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.

Loss of Appetite

Albert Camus’s novel The Stranger features a scene in which a character, despite it being lunchtime, loses her appetite.   Her boyfriend, in the same circumstances, goes right back to chowing down.

Who are they? What are the circumstances? They are Meursault, the novel’s main character, and his girlfriend/fiancee Marie. Meursault, famously, does not play societal games. He does not pretend to be what he is not.  A neighbor, Raymond, has asked him for help writing a letter. The aim of the letter: entrap a young woman with whom Raymond had a relationship. On the day of the disrupted lunch, screams come from Raymond’s apartment. The  letter has worked. The young woman came by. Raymond beat her.

The ruckus causes neighbors to gather in the hallway. Marie, troubled by what she has witnessed, loses her appetite. Meursault remains unaffected.

Camus sought to write a novel featuring an “authentic” central character, one who would not take on roles expected of and assigned by society. What he skillfully depicted is someone completely detached from what goes on around him.  Meursault is indifference personified. He does not care that the letter he has cooperated in writing is part of a vengeful plan. He is not moved by the beating of a young woman. He lives in a self-enclosed world. Societal games might not be for him, but are all evaluative, sympathetic responses part of the false veneer of society?  Meursault does not just refuse hypocritical games. He goes so far as to numb his evaluative response to surrounding events. A young woman is being beaten next door? Duly noted. A mere piece of neutral data. Now, back to lunch.

Not Marie. She cannot remain detached.  The beating scene affects her. She loses her appetite.  Basic bodily needs are eclipsed as non-physiological concerns take center stage.

Abraham Maslow famously identified a “hierarchy of needs.”  It offered a neat framework which ranked the needs in a particular way: the lower needs had to be fulfilled before higher ones could be realized.

It offered a clear-cut system of “axiology”--concern with value and its ranking.  Marie’s loss of appetite suggests how Maslow’s hierarchy was a bit too neat. There are times when the tug of ideals, the commitment to key values, are more important than the demands of physiology. Marie, revulsed by the appalling scene of a young woman being beaten, offers one example.  The injustice, unfairness, general evil of the scene comes to supersede her physiological craving for food.

The same can be said for more well-known scenarios: suffragettes on a hunger strike;  Bobby Sands dying as a result of refusing nutrition; religiously induced fasts; starving artists, the Russian scientists charged with preserving a seed bank who starved rather than eat the seeds entrusted to them. There is also the pathology of anorexia where priorities have been upended and hunger is overridden.

Such scenarios suggest that the Maslow hierarchization needs to be tinkered with in two ways.  First, Self-actualization is not a good name for the highest level. Second, for humans, the hierarchy is flexible, what is higher on the pyramid can, under certain

circumstances, become more fundamental than what is at the base.

Against Self-Actualization.  Suffragettes, Bobby Sands, Russian seed bank scientists: What they held most dear was not actualizing the self. They sacrificed the self for a more communal cause, a cause they saw themselves as serving. One distinguishing  feature of humans is precisely this willingness to place a communal cause as a central ideal, even if it means loss of life.

For a flexible axiology. Humans manifest a cluster of aspirations, impulses, inclinations, wants. Living out the fullness of human life means not being limited by a hierarchy with pre-ordained, fixed levels.  It means being drawn as much by transcendent ideals as by physiological necessity. Both the physiological and the axiological can work together. At difficult times, in certain circumstances, people have to choose.  That the axiological can override the physiological is an indication of how complicated a creature we are.

Of course, humans can always, Meursault-style, numb themselves.  “It’s all the same to

me” they can say. In making such an utterance they situate themselves apart from ordinary human experience.  The position of complete detachment is a seriously artificial one. It requires a lot of work, either individual effort or culturally absorbed effort, to reach the point of neutering, treating as neutral data, the occurrences which make up part of our surroundings.  It is natural for us to hunger for food. It is also natural for us to hunger for fairness, justice, freedom, and respect. What characterizes us, as the special animal we are, is that the prioritization of these hungers is not rigidly fixed.