacteria, and the hissing of all the chemical reactions, the cemetery would thunder like an industrial zone. While coffins were once made of stone in order to keep the riffraff out, today the materials are governed by strict rules so the riffraff can be welcomed with open arms. The idea is that within a year only a few of your bones will remain, and whatever is cleared away after ten years is hardly worth the trouble.
A coffin is a phone booth without a phone, a canopy without a bed, a cubicle without a peepshow, a hut whose only company is death. And a toilet without a toilet bowl. That no longer seems necessary. But what’s left of you after a year, except for a few bones? After your death you perform your last feat of strength: you poo and pee yourself away. Even though you don’t eat anymore after you die, your metabolism plods on undaunted—but with yourself as its food. A corpse eats itself up. Without teeth. There’s little left for the worms. Long before any worm strays from the upper reaches of the earth, finds the coffin, and bores into it, the body has fully consumed itself, assisted by its bacteria. All your life, your bacteria have been waiting for this chance, but they were always beaten off by your immune system. As soon as you die they make their way through your organs, pillaging and plundering. Some of them can’t even wait until you’re completely dead. If the resistance of a terminal patient is sufficiently weakened, the bacteria tear down the barriers that have been standing in their way all this time. This begins in the intestines, where most of the bacteria live. The wall that once held them back is now penetrated as they make their way to your liver, and you’re eaten alive the way a vanquished zebra is eaten by a lion. To steal a march on all those attackers, the body cells then eat themselves up. They’re full of suicide capsules, the lysosomes, which are filled with enzymes whose job it is to clear away cells during the continuous construction and demolition activities that keep the living body in shape. The decomposition products don’t necessarily leave the body through the intestines (or what is left of them); incontinence has now taken control and the whole coffin is smeared with bodily waste.
To prevent the coffin from becoming soiled during the funeral, a fresh corpse undergoes careful preparation. Intestines and bladder are emptied, after which the throat and anus are kept in check with a wad of cotton. The risk of undesirable smells is already considerable. If the corpse can just manage to delay its decomposition until after the funeral, it won’t need a toilet in the coffin. The body can stop trying to keep up appearances and will be allowed to blend with its own sludge.
But what about back in the beginning, in the womb? No sanitary facilities there either. Going nine months without plumbing seems like a tall order. Is that why the maternal belly swells to such vast proportions? No. The waste products of the unborn baby are sent back via the same route by which its food is delivered. In the placenta, baby blood and mother blood swap food and waste. And that’s a good thing, because at the end of the pregnancy a baby can drink three-quarters of a litre of amniotic fluid a day and pee out the same amount. While the mother lovingly hauls her belly around with a look in her eyes that you only see among true believers, the darling baby uses its mother as a piss-pot. And Mum pulls the chain.
A baby doesn’t defecate until after its birth. There’s too little to eat in the mother’s belly to create anything worth shitting. When the baby is born, its stomach is barely recognisable, an empty little sack hidden behind the inactive intestines. At fifty grams, the baby’s entire intestinal tract weighs less than a tenth of that of an adult. Shit only accumulates there in the latter stage. The baby has ingested all sorts of things along with the amniotic f luid: exfoliated cells from the skin, the oesophagus and the trachea; lanugo, baby skin grease, glandular fluid, blood, urea, and enough bile pigment to colour the intestinal ooze green. By the end of the pregnancy the whole large intestine is full of it. Sometimes the baby lets a little of it run into the amniotic fluid, but a good child waits until shortly after birth. This syrupy, dark green-brown stuff is properly known as meconium and is easy to distinguish from the yellowish fledgling excrement that begins flowing so abundantly after a few days.
As baby or corpse you don’t have anything to worry about. In your cradle or coffin you’re safely sequestered from the rest of the world. The hardest bit is life between cradle and coffin. You spend a long time living in the public realm, hoping that the borders of your individual territory are respected. But no one can see those borders. They’re built on something ethereal, like a sense of unease. The only way you can tell that they’ve been transgressed is if you feel uncomfortable. And you wouldn’t feel entirely at ease in public unless actual walls were erected around you. That isn’t so hard to imagine. Take that man out there in the square, encapsulate him in a steel-and-concrete construction following the lines of his borders, add a few windows so he can see out, and the result will look vaguely familiar: a phone booth. It’s partly because you don’t see phone booths very often anymore that every time one of them comes into view I hope there’s someone I need to call.
The telephone itself hangs in its booth like bait in a trap cage, the perfect excuse for disconnecting yourself from humanity and, without any embarrassment, bringing yourself to express the most personal intimacies in the midst of the repudiating masses, like the singer Jim Reeves in his song ‘Put Your Sweet Lips a Little Closer to the Phone’. Try coughing up lyrics like that on a mobile phone as you stride down the high street. Besides the lack of seclusion, a mobile caller has to do without the immobility, be it voluntary or involuntary. While the rest of the world spins around you, you remain the unmoved centre of your universe there in your little structure. Compared with a ‘public talking facility housed in a booth’, as the phone company calls it, these walkie-talkies are just cheap baubles. With a mobile phone you don’t escape the masses; you get sucked into them. I look at this and shake my head. If you’re able to accumulate your pee like a decent person until you reach the next available toilet, why can’t you hold your yacking until the next available phone comes along? Mobile telephoning is a verbal form of incontinence.
Long before the phone booth began vanishing from the street scene, the thigmophile had been driven into the pub. Here, until this century, there was a special place of which I preserve many warm memories, between the door marked L and the one marked G: the door marked T. As soon as you opened it you were assaulted by a cloud of cigarette smoke, stale beer, coffee grounds and drenched all-purpose carpeting that I otherwise knew only from student rooms and regional newspaper editorial offices. The full ashtray was balanced on a stack of telephone books, incomplete—many of the missing phone numbers were scratched onto the wall. The fact that you could barely move in this hut, foot on an empty crate, back against the stairs under which the T was usually to be found, didn’t bother me in the least. The only difficulty was finding the telephone amidst all the clutter. When you finally got your hands on it you reported that unfortunately you had to work late. At no other time and in no other place has the phone company so fully cooperated in the spreading of lies as then and there. The entire booth smelled provocatively of sin.
What was striking about the pub phone booth was its correspondence with the adjoining toilets. The same form followed the same function. In both the T, the L and the G, one eliminated what one had to get rid of. That brought with it certain miscalculations. I recall a lively evening in the Amsterdam pub known as the Karpershoek, where the G, the T and the L were still neatly lined up. At a certain point we saw a yellow stream trickle out from underneath the door marked T and into the pub, soon followed by a relieved uncle Theo, who staggered back to the bar to fill up his bladder once again. Something like that seems out of the question today, in the age of the mobile phone. No one pisses in the phone booth anymore; one makes one’s phone calls on the toilet. Pub patrons go outside to politely make their calls so as not to disturb anyone. But apparently there’s no fixed location for such activity out there. Recently I saw someone making his call against a lamppost.
Armed with their mobile phones, people have demanded the right to spout their drivel at the slightest pretext. With the help of satellites, earth’s entire atmosphere has been filled with human babble and chatter. And woe to the provider who has neglected to arrange for reception in the middle of nowhere. All the more surprising is the lack of access for that other form of drivel. If you suddenly find you have to pee, you’re better off at home. Apart from exemplary cities like New York and Tokyo, suitable peeing facilities along the public thoroughfares are few and far between. The ones that were there are disappearing from the street scene with the speed of the telephone booths. For people with small bladders, it’s getting increasingly harder to plan a walking tour through the city. Personally I can’t escape the impression that in places like Amsterdam you see more and more people walking around with anxious looks on their faces, but that may be for other reasons, of course.
The disappearance of public toilets is something to mourn, not only from a physiological point of view but also from the perspective of urban beauty. In the past, especially during the Victorian era, real peeing palaces were erected—cheerfully styled, elaborately decorated, often patterned on something else, like a castle, as if to provide a festive touch to the minor physical pleasure being offered there. In London there were also underground piss palaces called Halting Stations. When the first one was opened in 1855, Josiah Feable expressed the newest step on the road to progress in the presence of Queen Victoria:
Down gleaming walls of porcelain flows the sluice
That out of sight decants the kidney juice.
Thanks to the opening in the front you could wipe your backside in a Roman toilet without having to stand up. Not with paper but with a sponge on a stick.
Not much later, the celebrated pissoirs appeared in Paris under the name vespasiennes. This was in honour of the Roman emperor Vespasian, who was said to have provided public toilets back in the days of antiquity. The remains of the Roman facilities can still be seen. There was room there for twenty-five men to sit side-by-side on stone latrines, shitting and chatting together. We get the impression that these were people as tidy as they were convivial, with outstanding sanitary facilities, but according to the Limburg archaeologist Gemma Jansen nothing could be further from the truth:
From finds we learn that conduits, gutters, and drainpipes were often blocked, and that the floors were therefore flooded with water and urine. Sometimes toilets and baths were half caved in but still in use. In short, it was filthy and it stank.
This could be a description of contemporary Amsterdam. Yet a century ago a kind of toilet architecture was being flaunted there that was no less impressive than that of London and Paris. On the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal there’s a sweet little pine house in chalet style that still bears witness to those glory days. It’s a confection of a building. You’d never believe by looking at it that something so charming could ever have been built for something as trivial as piss. Now it’s a little restaurant, where tourists devoid of any historical sense come to partake of fashionable titbits. Seldom have we been so harshly confronted by the victory of eating over peeing. It’s a clever chap who, at the moment of greatest urgency, manages to find the nearest urinal on the Singel in plenty of time.
But it still exists, the unsurpassed apex of Amsterdam street architecture: the krul, or the curl. Like an ornamental ribbon of sheet iron shaped by a giant florist with giant shears, this urinal folds itself around the grateful user. What a pleasure it is to take a breather there while peering through the ingenious pattern of little holes in the enclosure and watching the seagulls and people along the canal. Rarely do I pass one up when the opportunity presents itself, even when there’s a whole row of them—a veritable stairway of sluices—as there is on the Singel, each one laying claim to the very last drops. And what a glaring absence it is when one of them is out of service or, worse yet, has disappeared! When that happens I feel like my cat when he’s startled by the vacuum cleaner and takes his standard escape route through the house, only to discover that there’s a side table missing which causes him to miscalculate his jump—one of the few times I think I’ve ever heard a cat swear.
You can see from the elegant lines of the krul that it was designed by a genuine architect. That was Johan van der Mey (1878–1949), who perfected it in 1915 and whose luxurious design for the Shipping House (Scheepvaarthuis) in 1928 makes him a pioneer of the Amsterdam School. But there are also later structures that exert an attraction on the type of men whose interest in ornamentation is unusually acute. In the urinal across from the Hortus Botanicus, a pink lamp testified for years to the pleasure the city’s gay community took in helpfully changing the light bulbs. Even more popular during the emergence of Amsterdam as the ‘Gay Capital’ was the pissing palace below the Munttoren. The city declared it was being improperly used, which partly accounts for the disappearance of many other urinals from the streets. They’ve been replaced in the city’s entertainment districts by plastic pissing towers, where four men have to struggle to avert their eyes from what’s taking place right under their noses on either side of them. Once again, an innocent little pleasure has deteriorated into distasteful spattering.
The krullen unite elegance with the greatest possible technical simplicity. Essentially you’re just peeing against a wall, albeit a wall made of a special kind of stone that can take a lot of abuse. When it comes to cleaning them, the city relies on the theory that urine pollutes and cleanses at the same time. Mildly acidic, and entirely sterile when it leaves the body, urine makes an outstanding cleaning agent. The bacteria that give urine its characteristic smell don’t start working until they’re outside the body, and when they do their diligence is not universally appreciated. So from time to time the sanitation department comes by to spray the krullen with water, although no one believes they’ve ever actually been inside them. Women tend to walk a wide arc around each krul, but for some men the smell of piss exerts a certain attraction, like a much-used lamppost has for dogs.
The toilet facilities on public transport are a case apart. During the age of the steam engine none of the trains had any facilities at all. The trains did make regular stops, however. The locomotive had to fill its water tank and the passengers had the chance to empty theirs. Today the Dutch trains stop too briefly at each station to allow passengers to relieve themselves. Many stations don’t even have toilets. Fortunately, most trains have toilets on board, but even these are being nibbled away. In around 2010 the Dutch railways acquired a whole fleet of trains that were entirely without toilets. For what reason? By eliminating toilets you could survey the inside of the whole carriage from front to back, a boost for ‘security’ and—oh, yes!—for ‘transparency’.