OUTHOUSE

Some contemporary scientists, with plenty of time on their hands, have figured out how long is the ingested trajectory for a piece of lego, i.e. how long before it is excreted.  Yes, this was indeed a research project.

On a more artistic scale, Alfred Hitchcock once envisioned a film that would trace the urban food trajectory from arrival to sewers. In between, people would purchase, cook, ingest, urinate and defecate.

 

The sewers, culminating point for the film, are a necessity where large numbers of people are gathered. Their absence poses a great global public health problem, something which Bill Gates, promoting off-grid toilets, is trying to address. The past masters of on-grid  disposal were the Romans. Their cloaca maxima (“great sewer”) helped remove waste from the city’s latrines.

There’s a good reason why the cloaca was needed. It goes back to Hitchcock’s project: we live as a result of cycles.  Ingest-food-produce-waste is a major one. Nothing could be more natural. At the same time, as already noted, feces, improperly disposed, can be disease producing.  It’s also smelly. One result: a penchant for keeping the process isolated, if not entirely hidden.

Enter the satirist Jonathan Swift. His poem “the lady’s

dressing room” envisions a young man, “Stephon,” enamored of “Celia.”  He sneaks into her private chamber. What does he find? Not signs of the lovely woman he adores. Rather, the scene is one of towels

“Begummed, bemattered, and beslimed  

With dirt, and sweat, and earwax grimed.”  

Then, horror of horrors, disguised by outward appearance, but not by smell: a privy.  Stephon, no longer deluded, must (in Swift’s blunt phrasing) reckon with the facts: “Oh!  Celia, Celia shits.”

Poetry, though, is varied.  A different take is offered by W.H. Auden’s The Geography of the House. Proper biological functioning, including defecation, is to be appreciated. The poem starts on a note of pleasure:

Seated after breakfast

In this white-tiled cabin

Arabs call the House where

Everybody goes,

Even melancholics

Raise a cheer to Mrs.

Nature for the primal

Pleasure She bestows.

“Mrs. Nature” is not to be bracketed or dismissed.  She is to be “cheered” for her well-functioning ways.  Just as farmers praise a good rainfall after plenty of sunshine,  so we can praise the sequence of taking in food/removing waste. Indeed a successful latrine stop is a good omen:

Lifted off the potty,

Infants from their mothers

Hear their first impartial

Words of worldly praise:

Hence, to start the morning

With a satisfactory

Dump is a good omen

All our adult days.

All the same, “cheering” can be kept within bounds. Swift touched a human sensitivity.  Excrement is excrement. It can breed disease. That is why processes for its collection, removal and treatment are needed.  It also takes us to the “waste” end of the digestive function, an end quite different from the lovely smells, good tastes, and camaraderie often associated with  food-taking.

This contrast explains cultural customs. Humans are, by nature, those creatures who need culture. There must always be a “grammar” of behavior, as there is a

grammar of the universe  (laws of nature). Social customs determined that Celia’s “privy” be, well, private. The same is true of Auden’s “white tiled cabin where everyone goes.” Celia’s secret world just pushed the isolation too far. Complete pretence supplanted suitable propriety.

Propriety or decorum must walk a fine line. On one hand, it must not deny a vital function.  On the other, it needs to respect a socially approved demeanor associated with that function.

Albert Camus’s autobiographical novel, left unfinished

at his death, well describes the balance.  Uncle “Etienne” is a simple, life-loving type, someone marked by “Adamic innocence.” He savored a well-functioning body.  He thus appreciated the healthy cycle of eating-urinating-defecating. Wanting to share this savoring of simple joys, he introduced outhouse-related topics at the dinner table.  In response, Camus’s grandmother would rebuke Etienne with reminders about the suitability and unsuitability of certain topics in certain settings.

Specific table manners introduced at specific times may not always get it exactly right. Table manners,  though, do get something right. Humans are nature-culture hybrids. They depend upon an appropriate grammar of behavior. Functioning without the social grammar of politeness tears away at the threads that hold interrelationships together.  

As is most often the case, there is need for balance. Swift’s Stephon made too sharp a distinction between appearance and biological reality. Auden’s praise for the pleasure of an integrally functioning organism offers one way to redress the balance.  Camus’s grandmother’s admonitions about table manners presents us with another.