Defecating is not a spectator sport. As delightful as it is to perform the act yourself, it’s not much to look at. The grace of a gymnastics performance, the beauty of high diving and the spinning of a discus thrower are sadly absent from this form of physical exercise. Yet people watch it all the time. Among animals. The fact that you’ve never seen your neighbour or your old aunt in the act of shitting is only because they’re human beings, too. Just as sport leaves trotting to horses and flying to pigeons, shitting has been outsourced to animals. Not to horses, unfortunately, with their majestic buttocks, or to cheerfully crapping bunnies, but to the only animal that humans have ever wanted to be: the dog. And although there’s nothing exemplary about it from an aesthetic point of view, millions of people go outdoors three times a day to watch their dog shit. Passers-by and neighbours get to watch for free. Their reviews can be read in the local media, though little of it is appreciative. In terms of indignation, no war or disaster on the front page can match the lamentation about dog poo in the letters columns. How many millions of kilos it amounts to, how it stinks, how slippery it is, why no one does anything about it. To limit the damage and embarrassment, more and more dog owners are cleaning up after their pets. It’s amazing to watch them do something that they would never dare do with their own turd: pack it up in a plastic bag, steaming and warm, and throw it away. While people in the past could act as if nothing ever came out of their dog, now they have to walk around with their little plastic bags, looking inside for traces of strawberries or tasty nuts. The telephone has now become mobile, and so has the turd; it takes some getting used to, but it’s worth the trouble. Nice and tidy, says the dog owner to himself, but the dog is totally baffled. It looks at its owner with a kind of despair. ‘I don’t do that to you, do I?’
Owners watching their dogs shitting is something you see every day in the city. On the other hand, you never see a dog watching its owner shit. They’re allowed to come right into the house with us, these best friends of ours, and into the kitchen. And many people even let them into their beds. But when it comes to the toilet it’s here and no further; this is strictly a people room. Maybe it’s just as well that a dog doesn’t get to see what its owner is doing in there. It would break its heart: even the nicest turd is mercilessly flushed away. Gone.
For a dog, a turd isn’t filth that urgently needs to be got rid of. It’s a precious means of communication. The scents it gives off form words, sentences, announcements. For a dog, a turd is actually a message. Two turds are a tweet, three are a memo. A street full of turds is a library full of romance and information, with here and there a small but not insignificant little poo that’s been artfully twisted into a proud whipped cream dessert and is understood by every dog that comes along as a poem in itself. A dog never steps in its own turd, or that of another dog; to do so would be deeply regrettable. For it, throwing a turd away is tantamount to book-burning. Without excrement, a dog cannot make itself understood. We gag them at their nether end. The poor despairing creatures sniff around for something to hold onto. The gentle whining dogs make even though they’ve just been let out is nothing but a cry for freedom of expression. It’s a good thing there are still scent markings on trees and lampposts. You can’t throw them away that easily.
Of the two parties involved in letting the dog out, the human is the most to be pitied. There the dog is in charge of the person. While it sniffs one bit of news after another, getting all wound up from the libidinous odours, adding its own gossip to the last with one lifted leg, its owner plods along beside him like a fool. He doesn’t smell a thing. Like a blind man who can still make out vague contours, he does notice that a turd stinks, but the message escapes him. For a dog, a lamppost is all meaning, a source of knowledge, a beacon in the sea of ignorance that its master calls ‘the world’, but for a human it’s no more than a way to make things out at night. To understand how such an animal feels in a street full of lampposts, take it to a library the next time you go for a walk. There the world is reversed. Now it’s the dog who doesn’t understand what its owner sees in all those books and magazines. Why does he laugh at that one back cover, and look around furtively before reaching for the next little book? Is there something to smell here? The dog may be an illiterate, but its owner is an anosmiac.
The dog is one up on the man—because it looks out of its nose. How on earth did this come about? It’s because humans were once apes. Apes live in trees. They jump from trunk to trunk, from branch to branch. You don’t need your nose much to do that. If you only look with your nose, you’ll end up lying at the bottom of the tree in one or two jumps. What’s needed is a good pair of eyes. Not eyes like those of an ordinary mammal—a cow, for example, on either side of its head—but eyes in the front, side by side, so you can properly gauge the distance of a jump. Stereoscopic. With eyes on each side you can see from every angle, which comes in very handy for a cow who has to watch out for wolves, or the steer. But such eyes are no good for measuring distances. That’s why you don’t see very many cows swinging through the treetops. Only two forward-looking eyes will allow you to see depth. But everything has its price. The migration of the two eyes to the front of the face left little room for a nose. The ancestor of the apes, the tupaya, still had a real snout, but by the time the anthropoid apes came along the snout was virtually gone. Humans have barely enough nose left over to prop their eyeglasses on. Our nose, like the appendix and the wisdom tooth, is a rudimentary organ—although for some it’s less rudimentary than for others.
We’re not the only ones who lost our noses in the trees. Birds can barely smell anything anymore. Apart from exceptions like the American vulture, birds don’t sniff at their food until it’s already been eaten, as a final check, and they do it via the nostrils in their beaks. Reading shit is also something birds rarely do. Instead they communicate with eye and ear, just like humans. That explains the good relationship between man and bird; the Society for the Protection of Birds has far more members than the society that protects our own class of mammals. Anosmiacs united.
Once we came down from the trees and went from ape to human we never did get our noses back. Evolution is a one-way street. Mammals that left the land to go back to the water in order to become whales never recovered the gills they once had possessed as fish. We have to make do without noses in a world full of expressive smells. The Dutch writer Annie M. G. Schmidt got it right with one of her first poems for the illustrious journalists’ cabaret company The Octopus:
Long ago we lived in the trees,
I think I’d like to go back there, please.
You can see something of the wistfulness at the thought of a lost paradise in the joy of children who build huts in trees and the pain in the hearts of their parents when a giant tree is chopped down. Nor is it difficult to see the tree dweller in tram passengers hanging from their straps. But the tree dweller is most easily recognised by that silly nose. A human being is an ape without a tree. Too much earth beneath the feet. Too little smell in the nose.
You may have both feet on the ground, but your nose is still living in a tree. That tree is yourself. Ever since humans began walking upright their noses have been suspended more than a metre and a half above the ground. There’s not too much to smell up there; it’s like trying to read the newspaper a metre and a half away. The only way you can smell what your feet can’t smell is with your nose on the ground. There the odours are as heavy as a blanket of mist hanging over a winter meadow, an internet of damp fragrances that benefit anyone who can smell them. Mice, dogs, insects and snakes are online there all day long; elephants, who, like us, are too tall, are connected by their trunks.
It’s fun to watch a dog jump up to reach the height of its human, but it’s just as instructive for you as a human to descend to the level of your dog. You’ll never smell the world as keenly as your dog does. While our ancestors let their noses languish in the trees, the noses of the dog and the wolf became razor-sharp. The olfactory mucosa in our nasal cavity is no bigger than a postage stamp and is located high in our noses, while in a tracker dog every bit of snout that isn’t needed for teeth is full of these postage stamps, up to more than fifty of them. In addition, the sensory neurons are much closer together. In the brain, where all stimuli are processed, the olfactory lobes in a dog are a hundred times larger than ours. All in all, a dog smells many things a thousand times better than we do.
That’s not only to the dog’s credit. It’s also our own fault. We do too little with our noses, and as a result they waste away even further, so we use them even less, etc., etc. Use it or lose it. We’ve come to trust more and more in our eyes. There is still something to smell in an old book, but televisions and computers are completely geared to the eye and the ear. And no dog watches TV.
Humans have theatres where they see things and concert halls where they listen to things, but no smell theatres. A fun night out together for a good smell is not something we do. But our noses aren’t really that bad. One drop of perfume can fill a whole shop with fragrance. To be able to smell violets you need 0.000000003 grams of aromatic substance per litre of air. To give you an idea of what this means, you’d have to make a hair-fine tube stretching from here to the moon and fill it with one gram of the aroma in question, ionone. One millimetre of that tube contains enough ionone to enable you to smell violets. A dog can manage with even less, but you’d never know it by its response; the smell of flowers doesn’t do anything for a dog. Unfortunately, humans are born grouches. They’re more likely to smell stench than violets. Fifty times less methyl mercaptan is needed for that, the sulphur compound found in the most disgusting farts. You can do much more than the basic things with such a skill, but you’ve got to learn how. Because we all smell high up in our noses, where a normal breath of air rarely penetrates, you have to learn to sniff—preferably repeatedly, because it’s the alternation that makes you conscious of what’s out there. After a while, really talented people can smell where a wine comes from, what its vintage is, and from what grapes it was made. But that’s about as doggy as a human can get. At the very most a human can learn to read turds at the most basic canine level. What gets in the way of such a reading lesson is the immediate impression you get from a turd: its stench. When humans don’t like the cover, they don’t read the contents.
Most mammals read each other’s excrement instead of a newspaper. But the news source is strictly regional. In the main article the depositor first claims the region for itself, which it regards as its own territory. Just like a real newspaper, the contents are only current for one day, maybe a few, and they have to be refreshed on a regular basis. For a large distribution area the report is also written in urine. Letters to the editor are sent by the kidneys and adrenal glands as well as by the sex glands. Lampposts, trees, large stones and other salient features of the landscape are marked with a drip here and a drop there. But there are other ways to do it. Antelopes smear branches from a scent gland near their eyes, dogs sometimes rub their entire body against a wall in order to stamp it with their body smell. Glands on either side of the anus add news and background information to every piece of excrement that passes through. But turds are always a special medium. They mark themselves; here, medium and message are actually one. Naturally it’s more difficult to distribute your turds over a large surface area than the contents of your bladder, but animals like the hippopotamus have found a way to deal with this. They spin their tails around while they’re shitting so the faeces are broadcast like manure from a manure spreader, making for a rather amusing sight in a zoo full of visitors with expensive coats.
Why does a male dog lift his leg to pee? Because he has no hands. When a human male pees against a tree, he uses his hands to take aim; a male dog does the same thing with his hind leg. Since leg and willie are connected in the groin, when the former is raised the latter follows suit. This requires the dog to curve his rump towards the tree, so that his head automatically turns away from the scene.
It’s quite a performance. If seven hundred fifty thousand male dogs each marked a dozen Dutch trees every day, that would amount to almost ten million pools of pee all together. And all this effort would be in vain, since every territorial mark is peed over by the next dog as quickly as possible. Clearly something has gone wrong. Long ago, when dogs were still proper wolves, only the Great Leader of the pack would lift his leg, thereby underscoring his power in scent and colour. Our dogs no longer live in packs, and for them the Great Leader, oddly enough, is a human. Actually, it shouldn’t be the dogs but their owners who go from tree to tree, lamppost to lamppost, leaving their marks. It would save the dogs a lot of work.
So why do dogs pee so high? Can’t they aim a little lower, like on the pavement? They could, but the rain would soon wash the smell away. Not only that, but a dog’s nose is at the same level as his willie; sender and receiver are coordinated. So aiming horizontally produces the best results. Wouldn’t slanting upwards be even better? No. If the highest territorial mark were the best, then the biggest dog would always be the highest in rank. But dogs don’t care who’s the biggest. A dog doesn’t know whether it’s a Pekinese or a Great Dane; it still thinks it’s a wolf. That’s why little yappers bark so valiantly at big brutes; every dog, no matter how big or how small, is allocated the same portion of caninity.
The doggedness with which animals keep staking out their territory shows how important it is for them to have their own little domain. It’s an extension of themselves beyond their bodies, essential to getting enough to eat and being able to offer something to a partner. To acquire a territory, animals readily sacrifice the highest good that we humans can imagine: freedom. Even a wild animal is imprisoned in hundreds of ways. A fish is restricted to its water, a squirrel doesn’t dare come down from the trees, most insects are dependent on that one plant that they happen to relish. We know of birds who spend their entire lives in a small area of the tropical rainforest no bigger than a city block. Birds! Even migratory birds who cover thousands of kilometres a year aren’t as free as they appear on TV. They travel fixed, narrow routes on a fixed schedule from A to B, and back again from B to A. These are not romantic vagabonds; they’re wage-earning drivers longing for hearth and home.
Odours surrounding the territory are primarily meant to serve as boundary markers. Yet other individuals of the same species never recoil in terror and head for the hills. On the contrary, the smells entice them to come and take a leisurely sniff. The territorial marks and turds are not the animal version of an electric fence, but a notice containing information on accessibility. Like us humans, animals can’t live without a sea of information—a network of informants, a kiosk, a town pump, an office water cooler. In lieu of paper, the information is printed on shit; in lieu of an alphabet it’s presented in smells and colours.
Sometimes intruders are so hungry or sex-starved that they pay no attention to the warnings at the territory gate, but usually a great many fights are avoided with good information. This works to the advantage of both parties, since the pugnacious are always defeated sooner or later. And thereby shit and piss make a laudable contribution to peace and prosperity.
Even humans manage to use territories in order to keep the peace. Conflicts only break out when borders are not respected: war between countries, quarrels between neighbours. As inveterate visual animals, we draw our borders not by smell but by sight. Thanks to walls, fences, doors, nameplates and canals, we know how to find family members and friends in cities with hundreds of thousands of people living next to and on top of each other. Our homes are filled with personal items that guarantee a sense of safety; the first thing we do in a hotel room is spread out our belongings in order to claim the room as our own. Interestingly, the next thing we often do is go to the toilet. We act as if marking with excrement was something we had left behind ages ago, but the worst possible violation of your territory is somebody else’s turd on your doorstep, your predecessor’s faeces in your rented room. As if to remove any suspicion, many hotels place a paper band around the toilet seat in advance of your arrival. We can see how well the old smell system still works by the irritation of non-smokers who are forced to breathe second-hand smoke from someone else’s cigarette. The smoker is violating their territory. The worst thing is that the smell continues to cling to them, as if they had been pissed on. And it’s not mainly about health, as we see in the train, tram or lift, when perfume and aftershave are annoyingly imposed on you. This is something that women suffer from in particular. Because their sense of smell is keener than that of men, they use so little perfume that a man can barely detect it; but men immerse themselves in aftershave until they themselves can smell it, which for a woman is almost unbearable.
According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, civilisation began with the invention of the fence. Unlike faeces, you don’t have to refresh it every day. So fencing manufacturers do good business. Civilised people have doors with locks on them to ensconce themselves behind. The only way the outside world can intrude is through the mail slot. You can put special stickers on it in a modest effort to keep out unsolicited printed matter. Only posties can violate these stickers, their actions hidden by prudish metal flaps. We feel safe in our own territory behind our fences and doors—until a randy tom cat goes on the prowl and gives us a good spraying, making it clear whose house it really is. That makes people angry. And that’s the nice thing about the territorial impulse: we only acknowledge its existence when our own territory is violated. Someone pisses through your mail slot. Red with rage, you open the door. There’s a turd on the doorstep. The turd itself is easily cleared away, but the message remains: our existence is being challenged.
An animal turd works like a magnet: it can both attract and repel. While it keeps rivals at bay, it also attracts possible partners. A turd’s at its best during the mating season. It’s like a sign on the door; animals from the same species can read from a turd when a female cat or a bitch is on heat. In horny expectation, the tom cats and male dogs gather until the hour arrives. The entire garden, the entire street, all the trees in the neighbourhood are filled with the scent of promise.
Humans entice each other mainly by means of eye and ear. As man bait, a woman might put on a nice-looking skirt. If the enticement is successful, she’ll take it off again. Music is played with lyrics that leave little to the imagination. Yet for something as primordial as sex, a primordial sense like the sense of smell does come in handy, even for humans. With a fragrant turd you don’t even have to touch your beloved. But modern partners don’t want to have anything to do with ordinary body odour at all. Before he goes out on his date, today’s lover washes himself until there’s nothing left to smell. To make sure he’s free of all odour molecules, he shaves off the hair in which they might nestle, even in the most intimate regions. Only when he’s less pungent than a marble slab or a strip of stainless steel does he apply his aftershave and lotions. Clouds of his artificial scent rise to meet her from a distance. There’s not a trace of human aroma between them, neither in her smell nor in his. When vested for love, a human displays with the sexual fragrances of other species, animal or even vegetable. Girls flirt with the help of flowery perfume, as if they were out to nab a bumble bee.
As far as plants go, the leaf (verbena) or the bark (cinnamon) is sometimes used, but what parfumiers generally prefer are the reproductive organs, the flowers. Flowers were originally intended to attract insects. Humans and insects went their separate evolutionary ways hundreds of millions of years ago, but oddly enough they fall for the same fragrances. For example, both are wild about faecal aromas. The intoxicating smell of jasmine on a sultry evening is all owing to the presence of skatole, the same substance that makes shit smell like shit. But the fact that jasmine smells like shit is not to say that shit smells like jasmine. The art is in the dosage. To attract humans, you have to add so little skatole to the perfume that you notice it and but don’t recognise it as the smell of poo. While a turd screams at you to stay away, jasmine whispers you into the kingdom of sensual pleasure, and with the same voice. What seemed so innocent and vegetable furtively awakens your deep animal passions.
As for animal substances, the better perfumes contain the sexiest juices of all the world’s fauna: musk oil, civet semen and beaver semen. These are the substances by which musk deer, civets and beavers turn each other—and us—on. They constitute a kind of Esperanto, an inter-animal world language of voluptuousness. But here, too, you’ve got to be sneaky. To steal the heart of your lover, it’s best not to burst into the house via the front door but to knock gently at the window. And you have to present your message in special wrappings. To have any effect, you add the more volatile, flowery fragrances as the top and middle notes; the animal fragrances form not the melody but the base notes of the aromatic music. Parfumiers have a word for this base note: booster, a substance that brings out the best in other fragrances without betraying its own origins, the way a pinch of salt can revive all the smells and tastes of a meal. But even a pinch can be very expensive; you need hundreds of thousands of flowers for a litre of jasmine oil. That’s why skatole is often prepared synthetically.
During the sixties, the prospect of arousing a woman at a distance with the help of a fragrance gave researchers an idea. A similar experiment had just been carried out with insects. Female silkworm moths attracted male silkworm moths from kilometres away with a few molecules of a particular pheromone, bombykol. Irresistible. Imagine if such a thing were possible with humans! Expectations were great. Perfume manufacturers couldn’t wait to come out with perfumes containing pheromones. Some even began production, but the effect was disappointing. A little cloud of perfume intensified the atmosphere on both sides, like beautiful music or sexy underpants, but there was no evidence of olfactory remote control.
Apparently our sense of smell just isn’t good enough. And indeed, there’s a lot about our noses to find fault with. But occurring at almost the same time as the pheromone experiment was an even more hopeful discovery: a second human nose! In addition to the familiar, not-so-great nose, it turns out that humans also have a vomeronasal organ, a nose within the nose. Animals were already known to possess such a thing. Cats use it when they smell catnip or munch on cat grass. They curl up their lips and stare cross-eyed into the distance as if they were stoned. This curling of the lips is called the flehmen response and is common among many animals. They throw back their heads as if they were stifling a loud laugh. The pressure of the lip muscles opens the entrance to the vomeronasal organ. What we learn from this silly behaviour is that the sense of smell is connected to the most arousing areas of the brain.
In humans, the vomeronasal organ is mainly associated with the embryo. It withers away before the baby is born, so it is regarded as rudimentary. But if you know where to look, you can still see it in most adults—or the entrance at least—as two indentations at the base of the nasal cavity on either side of the septum, a centimetre and a half from the nostril.
Does it still work? Women’s magazines have known for years that it does, and scientific journals don’t dare lag too far behind. Our second nose should be sensitive to pheromones, just as it is in animals. Pheromones are like hormones, except they don’t do their work inside but outside the body. And like hormones, pheromones, in small quantities, have a major impact on your behaviour and mood. Women’s magazines are always reporting that women become aroused by the smell of male armpits. This smell contains a pheromone, androstenol, which is also present in the saliva of randy male pigs. You get aroused just reading about it. Even more persistent is the report of female students who experience menstrual synchrony due to sleeping in the same room. This story has been going around since 1971, sometimes in exaggerated form as a report of menstruating nuns in far-flung convents, although it was difficult to corroborate experimentally. Statistically there was something fishy about the original research. Even if you don’t have a head for mathematics you can figure out that two women who have their periods one week in four will find themselves in the same phase more often than you might think at first. They’re never more than fourteen days out of sync, and there’s an average of one week between the days when their periods begin. And if women really did respond to the smell of male armpits, and if the smell of male armpits really was the same as the smell of rutting male pigs, then pigsties would exert an enormous attraction on human females. Farmer Wants a Wife would be over in no time.
Scientific scepticism has never been able to harm the perfume industry. The only thing connecting science to perfume are the lab coats worn by the men in the cosmetics commercials. These men bottle pig slobber as an irresistible aroma. Now even hair gel contains pheromones. ‘Attention: extreme attraction’ warns ‘Date Magnet’ from the once-so-respectable Schwartzkopf. ‘Men of the land: make women putty in your hand!’ and ‘They’ll jump all over you!’ Christine le Duc tells me encouragingly with her pheromone spray ‘Lure’.
All this fire had already been predicted fifty years ago, and by the man who kindled it, no less: Alex Comfort, London gerontologist. While the first college girls were menstruating synchronically (or not) in 1971, he wrote in Nature:
Science fiction has an awkward way of coming true. Nearly ten years back I wrote a science fiction novel which turned upon the discovery, use and abuse of human pheromones. A pheromone is a substance secreted by one individual which affects the behaviour of another—an olfactory hormone. In the story there were two—3-blindmicyn, which was the universal aphrodisiac, and cocuficin, which excited hostility between males. The main aim of the book was political satire, but the biology unfortunately took over—only biochemists and psychoanalysts found it funny, though the girl who typed it took it for a factual history of my life.
Pheromones seemed too good to be true. Even researchers in official university laboratories dreamed of substances engineered to entice men or to spray women into total submission. Others did their best to set them straight. These ‘Stink Wars’ have not yet subsided, but as the smoke of battle clears, the contours of reality become more visible. Any proof of the existence of mammalian pheromones has been found to be flimsy indeed.
But even if they do exist, they don’t amount to more than a gentle nudge for the mammals that notice them. No directives from on high here, not even in a dog turd. Rarely, if ever, do you see a dog sniff another dog’s turd and then do a one-eighty because its orders had suddenly been changed. Nor do humans let themselves be controlled by a turd’s contents. Even if we had the most sophisticated equipment at our disposal to decode the message contained in a dog turd, we wouldn’t understand it. It’s no more couched in monosyllabic pronouncements than our newspapers and books are. Just as the smell of a cup of pea soup or a leather handbag is made up of thousands of components, some that augment each other, others that contradict each other, most of them irrelevant, yet others that set the tone from the background, so the smell of dog faeces is a complex interactive conglomerate. In order to enjoy all that information and to impart meaning to it amidst the rest of life’s daily affairs, you have to have a dog’s brains as well as its nose, complete with the worldview stored there. The idea that one smell has one meaning is just as outmoded as the idea that one instinct moves you to carry out one particular action, or that one gene is responsible for that one horrible character trait.
It’s this inaccessibility that arouses curiosity about the contents of an animal turd. What exactly does the depositor want to tell the recipient? Confidentiality of the mails isn’t the issue here; it’s how do you get the damned envelope open? Is your dog gossiping about you in secret while you’re just standing there? Are the dogs of the neighbourhood laughing at you? Or are they really as loyal as they claim? How delightful it would be if you could clean out the cat’s litter box and learn all the latest juicy chitchat from the back garden, the way you get to hear everything about school when your child comes home. Or if you could get caught up on the latest news from a lamppost while taking the dog for a walk. Having a good chinwag with your hamster would certainly brighten up your mood—and your hamster’s, too.
~
If you really loved your pet you’d take a course in turd reading, which is no more ridiculous than a course in palm reading or iridology. It seems to me that learning animal language before you venture into the big wide animal world is simply a matter of common decency. Bird guides would show you the way. Besides the birdcall they’d teach you the mating call, the warning cry and the contact twitter for every species. But such instructions would be no more useful to you than the sample sentences in How Do I Say That in Estonian? And whatever you might learn about the smell of their droppings would be even less useful. Mammal guides sometimes describe a turd in general terms (sweet, sickly, sharp), but that doesn’t tell you what’s being communicated. Humans fail their animal language exam before they even start. It’s enough to drive you mad. We deciphered Sanskrit and hieroglyphics with a bit of puzzling, and we found out what the Chinese mandarins had to say to each other a thousand years ago, but what Buster thinks of Fluffy is completely beyond us.
Maybe we should approach the thing from the other end. The fact that we’re too stupid to learn animal language doesn’t rule out the possibility that animals can get the hang of ours. Vocal cords not required. It’s mainly a question of good communication skills.
The best chance you have for a good conversation is with your own family. Of all the animals, the apes are our closest relatives. To teach them our language you have to get them when they’re young, just like human children. In 1931 the American psychologist Kellogg—no relation to the cornflakes magnate—and his wife raised a young chimpanzee, Gua, along with their little son Donald. But the vocabulary never went much beyond ‘papa’ and ‘mama’. It was another American couple, the Gardners, who grasped the problem: chimpanzees simply have no larynx to enable them to talk. Sign language would work better. Their chimpanzee, Washoe, made it to 130 words, very intelligently strung together into little sentences like ‘Give me sweet, hurry’ and ‘Who good? Good me’. Expectations were high. At the end of the last century, scientists were obsessed with the possibility of ape speech. We were this close to bridging the gap between human and animal. ‘This close’ is now long past, and we’ve pretty much said all there is to say on the subject. The apes have vanished into the zoos, the jungle or the vivisection labs. After a brief introductory interview they were rejected as too lightweight, banished from the human realm and sent back millions of years to the kingdom of the apes.
Here and there you may still find a researcher plodding away with talking apes. But language lessons for snout animals like the dog have lost all their appeal. Nose and ear are not on speaking terms. Ear does not understand nose, a situation that exists not only between humans and animals but even within our own species. Of all the thousands of smells that we can distinguish in spite of everything, only a few have names, such as ‘musty’, ‘penetrating’ and ‘rotten’. And most of these are borrowed from another sense. Smells are called ‘sweet’, ‘sour’ or bitter’, but essentially those are tastes. Warm and heavy smells are named after tactile stimuli, and ‘clear’ or ‘dark’ are more likely to describe something seen by the eye rather than smelled by the nose. Charles Baudelaire spoke of ‘fragrances as fresh as a child’s body, soft as an oboe, green as the greenest meadow’. ‘I really no longer knew,’ wrote Guy de Maupassant, ‘if I were breathing music, or hearing smells, or sleeping among the stars’. In The Name, The Nose, the writer Italo Calvino sends his decadent main character to the perfumery of Madame Odile to find out what fragrance had been worn by the lady, now vanished, with whom he had danced at a masked ball.
What I required of Madame Odile’s specific experience was precisely this: to give a name to an olfactory sensation I could neither forget nor hold in my memory without its slowly fading.
Usually we make do with a comparison: it smells like coffee, like sweaty feet, or like a first day of spring. This doesn’t get you very far if you’re a coffee roaster or wine connoisseur. Or a detective. According to Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles, a fully qualified private eye should be able to identify seventy-seven different smells. Even Linnaeus, nature’s bookkeeper, didn’t manage that. In his Odores medicamentorum of 1752 he identified seven different classes, ‘hedonically’ ranked from pleasant to foul:
Aromaticos: as aromatic as lavender
Fragrantes: as fragrant as jasmine
Ambrosiacos: as ambrosial as musk
Alliaceos: as sharp as garlic
Hircinus: as goat-like as sweat
Tetros: as foul as coriander
Nauseosos: as nauseating as faeces
Every attempt to find the right word for a new smell poses problems for the man of letters, as if his search had brought him face to face with a closed door. You’re certain that the word must be tucked away in the cabinet behind that door, but you can’t get to it. The word is on the tip of your tongue, but that’s no help. It only shows us once again how much smell and reason belong to two different worlds. Ascribing a particular word to a particular scent is like trying to force a square peg into a round hole or drive a nail in with a screwdriver. Signals from the nose end up in the old vaults of the brain, the limbic system, which dates from a pre-verbal era. Words are processed in the neocortex, which has burgeoned like a block of flats across the brain’s Old Town. Of course there are connections—in the brain everything is linked to everything—but the first thing a smell sensation evokes is not an idea but an emotion.
Thinking and feeling not only have separate headquarters but they also have separate transport systems. While reason prefers to give its orders electronically via high-speed nerve bundles in a way that is unambiguous and brisk, feelings trickle along chemically with the help of hormones. In order to deal someone a well-directed wallop, a great many nerves in the head, arm, and fist come into play, but the inclination to deal the wallop in the first place comes from your hormones. As every novelist knows, it’s the main character’s feelings that power their actions, not their well-considered decisions. Smells play an important role here. In Patrick Süskind’s Perfume (1985), fragrance and feelings become completely merged.
For scent was a brother of breath. Together with breath it entered human beings, who could not defend themselves against it, not if they wanted to live. And scent entered into their very core, went directly to their hearts, and decided for good and all between affection and contempt, disgust and lust, love and hate. He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men.
Like all odours, the first thing the odour of a turd does is to release emotions. There are no neurons in a turd to make detailed announcements and give instructions. If a turd speaks a language, it’s more in the form of poetry than prose, more advertisement than stock market report, more Hello! than Le Monde, sent by the heart rather than the head. If you’re an animal, a turd can’t teach you how to build a flying machine or who Charlemagne was, but it can help you pour out your heart, gossip, get into fights and settle them. A turd is a perfumed letter from heart to heart. It’s a shame we humans, with our toy noses, can’t use them to read what turds have to say, but maybe it’s just as well. Those who listen to gossip run a serious risk of ending up being talked about themselves. Considering the way humans treat animals, I have no illusions about their view of us. The steam that rises from their shit is the truth about us that gets passed around. Although our noses don’t pick up the interesting stories, the core of the message comes through loud and clear in the overpowering impact of the stench. The penetrating smell of unseemliness drowns out any nuance.
~
One good way of setting your neighbour straight is by sending him a turd. That’ll teach him. The first victim, however, is always yourself. How do you pick up a piece of shit? How do you get it into an envelope? Fortunately you don’t have to. The phrase ‘piece of shit’ alone says it all. Cursing! Swearing! Words with lots of shit in them derive their punch straight from your entrails, somewhere between your heart and your liver. Cursing is the opposite of a friendly greeting, swearing the opposite of prayer. You can pray for someone’s wellbeing with great intensity, but you can just as wholeheartedly wish them ill. Most of the time that’s about as far as it goes. You’d be downright astonished if the other person actually did drop dead or go fuck themselves. And yet cursing helps. I for one don’t know how anybody could put an IKEA table together without cursing. It’s a much more effective adhesive than glue or screws. And then just pray the thing doesn’t collapse.
To add power to your cursing, it is recommended that you violate a taboo. The typical Dutch method is to curse the other person with some horrible disease or condition. There’s also a lot to be said for a more general violation, towards God. Since it’s the opposite of prayer, every curse is a form of blasphemy. But you can also go straight to the source. ‘God damn it’ —Godverdomme—is something you hear more often in Dutch than ‘get tuberculosis!’ (a real Dutch curse) or ‘suffer from consumption!’; in Scandinavia people invoke the devil with ‘Fy fan’. For the unbeliever there’s a broad range of taboos to choose from in the realm of sex. In America, ‘fuck!’ is not only one of the most popular curses, but if you can believe the films from that country it’s also the most frequently used word in the English language. With the exception of ‘shit!’ In English as well as in German and French, the anus is used more often for swearing than for shitting. An interesting indication of the national preference for either shit or disease is the proper Dutch translation of the English phrase ‘the shit’s gonna hit the fan!’: ‘nou breekt de pleuris uit!’—‘now there’s gonna be an outbreak of pleurisy!’
‘Merdre’ was the first word of the play Ubu Roi, which premiered on 10 December 1896 in the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris. Among the audience the shit almost did hit the fan. ‘Despite the late hour,’ one of the reviewers wrote after the performance, ‘I went home and hosed myself down.’ And so the avant-garde theatre was born. In France, that is. The Germans were already used to this sort of thing. In 1773 Johann Goethe had written Götz von Berlichingen—the name alone is now tantamount to profanity. In this drama, the brave knight Götz finds himself surrounded by his enemies. They call to him to surrender. ‘Tell your captain,’ Götz answers, ‘that he can lick my arse!’ This quip is still cited in Germany today, no matter what the circumstances. An inappropriate example took place during the Nuremberg Trials, when Göring slammed his fist on the table with the words, ‘God damn it, I wish we all had the courage to limit our defence to three simple words: lick my arse! Götz was the first one who said it, and I will be the last!’
Hollering ‘shit’ has the same effect as shitting itself: out comes the filth, you’re free of it, now it’s someone else’s problem. Very few things clear the air as capably as a good shitful curse. It’s as if the brain’s traditional linguistic centre had finally given way under the emotional pressure built up by the fetid air in the olfactory bulb. Before you know it, the words escape your lips like a fart from your arse: Shit! Scheisse! Merde! No shit, Sherlock.
Shit, Scheisse, merde: even the most common word for poo sounds like a curse. So what term should you use if you just want to talk about it? To prevent you from starting to swear before you’ve even begun having a serious conversation, a whole series of new euphemisms have been invented over the years. Faeces, excrement, stool—none of them help very much. There’ll always be something fishy about shit. Due to the absence of a neutral word, the subject has simply become unmentionable in polite company. To get around these difficulties, people tend to talk about the place where the act is performed rather than the product or the function. Thus one goes to the toilet—or, as respectable people put it, to the loo. It’s reminiscent of the way sex was dealt with until fifty years ago. In the absence of a nice word for fucking (the act), people went to bed with each other (the place). Today, as then, there are three social refuges where you can freely talk about shit, and each refuge has in its own jargon: medical, vulgar and infantile.
Doctors revert to the trick by which they were able to elevate their profession above the level of the common man for so long, the same trick the Catholic church used so successfully: the use of dead languages. There are no obscenities in a dead language. Doctors don’t fuck their brains out in Latin and Greek, they cohabit; they don’t shit, they defecate. Actually, faeces is just an ancient word for muck and filth, but everyone seems to have forgotten that. Even more serious is the tendency to associate medical terminology with sickness and death. The fact that doctors only deal with sick people is having its revenge. They have absolutely no knowledge of what’s going on inside a healthy body.
Popular speech calms the fear of death and decay, of piss and pus, with humour. In popular speech, people seldom defecate or urinate; it’s always taking a crap or taking a leak, to say nothing of pinching a loaf or draining the main vein. In folk tales there’s no end of sliding on brown sludge, chamber pots being emptied on people’s heads, exits used as entrances, and entrances as exits—all of it accompanied by snorting and sniggering. While it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, real folk humour always calls a spade a spade. As the tram conductor said after one of the passengers had farted: ‘Everybody take a whiff and it’ll be gone in no time.’ And this well-intentioned complaint from the Brabant farmer: ‘No sooner do you settle down for a really good shit than you run out of the stuff.’
For children, shit is a gold mine. First there’s the material itself followed by the words to describe it, and this goes on until they’re ready for sex. For parents, children are a welcome outlet, giving them a chance to join in the poo talk without holding back. At the same time, however, the kids are already practising the use of common euphemisms. The Dutch writer Godfried Bomans provides a splendid example of this in his ‘earliest memories’ of Pieter Bas: ‘Anna, who “had been in service to the master himself,” insisted that all four of us take our turn on the chamber pot, for, she said, “a true Christian could not sleep until all the ‘bad stuff’ was out.”’
So four chamber pots were lined up against the wall. The Bas brothers sat themselves down and looked at each other intently, since the whole idea was to see who got the bad stuff out first. The first one to do so would climb into bed triumphantly and wait for the next winner. Together they would egg on the two stragglers, urging them ‘not to let down the team’, and these in turn would stare at each other with red faces, determined to give it their all. Poor Jozef! He always came in last. And when one after another had crept into bed and he was left alone on the floor, groaning, I sometimes felt sorry for him. So I’d straighten myself up and holler, ‘How’s it going?’
‘Almost there,’ would come the serious reply.
Good boy, Jozef! But every now and then he’d be rewarded for his efforts.
‘Everybody come and look,’ he’d shout, very excited.
And the three of us would fly out of bed, since ‘what Jozef did was nothing to be sneezed at’. We’d study the results with the eyes of experts who knew a prize when they saw one and tell him it was a ‘whopper’, while the happy owner would receive the tribute with a grateful little laugh.
Unfortunately, because of its popularity among children, pooing has acquired a somewhat childish reputation. Ask for a book about poo in your local bookshop and you’ll be directed to the children’s department. There you can find a book that is called The Story of the Little Mole who Knew it Was None of his Business. It’s a story about a little mole who wants to know who shat on his head, which is actually the title of the book’s Dutch translation. For an adult such a title is unthinkable; the word ‘poo’ alone is taboo. Too childish. So as the writer of a serious book about poo you’re stuck with a vocabulary full of holes. Writing a book on a subject for which there is no decent word is like baking a cake without sugar, building a house without nails, or sitting on the toilet without having to go. How is this supposed to end? Back when it was all about sex in books, it seemed like a question of attrition. Sex book after sex book wore away the sharpest edges of words like ‘cock’ and ‘cunt’, but between ‘cock’ or ‘cunt’ here, ‘penis’ or ‘vagina’ there, and ‘willie’ or ‘pussy’ somewhere else, the gaps still yawned. In the case of sex these were filled in with provocative photos, erotic films and exciting lingerie. If you didn’t have a word for it, there were always pictures. But it’s trickier with shitting and peeing.
If you want to write about shit you have to make do with what the language has to offer. Nothing for it but to change register from time to time, be prepared to put up with ambiguities (it’s a subject that can’t help being funny) and enjoy childish pleasures—and if the entire vocabulary lets you down, vent your feelings just like everyone else with a loud ‘Shit!’