TOILETS I HAVE KNOWN
Anne Blackburn
June 2013
This essay accompanied our 2011 curated box set, Water Closet, featuring original work by Troy Gua and Erin Shafkind. This collaboration was a wonderful nod to the multiplicity of humorous and sometimes poignant references to bodily waste, consumption, and the art world by artists throughout history.
Toilets are in essence aim, gravity, and circulation approached with extremity of emotion --hygiene colored by wariness, desperation, gratitude, nausea, dread, relief. Provided it’s not gross beyond tolerance, you don’t get mugged, and it is not out of order; ideally you use them and forget. Relieved, real estate available for more sustenance, hands washed, it is a slight respite. The contents of your own plumbing is now circulating through the plumbing of the building and out to the street, and you can move on. There is a reason birds shit before they fly.
Just don’t think too much about plumbing when using a restroom on the 40th floor or on an airplane– sudden visions of pipes of liquid shit in x-ray vision, pumped up and down the core of many a hi-rise, flying tin cans with veins of waste, just next to that mahogany and marble elevator and their weather/kids/traffic conversational trifecta or the matching stewardess outfits and luggage.
It’s gone, but not that far gone.
One of the most vexing human engineering issues, toilets are rightfully and proudly thrones and porcelain gods, and--my favorite--privies. Private councils with oneself and ones chosen edibles and internal chemistry--solid, liquid and gas—ideally set apart, in quietude and outdoor loveliness, with a minimum of spiders, a maximum of ventilation, and a the light and rustle of a late summer afternoon.
My earliest remembered toilet was an orange bucket in dark stained wood box frame on the floor of the entryway in my family’s seasonal cabin. I was about 5, the cabin was part of an old dude ranch outside Jackson Hole overtaken in the 70’s by the park rangers, snowbirds, and seasonal workers like my parents, and the toilet was simple and sometimes smelly. I remember a similar fascination with it and with my elder brother’s broken arm, obtained while jumping on the bed--that something happened there. It was Serious.
Years later on a college trip to Kenya were cool thick-walled pit latrines in Swahili houses or outbuildings, obligatory dark shadow of a single fish patrolling for mosquito larvae in the water cistern, the tap and cup along the wall, appreciating for the first time that sometimes Western didn’t mean better, and intelligent, simple design is everything.
Contrast this with the Western-style flush toilet in the one café open in Mombasa, Kenya at 7AM as a small horde of people waited for a bus. A single bathroom with the water out, a toilet full of shit and then some—a neat little pile with a staggering odor. Eyeing this monument and the jolting 2 hour bus ride; I chose the painful bus ride. And as I emerged to a café full of watching Swahili men in their kofias and sarongs, I knew that they all knew what I had just chosen, and my privilege burned in my ears.
Now I work in a tall corporate tower, and I do think about the plumbing on the 40th floor, and I do think about the percentage of women who use a toilet seat cover religiously, even though these bathrooms get cleaned twice a day. I think about the fact that you can buy “Urinal Cake” scented candles from a company called Hotwicks. I think about the fancy Japanese toilets with air and heat and a mint on your pillow. I think about listening to one half of a cell phone conversation in the stall next to you, and how surprisingly appalled I am by that.
Maybe with the next installment of American rustic nostalgia (part IV) we can bring back the privy?
I need a little privacy.
Toilets are in essence aim, gravity, and circulation approached with extremity of emotion --hygiene colored by wariness, desperation, gratitude, nausea, dread, relief. Provided it’s not gross beyond tolerance, you don’t get mugged, and it is not out of order; ideally you use them and forget. Relieved, real estate available for more sustenance, hands washed, it is a slight respite. The contents of your own plumbing is now circulating through the plumbing of the building and out to the street, and you can move on. There is a reason birds shit before they fly.
Just don’t think too much about plumbing when using a restroom on the 40th floor or on an airplane– sudden visions of pipes of liquid shit in x-ray vision, pumped up and down the core of many a hi-rise, flying tin cans with veins of waste, just next to that mahogany and marble elevator and their weather/kids/traffic conversational trifecta or the matching stewardess outfits and luggage.
It’s gone, but not that far gone.
One of the most vexing human engineering issues, toilets are rightfully and proudly thrones and porcelain gods, and--my favorite--privies. Private councils with oneself and ones chosen edibles and internal chemistry--solid, liquid and gas—ideally set apart, in quietude and outdoor loveliness, with a minimum of spiders, a maximum of ventilation, and a the light and rustle of a late summer afternoon.
My earliest remembered toilet was an orange bucket in dark stained wood box frame on the floor of the entryway in my family’s seasonal cabin. I was about 5, the cabin was part of an old dude ranch outside Jackson Hole overtaken in the 70’s by the park rangers, snowbirds, and seasonal workers like my parents, and the toilet was simple and sometimes smelly. I remember a similar fascination with it and with my elder brother’s broken arm, obtained while jumping on the bed--that something happened there. It was Serious.
Years later on a college trip to Kenya were cool thick-walled pit latrines in Swahili houses or outbuildings, obligatory dark shadow of a single fish patrolling for mosquito larvae in the water cistern, the tap and cup along the wall, appreciating for the first time that sometimes Western didn’t mean better, and intelligent, simple design is everything.
Contrast this with the Western-style flush toilet in the one café open in Mombasa, Kenya at 7AM as a small horde of people waited for a bus. A single bathroom with the water out, a toilet full of shit and then some—a neat little pile with a staggering odor. Eyeing this monument and the jolting 2 hour bus ride; I chose the painful bus ride. And as I emerged to a café full of watching Swahili men in their kofias and sarongs, I knew that they all knew what I had just chosen, and my privilege burned in my ears.
Now I work in a tall corporate tower, and I do think about the plumbing on the 40th floor, and I do think about the percentage of women who use a toilet seat cover religiously, even though these bathrooms get cleaned twice a day. I think about the fact that you can buy “Urinal Cake” scented candles from a company called Hotwicks. I think about the fancy Japanese toilets with air and heat and a mint on your pillow. I think about listening to one half of a cell phone conversation in the stall next to you, and how surprisingly appalled I am by that.
Maybe with the next installment of American rustic nostalgia (part IV) we can bring back the privy?
I need a little privacy.
