Shitting is a paradox. You make something that you actually want to get rid of. So the fun has to come from the shitting itself. And it does; all you have to do is enjoy it. Senses aplenty. Although there are no taste buds in your backside, you can tell the difference between one turd and another by the consistency, the creaminess and the shape, the way you can tell the difference in your mouth between custard and porridge, between hot chocolate with skin or without. Isn’t it delightful to let a well-lubricated turd slurp through your half-relaxed anus like a cake of soap through your hand? Enjoy how the tension mounts, sometimes to the breaking point, before tapering off when the passage triumphantly gives way and the turd slides through. Suddenly you remember how deliciously spicy your meal was day before yesterday. All you have to do is sit down, give yourself plenty of time, and focus your attention like a wine connoisseur or a tea ceremony devotee. The more advanced practitioners go to the loo with the eager expectation that ordinary people reserve for entering a fine restaurant.
The only condition attached to minor scatological pleasure is that you be open to it. You have to be in the mood. Aus einem traurigen Arsch, as every German knows, fährt nie ein fröhlicher Furz. From a sad arse, never a cheerful fart. A good-humoured arse, on the other hand, is a wellspring of entertainment. Thanks to all the nerve endings located there, it’s sensitive to stroking, kissing, licking or a good wallop. And as far as that’s concerned it’s the perfect counterpoint to the mouth, which also has other responsibilities but for that reason is not insensitive to the attentions of a tongue or a pair of moist lips. ‘Lick my arse’ or ‘you can kiss my butt’ is both a curse and a reference to the most intimate of all intimacies. In the Middle Ages, it was believed that heretics kissed the devil’s backside at ungodly hours. Witches were cleverer. They worshipped the devil in the shape of a black cat; no livelier little bottom in existence—so kissable. According to reports, this was when the witches danced their witches’ dances and sang their witches’ songs. But it took Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to compose really heavenly music to honour the anus, with lyrics he wrote himself such as ‘Leck mich im Arsch’ (KV 231) and ‘Beym Arsch ist’s finster’ (KV 441b). In 1787 he disguised his appeal in Dog Latin: ‘Difficile lectu mihi mars et jonicu jonicu difficile’. This three-part canon (KV 559) was a good-natured pitfall for the tenor-baritone Johann Peyerl. When Peyerl sang it in his Bavarian accent, the German public clearly heard ‘leck du mi im Arsch’, while Italians recognised the word ‘cujoni’ (balls) in the repeated jonicu jonicu. This was immediately followed by the choir with ‘O du eselhafter Peierl’ (KV 560a).
How a tongue can end up in an anus is anybody’s guess. Normally it’s a neighbouring organ that enjoys the occasional lick. The genitals are located right next to the piss and shit organs. ‘But Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement’ wrote the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, in a distant echo of Saint Augustine’s comment that ‘we’re born between faeces and urine’. Sewer and portico are so closely interwoven that biologists speak of one urogenital system, and if you have sperm problems you’re sent to the hospital urologist. No wonder your tongue tends to stray there in the dark. But even in broad daylight, the similarity between an anus and a vagina is hard for anyone to miss. Gay men have little choice, and, if you can believe contemporary pornography, more and more straight men are making the occasional detour on the way to the main entrance. From the outside it’s impossible to see that the anus is meant for anything other than an exit. The valve that closes off the entrance is located deep inside, near the three-way connection where the small intestine, the appendix and the large intestine meet. The penis seems to have been created for penetration of the rectum. It’s shaped like a turd and has approximately the same dimensions. What comes out should be able to go back in. The only thing that’s missing is lubrication. Since the Creator had another opening in mind—the vagina—that’s where the grease nipples are located. Fortunately His creatures invented lubricating jelly.
A man is lucky. He has a penis and an anus, which means he can mount and be mounted. Apart from his mouth, his anus is the only possible access point for penile penetration. Most men leave this option untried. But if an anus can play vagina, a finger can easily take the place of a cock. In Wetlands, Charlotte Roche learned this at an early age from ‘a really old lover’:
He wanted me to experience everything about male sexuality so that in the future no man could ever pull one over on me. Now I supposedly know a lot about male sexuality, but I don’t know whether all of what I learned applies to all men or only to him. I still have to see. One of his cardinal rules was that you should always stick your finger up a guy’s arse during sex. Makes him come harder. So far I can certainly concur. It’s always a hit. They go wild. But you shouldn’t discuss it with them beforehand or after. Otherwise they’ll worry they’re gay and get all uptight. Just do it and afterward pretend nothing was ever in there.
Anyone who appreciates the fun of sex automatically discovers the pleasures that shit and pee have to offer. In the 69 position all your senses come in intimate contact with a landscape where sexual hillocks change imperceptibly into anal craters and urinal geysers, cloaked in lakes of mucous and indefinable smells that would have revolted you under other circumstances, but here and now exert a magical attraction. Being sexually active means getting smeared with shit, but so what? You’re there anyway, right? If you’re pinching the cat in the dark, you might as well give the dog a squeeze. A situation that stimulates the one will entice the other. Once you’re in bed, the move from the genitals to their neighbours in the crotch is almost instinctive. Conversely, the switch from shit and pee to sex often takes place in the loo. All alone, in the safety of the toilet, you can satisfy two needs at once. Paper, drain pipes, privacy and wandering thoughts are all within reach.
Most people are prepared to put up with a bit of excrement or urine during sex with varying levels of pleasure, but there are some who see it as the sauce and whipped cream of sexual cuisine. In Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, Alex Portnoy’s girlfriend talks about a former lover who liked to watch her defecate on a glass-top coffee table while he lay on the floor beneath her. The newly married man in the film Where’s Poppa? satisfied his desires just as shamelessly. After having sex on their wedding night, the young bride notices that her husband has done a ‘caca’ in bed. When she demands, ‘How could you?!’ he answers, ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ James Joyce, the author of Ulysses, was luckier with his wife Nora. Their marriage, as his letters attest, was sealed with a mutual longing for shit:
The smallest things give me a great cockstand…a little brown stain on the seat of your white drawers…a sudden immodest noise made by you behind and then a bad smell slowly curling up out of your backside. It must be a fearfully lecherous thing to see a girl with her clothes up frigging furiously at her cunt, to see her pretty white drawers pulled open behind and her bum sticking out and a fat brown thing stuck halfway out of her hole. You say you will shit your drawers, dear, and let me fuck you then. I would like to hear you shit them, dear, first and then fuck you.
Charlotte Roche also knows the power of a lick of shit. Some of her lovers ‘like it when the tip of their cock has a little crap on it when they pull it out after butt fucking—the smell of the crap their cock’s pulled out turns them on.’ For such a man, ‘there’s crap ready to be found just a few centimetres inside the entrance. He only has to have stuck it in for a second and come in contact with the crap. Then when he pulls it back out and we try out another position, his cock functions like a fluttering crap-scented air freshener.’ If the man she’s with isn’t fond of anal sex with the faeces included, Charlotte cleans her rectum three times beforehand ‘until there are no more mini-chunks of crap visible. I’m perfectly prepared for clean butt sex, like a blow-up doll.’ But you have to be careful. There’s a known case of a man who was doing it with such a doll when fate stepped in: ‘No sooner had I bit her in the neck than she farted and flew out the window.’
Sex shouldn’t be clean. There should be something slightly fishy about it, literally as well as figuratively. Some men are perfectly happy with the smell alone. You see them in Amsterdam’s Red Light District, standing in the queue at the reeking urinals. In the standard work Die sexuelle Osphresiologie (1906), Albert Hagen describes the case of an established notary who ‘since his childhood had been known as an eccentric and misanthrope’. By his own admission, he ‘stimulated his sexual urge’ with the help of ‘a number of sheets of toilet paper that he himself had used, which he then spread out on the blankets and looked at and smelled until he got an erection, die er dann zur Onanie benutzte’. After his death a large basketful of these papers was found next to his bed, each one carefully marked with the date and the year.
~
If it were purely a matter of humans and their lusts, all bodily orifices of sufficient dimensions would be used for sexual pleasure. The only ones to object were the gods. The church has always threatened hell and damnation to those who use their openings unproductively. It hasn’t had much to say about faeces and urine as such, but the entanglement with sex makes improper use not only obscene but profane, which puts it squarely in the middle of the church’s field of operations. Sex from behind has been a special target of the church’s ire. Those who do it doggy fashion—more canum—were doomed by the mediaeval church fathers to burn in hell for eternity while riveted together in this position. But who of us today allows the church fathers to peek under the sheets? Modern individuals don’t let the church tell them what to do. A modern individual doesn’t believe in God anymore but in science. And in the scientific study of shit and sex, there’s only one high priest who towers above all the others. Here the word of Freud is still the law.
Although even Sigmund Freud was unable to untangle sex from shitting, he did impose some kind of order. He saw sex the way a good Christian sees the Holy Trinity: one God in three persons—God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. According to Freud, your sexual development begins at birth and follows three steps: the oral, the anal and the phallic phase. For the first year and a half, pleasure consists mainly of sucking on your mother’s nipples, and after you turn three, sex comes to reside in the organs for which it is named. But in the intervening years, satisfaction gurgles in your backside. This anal phase is a real earthly paradise. Shitting to their heart’s content, your intestines furnish you with continuous pleasure. For thousands of years, babies had to make do without rattles or teething rings, but their intestines never abandoned them. Even this paradise has its Fall, however. Suddenly the fun and games are over: you have to do your business on the potty. You may have been mama’s sweetheart, but from now on you have to perform first before she presses you to her bosom. If you don’t make it to the potty on time you’ll never grow up. ‘You want to be a baby your whole life?’ And if you do make it, the grateful hug you get for your latest production is followed by the ultimate insult: your turd, the most beautiful thing you can make, a bit of yourself, the perfect means of self-expression, is hastily carried off and flushed away. Because it’s dirty. Yuck. Naughty. Bad. If there’s one place where a child loses its innocence, it’s on the potty, according to Freud. Suddenly the world is divided into good and bad. Pride makes way for shame. That’s what a Fall is all about. But a fall from what? What can a baby have done wrong?
It got older, that’s what. It’s like being guilty of adolescence when you’re fourteen or deserving of the death penalty when you’re a hundred—a child is condemned to being toilet-trained just because of its age. If the child is ready for it, the punishment isn’t really so bad. You’ve got to come face to face with evil sooner or later. If enough time has been set aside for this encounter, Freud will let you move on to the next stage of life, the phallic, and grow up to be a fairly well-balanced individual. So the child is in no hurry; it isn’t up to him. It’s the parents who’d like him to hurry up and be toilet-trained. When I was born, in 1946, a child who wasn’t toilet-trained was an enormous inconvenience. All my nappies had to be washed by hand, wrung out and dried. Even more intolerable was the idea that there was something wrong with a child who took longer to be toilet-trained. Children were expected to meet certain expectations. A dirty child was a discredit to its mother. To get that shit out where it belonged, children were locked up, threatened and scolded. Big suppositories were jammed into small bottoms. The result was usually counter-productive. The worst mistake was to start in with potties far too early. A baby simply doesn’t have the nerve bundles to bring its sphincters under control for the first year and a half. At age two, only half of all babies are toilet-trained, and one year later 5 per cent are still letting their shit run free. Why does it take so long? Why do humans take three years to do something that cats only need three weeks to master? Kittens are using the litter box long before the baby of the house of the same age is out of nappies because that’s more or less what they’ve done for millions of years. Their forefathers were burying their excrement long before the human, let alone the litter box, had been invented. Their behaviour is anchored in their genes. Our forefathers, by contrast, were living in the trees, where you couldn’t bury anything and there was nothing to bury anyway, because you could just let your excrement drop without giving it a moment’s thought. Our babies still do that, lying close to the ground in their cradles—until nature takes pity on them, pulls out all the stops, and improvises a nerve connection between arse and brain. But what about the other apes who have come down from the trees? A baby chimpanzee clings to its mother all day long, inundating her with piss and shit. But when it’s old enough it gives her a warning sign. Without any prompting from its mother, it makes a little growl and sticks out its rear end, neatly directing its piss and shit elsewhere. It can’t be a coincidence that the chimp starts doing this after the age of two, which is approximately when human babies become toilet-trained. Sensible human parents patiently wait until their child lets them know the time has come. Of course they get the potty ready, but they don’t exert any pressure to bring about the inevitable. No pooing lessons are needed. Why should a child learn to do something it’s been able to do perfectly well since its birth? Human children toilet-train themselves, too.
Chimpanzees have never heard of Sigmund Freud, but we have. Even those who haven’t read his Charakter und Analerotik (1908) fear his frustrations and fixations. At any point from cradle to nursery to school, something can go wrong in the sequence of oral, anal and phallic phases. If the time for the next phase arrives while the previous phase has yet to be concluded, you’ll be stuck. Should such a fixation take place during the oral phase, not only do you keep sucking your thumb and whining, but later on, as an adult, you take to drink, you eat too much and you adopt a dependent attitude for the rest of your life. If you’re toilet-trained too early, you become anally fixated and develop an anal personality. According to Freud, that makes you tidy, stingy, and stubborn. Once it was just your shit that you tried to control; later on it’s your whole life. It often begins with collecting. Football cards, shells, or little plastic dolls become cherished possessions that you can organise into a unified whole. There’s nothing wrong with that. On the contrary, every science once began as a collection—of objects or of facts. But occasionally older people will revert to the primal practice of collecting excrement and find themselves in the colourful collection of Abarten des Sexualverhaltens as uro- or coprophiles. According to Abarten collector Günther Hunold, a urophile collects
other people’s urine in small, carefully labelled bottles. It is essential that the label contain not only the place and the date but also a personal description. At moments of extreme sexual arousal, a favourite bottle is opened and a drop of urine is spread on the penis or clitoris. This is followed by a lengthy session of masturbation.
Coprophilia involves collecting the faeces of the partner. After being dried, the excrement is stowed away and labelled, as with the urophile.
While it rarely gets this extreme, the more common thing collected by an anal personality is hardly less vulgar: the dross of the earth. Instead of faeces, he accumulates money; instead of parental pride he reaps social prestige. Rather than give his money away he hoards it, meticulously counted, with place and date noted in a ledger. A real miser is totally wacko. He’ll never understand the comment made by Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), that money is like manure, not in the Freudian sense but because it is ‘of very little use except it be spread’. The miser isn’t alone in his incomprehension. Our entire capitalist society is anally fixated—at least according to Norman Brown. It’s no accident that his Life Against Death came out in 1959, at the height of the battle between capitalism and communism. The anal fixation argument allowed him to depict capitalists as even worse than leeches; now they could be dismissed as anal perverts. The only thing that helped, according to Brown, was to recognise the problem. To tame the beast in man you first have to accept it. As long as you don’t admit that you’re stuck in a depraved body, the door to a better world will remain closed. Every trace of shame must be expelled, beginning with shit.
Nonsense. Poppycock. That’s what modern pseudo-intellectuals and head-shrinkers have to say about the anal personality. A strongbox is not a toilet. You can’t blame your parents because you’re a narrow-minded, fastidious know-it-all. Psychiatrists are perfectly aware that orderliness, stinginess and stubbornness often occur together, but they have another name for it—obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD)—and toilets or faeces are not part of the picture. In practice, a causal connection has never been demonstrated between bad toilet-training experiences and OCPD. The anal fixation is something Freud dreamt up.
Yet a connection between childhood and anal personality traits is undeniable. If interest in the anal is childish, it’s a perfect fit for our age of infantilising. With their fondness for sports, games and amusement, people love to return to their childhood. Never before has the call of Jesus Christ to ‘become as little children’ struck such a sympathetic chord. Dressed in their shorts, adults merrily run after a ball, lick ice-cream cones, shop for the fun of it. If earthly existence was once the crucial test for a better hereafter, it’s now become a game, a way to pass the time. And what better toy could you wish for than a butt full of shit: always available, absolutely free and with an opening like that on a party balloon?
If collecting is the basis of science, then play is the origin of art. And if the playful use of material begins with shit, then art is based on shit as well. No modelling clay models so well. And so gratefully. Shit is raw material and product rolled into one. You can show a good-looking turd to your mother as a readymade (‘look, Ma, no hands!’) or work it into a ball, a cake or a slide for dolls. You can stick little flags in it or birthday candles, you can mould a castle out of it, and finally you can watch it gurgle as it’s being flushed away. But there are other possibilities. Once you catch the creative bug, nothing can stop you from composing a song, writing a book or putting together an atomic bomb with the same pleasure. Nothing resembles the creative process more than excrement: from the first urge, then on to moaning and straining, and then the triumphant finale—the difference being that you can show the final product off to everyone, even if you’re not totally satisfied with it yourself. Thus Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) described his own Essais in De la vanité as ‘the excrement of an old spirit, first hard, then soft, and always indigestible’. Centuries later, Stephen King, in his autobiographical work On Writing, showed his gratitude for the anal powers of his youth, which were still responsible for the heat of his writing. He had once had a big fat woman as a babysitter.
Eula-Beulah was prone to farts—the kind that are both loud and smelly. Sometimes when she was so afflicted, she would throw me on the couch, drop her wool-skirted butt on my face, and let loose. ‘Pow!’ she’d cry in high glee. It was like being buried in marsh gas fireworks. I remember the dark, the sense that I was suffocating, and I remember laughing. Because, while what was happening was sort of horrible, it was also sort of funny. In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors.
Play, when it ripens into art, is of vital importance. For humans, a song, a book or a bomb are what a tail is to a peacock or antlers to a deer. Men in particular tend to flaunt their creations. Those with the finest art or the funniest tricks are able to outsmart their rivals. Bursting with pride, the best artists let themselves be photographed by the gutter press along with their conquest. But whether they’d ever be allowed to show off their most beautiful turd in the four-star suite of the Hollywood Hotel is rather doubtful.
Making necessity fun: the best way to lighten up your journey.
Let alone their chamber pots full of pee. While biologists are willing to grant a certain measure of recognition to urinating as a means of securing territory, psychologists and psychiatrists see little good (or mischief) in it. Even Freud, who assigned such an important role to shit in the development of the anal character, dismissed the pleasure of urinating in 1908 as nothing more than ‘urethral eroticism’ that would lead to ‘burning ambition’. Later, in 1930, he came up with the idea that primitive man had learned to suppress this pleasure only by stifling the infantile urge to put the fire out by pissing on it. But the mouth of the bladder was never given a psychosexual phase similar to the anal phase. The oral and anal openings apparently gave Freud all the opportunity he needed to make stuff up. For him, men and women were as good as equal, urethrally speaking.
In public, however, preference is given to male urination: there are more pissoirs than ladies’ toilets. But in one respect men are at just as disadvantaged as women when it comes to public facilities. If they have to defecate, a pissoir isn’t going to do them any good either. When it comes to shitting, a man is just as vulnerable as a woman. Along the motorways of Europe there are few opportunities to calmly pull over and defecate, probably because it’s considered too expensive. You need someone to keep the thing clean, and that costs money. This led the authorities of Paris in 1981 to develop the ‘Sanisette’, an automatic toilet that cleans itself from top to bottom after each paid use. You see them in other parts of the world as well today, but the advance is slow. I don’t think money is the main problem—physical relief is never too expensive if the need is great enough. What’s more objectionable is finding yourself in a sealed mechanism that you can only hope will re-open, preferably before it has included you in its high-pressure hot-water clean-up. Here the thigmophilia of the toilet quickly turns to the claustrophobia of the submarine.
All things considered, nothing can beat your own loo at home. Only there can you find the peace and quiet you need for the pleasure of relieving yourself. In addition, since men and women aren’t divided into LADIES and GENTS, they both get an honest look at the little idiosyncrasies of each other’s sex. Women, for instance, are more sensitive to smells, streaks and stains. In practice this means they will be the first ones to clean the loo, even if most of the mess is made by men. Many men even refuse to hang up a new roll of toilet paper when the old one is used up. So women do that, too, although they’re rarely thanked for it. Men argue that women are doing it all wrong. Women put the roll in the holder so the end hangs down against the wall. Men insist that the right way is just the reverse, since then the paper hangs far away from the wall and you can easily reach it to tear off a sheet without scratching your hand on the plaster. Whether this difference between the sexes is universal, and what purpose it serves, is not clear. Further scientific study is called for.
~
It’s the kind of study that’s perfect for children. They make use of the same toilet, but they’re less self-conscious about it. When children reach the question-asking stage, the toilet is mainly a source of inspiration. Can you feel how many are coming? And what colour will they be? Why do I never see my father pooing? Does what you’ve eaten make any difference? Why do some farts stink and others don’t? To become a real scatologist, all a child needs are a couple of tips. I included them once in a children’s book:
Farts smell good, but they’re hard to see. You can’t grab hold of them. That’s because they’re made of gas. Even though you can’t see the gas itself, you can still make your farts visible. You do that in the bathtub. They look like a row of bubbles. And you can hear them, too: blub, blub. Now that you can hear them and see them, you can also catch them. Just hold an upside-down jam jar over them. But first, take the jar and fill it under water, then turn it upside down and lift it halfway out of the bath. If you do that, a little water will stay in the jar. No air can get in to drive the water out. But your farts can. They bubble up into the jar and push the water back into the tub. This means you’ve caught your farts—they’re in the jar above the water. To keep them there, put the lid on the jar while it’s still under water. That way you can smell them later on.
Scientifically inclined children will stick a label on the jar indicating what they had eaten the previous day. If they do that every day they can compare them: what food produces the best farts? If you have a duplicate, you can exchange jars with a friend. This is what Robert Provine calls ‘small science’ in Curious Behavior. It’s not small because it’s trivial but because all you need is your own body to do it. And it makes you laugh. Some people can’t get enough of it, not even after their childhood years have passed. According to his life partners Woelrat and Teigetje, Gerard Reve saw it as an endless source of fun:
When company comes, Gerard usually can’t help but show them his fart-in-the-glass act. He’ll be a little nervous because of the visitors, which makes him gassy. Then suddenly he’ll hold his empty wine glass up to his backside and catch his fart with a loud bang, after which he covers the glass with his hand. Then he takes a whiff through a crack in his fingers and shouts with delight, I got it! Damn, I got it! Really! I got it! Smell it! A nice, well-rounded, fat fart! And when the visitor recoils in disgust, he smells it again and says, Oh, come on. Give it a whiff. Just for a minute. Really! I got it.
A dirty body is a joy forever. Perfect for playing Mushroom. This game requires two players. As one of them farts, the other one tosses flour over his partner’s backside with both hands. If the timing is right a mushroom cloud will appear, just like a nuclear test. If more people play you can hold regional contests or even set up a society, like the Free Farters from L’esclavage rompu (1750). ‘Every Free Farter must act, speak, and bear witness in the spirit of the society. Newly admitted members are exhorted to fart unashamedly in their own homes, in the street, and in company, as propaganda for the society.’
Things were done more scientifically at the Academy of Lagado, where Gulliver found himself in a remarkable laboratory during his travels:
I went into another Chamber, but was ready to hasten back, being almost overcome with a horrible Stink. My Conductor pressed me forward, conjuring me in a Whisper to give no Offence, which would be highly resented; and therefore I durst not so much as stop my Nose. The Projector of this Cell was the most ancient Student of the Academy. His Face and Beard were of a pale Yellow; his Hands and Clothes dawbed over with Filth. When I was presented to him, he gave me a close Embrace, (a Compliment I could well have excused.) His Employment, from his first coming into the Academy, was an Operation to reduce human Excrement to its original Food, by separating the several Parts, removing the Tincture which it receives from the Gall, making the Odour exhale, and scumming off the Saliva. He had a weekly Allowance from the Society, of a Vessel filled with human Ordure, about the Bigness of a Bristol Barrel.
It’s a promising branch of science. But you can no more reconstruct a turd’s earliest days than you can predict what the wares of the greengrocer or butcher are going to look like after passing through the intestine. Two artists can use exactly the same paint and produce very different paintings. No two days are alike, no two moods are alike. Can you tell from a turd in what state of mind it was made? On Laputia they thought so:
Another Professor showed me a large Paper of Instructions for discovering Plots and Conspiracies against the Government. He advised great Statesmen to examine into the Dyet of all suspected Persons; their Times of eating; upon which Side they lay in Bed; with which Hand they wipe their Posteriors; to take a strict View of their Excrements, and from the Colour, the Odour, the Taste, the Consistence, the Crudeness, or Maturity of Digestion, form a Judgment of their Thoughts and Designs: Because Men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at Stool; which he found by frequent Experiment: For in such Conjunctures, when he used merely as a Trial to consider which was the best Way of murdering the King, his Ordure would have a Tincture of Green; but quite different when he thought only of raising an Insurrection, or burning the Metropolis.
Among the readers who missed the irony in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels were intelligence services such as the CIA and Mossad. During the Cold War, they managed to lay their hands on the excrement of world leaders such as Leonid Brezhnev and Mikhail Gorbachev. To keep friendly excrement from unauthorised eyes, George W. Bush carried his own toilet with him for the depositing of intestinal state secrets while travelling in Europe.
Heinrich Böll elaborated on this theme in his Group Portrait with Lady (1971). In this novel, Sister Rahel keeps detailed records of the faeces of the young girls in her convent school, which she carefully examines.
The girls were required not to flush away these products into the invisible regions before Rahel had inspected them. In most cases a glance was enough for Rahel, enabling her to state with accuracy the physical and mental condition of the girl in question, and, since she could predict even scholastic achievement on the basis of excrements, she used to be positively beleaguered before the writing of term papers. Taking two hundred and forty school days as an annual average, times twelve girls and five years of floor-service, it is no trick to calculate that Sister Rahel kept statistical records and condensed analyses of some twenty-eight thousand eight hundred digestive processes: an astounding compendium that would probably fetch any price as a scatological and urological document. Presumably it has been destroyed as trash!
Since even graphology as a science is considered suspect, the reading of turds is not high on the list of academic methodologies. Of course, our turds want to tell us something—shitting is clearly a way of expressing yourself—but their message falls on deaf ears. Actually, it’s more a mumble. Even the most modern bugging devices are unable to elicit a sensible syllable from a turd. You might as well resort to the oldest method known to natural science: tasting. You did it as a baby. Adults happily tuck into a nun’s fart, a deep-fried pastry that’s also popular in Germany (Nonaffairs) and France (pet-de-none). The name refers to a nun who was doing some cooking in the abbey of Armouries (near Strasbourg) when she farted. Startled with shock and embarrassment, she dropped a spoonful of dough into the cooking oil. Everyone was enchanted with the delicate result, which evoked vague memories of their earliest childhood. While proper ladies giggle as they take one last nun’s fart with their tea, real men give a brazen wink and shove another sausage or meatball down their gullet. Or, big tough guys that they are, they eat some weird cheese that stinks like shit for miles around. But they wouldn’t eat real shit for all the tea in China. Or so they think. Great is the indignation every time traces of faeces are found on the meat in a slaughterhouse. Yet it can’t be avoided. When the meat was still a cow or pig, it was wrapped around a packet of intestines that were crammed full of shit. All it takes to puncture an intestine is for a knife to slip while the animal is being slaughtered. If this escapes the notice of the inspectors there’ll be shit on your bologna sandwich. It is virtually impossible to maintain a strict separation between excrement and food. The entire food industry is simply full of shit. Vegetables and grains spend their whole lives under a layer of manure; cows walk around in their own food, which itself is covered in shit, and they never wash their hooves. You can rinse your vegetables off, of course, but the efficacy of rinsing is evident soon enough when you grate your teeth on the last bit of sand in your first bite of spinach. And even if it is possible to remove the faeces from a cow in plenty of time, intestines and all, how do you deal with a bag full of shrimp or a tin of sardines? Many small animals are eaten complete with bowel contents for the sake of convenience. It’s true that boiling kills bacteria, but it’s cold comfort to realise that the shit you’ve eaten was boiled, too. And sometimes you can’t even count on the comfort—oysters are eaten alive, with living shit in living intestines.
‘I swear it smells like violets!’ Political cartoon featuring Napoleon and his ever-faithful Marshall Michel Ney.
Everything has its fans. Hunters regard the excrement of snipes as a delicacy. When they clean them they deliberately leave the intestines intact in order to enjoy a bit of ‘snipe dung’. It makes them feel more profoundly connected to nature. This kind of decadence goes back to the ancient Romans, of course. According to Lepidus, their emperor Commodus often ate excrement at his bacchanals. Hungarians would never do such a thing. They use their shit to brew brandy. At least that’s what the Croats say. In Austria, the same claim is made about the Poles. At least according to coprologist Werner Pieper, a German.
Urine and shit may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but there’s a lot to be said for it nutritionwise. Your shit contains one-tenth of the calories from the food you eat, and your intestinal bacteria add their own valuable nutrients. There are pathogens in shit, too, of course, but not necessarily enough to kill you immediately. If eating your own shit made you drop dead, there would be considerably fewer dogs and pigs in the world. Yet most human shit-eaters don’t do it for the nuritional value. A real coprophage is concerned with what’s going on in his head. A morsel of excrement or a glass of piss can really turn him on. In the archive of Günther Hunold there’s the case of Babsy Z.:
Toni was a very nice man, although he had his preferences. But I can take a lot. As long as you pay I’ll do anything for you.
Except for hitting. I don’t like that. But Toni wanted something very different. He made me drink a lot of champagne. I wasn’t allowed to go to the toilet. ‘Just hold it,’ he said. Then he gave me more to drink. At a certain point I couldn’t hold it anymore. I crossed my legs and pressed my thighs together. Then I noticed that he was starting to get aroused. He took this odd sort of bottle out of his black briefcase.
Toni asked me to urinate into the bottle under the table. He wanted to make sure he could see everything, he said. While the bottle was filling up, he began to masturbate. Then Toni grabbed the full bottle. He took a golden dish out of his briefcase and poured the urine from the bottle onto the dish. Then he took out a golden spoon and began consuming the liquid. At the same time he grabbed my hand and pulled it over to his erect penis. I knew what I was supposed to do.
Coprophagia reached its high point with the Marquis de Sade. In Les cent-vint journées de Sodome (1785) he writes about an orgy that lasted four months. It’s a sampling of sexual tastes, from delicate to coarse. When it comes to excrement, each of the four guests has his preference. One of them, a young financier, only eats shit that’s more than a week old, preferably with a bit of mould on top. A second is wild about diarrhoea, especially that of women who are suffering from indigestion or have just taken a laxative. There’s a freethinker who goes to Communion and gets a pair of whores to shit on his host while it’s still in his mouth. And then the fourth, a landowner, lives with a woman whom he keeps on a strict diet (no fish, salted meats, eggs, dairy products or bread, and very little fat, but plenty of poultry) to improve the taste of her faeces, which he dines on daily.
Emperor Commodus enjoying his coprophagic meal.
This puts him well ahead of his time. I see a future in which the shitting that will follow a meal will be taken into account as a matter of course, so you can enjoy the same meal twice. This doesn’t mean actually eating your shit. There are so many other ways to have anal fun with your food. A day or two after the meal you can expect the only real dessert that counts, either gassy or with the consistency of conventional desserts like pudding, according to your taste. The true food connoisseur will also be a faecal connoisseur. Right now, you can already turn to Indian cuisine for the coarser work. Warnings like ‘very, very spicy’ or ‘extremely hot’ are what to look for. It’s fire-eating followed by shitting razor blades, all within a space of twenty-four hours. This is no longer eating; it’s big-time athletics. The strength of the peppers determines the height of the bar. For good Spanish peppers you don’t even need taste buds; you can taste them with your skin. Try rubbing the inside of your wrist with a sliced hot pepper. It burns. You can imagine what happened to a friend of mine when she walked away from a pan of ajam setam for a minute, her hands still damp with pepper juice, to change a tampon. For the anus, it’s a stroke of luck when something finally comes along that can be tasted without taste buds. At last, a chance to get involved. But it doesn’t always have to be spectacular. Even for minor anal pleasure it’s easy to put a menu together with the help of peas and beans, bananas, raisins, coconut milk, mangos, coffee and cigars. It’s all just a matter of thinking ahead.
Tasting with your anus, eating out of your own butt—it sounds so unnatural. No wonder the church was against coprophagia. In the Bible, when Jerusalem was being threatened by the king of Assyria, the biggest insult to ‘the men which sit on the wall’ was ‘that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss’. This was too much for the God of Vengeance. ‘And it came to pass that night, that the angel of the LORD went out, and smote in the camp of the Assyrians an hundred fourscore and five thousand’. Another time, God was sorry when he had the prophet Ezekiel eat something that had come in contact with faeces:
Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentiles, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof, three hundred and ninety days shalt thou eat thereof. And thou shalt eat it as barley cakes, and thou shalt bake it with dung that cometh out of man, in their sight.
Then said I, Ah Lord GOD! behold, my soul hath not been polluted: for from my youth up even till now have I not eaten of that which dieth of itself, or is torn in pieces; neither came there abominable flesh into my mouth. Then he said unto me, Lo, I have given thee cow’s dung for man’s dung, and thou shalt prepare thy bread therewith.
The taboo on eating faeces continues unabated and has even intensified, owing to today’s consumer society. When consuming is regarded as the greatest good, there’s little room for a commodity as unsuited for consumption as your own shit.
Yet we owe our excrement more respect than we normally show. What we toss out is not worthless rubbish but a valuable product of intricate, highly synchronised processes. Not only is shit the keystone of the circle of life, but it’s also an object of lust, a means of creative expression, and a vehicle for communicating love between humans or between man and animal. Shit is the universal lubricant of the entire life mechanism; shit keeps the whole thing going. One of the first to recognise this was the philosopher Diogenes (c. 412–323 BCE). The list of things he had respect for was very short indeed. He regarded nice clothing, good manners and grand banquets as futile attempts to distinguish ourselves from the animals. Shit, on the other hand, was something he could pay deference to. To underscore this, he hiked up his robe in the middle of the marked square and defecated the natural way. Respectable people have never been able to understand this, any more than they understood Gustave Courbet, famous for his painting L’origine du monde with its glimpse inside a beautiful nude woman as seen from below. When asked what he thought of a neatly painted little landscape by François-Louis Français, Courbet expressed his disapproval with the words ‘There’s nowhere to shit in it!’ Don’t go where you can’t shit. Heinrich Heine once told an anecdote about the same high regard for excrement. While waiting for an appointment with a member of the Rothschild family, he saw a servant walk past who was carrying an elaborately decorated silver chamber pot, obviously belonging to his master. A young man who happened to be waiting with Heine tipped his hat in respect. That young man will go far, Heine said to himself.
So it would seem fitting to welcome your own faeces into the world with a certain amount of ceremony. Fortunately nearly everyone has the requisite setting for the family loo: a porcelain baptismal font, gleaming white and ready for the new citizen of the world. It may even give rise to an aura of serenity, most successfully achieved by the classic Japanese toilet and lyrically described by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki (1886–1965) in In Praise of Shadows as ‘a place of spiritual repose’. ‘No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden. Here, I suspect, is where haiku poets over the ages have come by a great many of their ideas.’ But you don’t have to be a haiku poet to unwind on the loo, staring into the distance and plunging into your own fantasies or those in a book. A toilet is a reader’s throne. ‘I’ve done all my best reading on the toilet,’ Henry Miller confessed. For Marcel Proust, the little room ‘intended for a more specific and vulgar use’ was a place for ‘all my activities that demanded inviolable solitude: reading, daydreaming, weeping, and sensual pleasure’.
Whenever I went to the library as a boy to borrow new books, I would look into the reading room with astonishment. Why would you sit in a room with other people and read when you could do it at home alone in the loo? Didn’t these people have indoor plumbing? In a room like that your body has nothing to do; on a toilet your mind and body are concentrating together. It’s not for nothing that the faces of people who are pooing look so much like those of people who are thinking. Squeezing out a brilliant idea requires the same effort as squeezing out a hard turd; you see the veins in the forehead swelling in order to transport extra blood. Actually, the pose of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ is no different from that of an equally concentrated Pooer.
Even a brief visit demands some decorum, all the more because there was so little time to get acquainted. Your faeces vanish from your life almost as soon as you give birth to them, on their way to an uncertain future. This can be a traumatic experience, especially for children. The six-year-old daughter of a Chicago psychiatrist became completely overwrought because each time a little piece of herself disappeared into the dark hole of the toilet. She could only be comforted by her father reassuring her that the little bit of human being went to be united with its ancestors in some cesspool paradise where everyone’s excrement would live happily ever after.
Nothing for it but to say goodbye, something even grown-ups aren’t very good at. When you’ve had a good visit with someone you look forward to leaving because you can always come back again, but the more unenjoyable the visit is the more difficult that becomes. Many couples stay together simply because neither one of them knows how to let go. The advantage of being a turd is that you barely have time to become attached before the moment of separation arrives. But when it does, we’re forced once again to face the unbearable fact of life’s brevity. Man is but a fart in the endlessness of eternity, but what a stinker he is! All that’s left of us after our departure is a puff of smoke—all the more reason to pause and give some thought to the passing of a creature even more perishable than ourselves: our very own turd child.
‘See you later,’ you murmur, but you don’t really mean it. ‘Take care now,’ and you pull the chain.