Merde and Civilisation

Merde and Civilisation

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are
Looking at the stars!
“Oscar Wilde”


To the reader

Folly, error, sin, avarice
Occupy our minds and labor our bodies,
And we feed our pleasant remorse 

As beggars nourish their vermin.
Our sins are obstinate, our repentance is faint; 

We exact a high price for our confessions, 

And we gaily return to the miry path, 

Believing that base tears wash away all our stains.
On the pillow of evil Satan, Trismegist, 

Incessantly lulls our enchanted minds, 

And the noble metal of our will 

Is wholly vaporized by this wise alchemist.
The Devil holds the strings which move us! 

In repugnant things we discover charms; 

Every day we descend a step further toward Hell, 

Without horror, through gloom that stinks.
Like a penniless rake who with kisses and bites 

Tortures the breast of an old prostitute, 

We steal as we pass by a clandestine pleasure 

That we squeeze very hard like a dried up orange.
Serried, swarming, like a million maggots, 

A legion of Demons carouses in our brains, 

And when we breathe, Death, that Unseen River, 

Descends into our lungs with muffled wails.
If rape, poison, daggers, arson 

Have not yet embroidered with their pleasing designs 

The banal canvas of our pitiable lives, 

It is because our souls have not enough boldness.
But among the jackals, the panthers, the bitch hounds,

The apes, the scorpions, the vultures, the serpents,

The yelping, howling, growling, crawling monsters,

In the filthy menagerie of our vices,
There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy! 

Although he makes neither great gestures nor great cries, 

He would willingly make of the earth a shambles 

And, in a yawn, swallow the world;
He is Ennui! — His eye watery as though with tears, 

He dreams of scaffolds as he smokes his hookah pipe.

You know him reader, that refined monster,

— Hypocritish reader, — my fellow, — my brother!
— Charles Baudelaire (Fleurs du mal)





Where there is dirt there is system

We live in a period in which everything is eternally brought into question, in which all the antique cycles of time and of nature have been forgotten.
In this difficult scenario we have lost a part of our own identity.
There is an overwhelming insecurity that could undermine the entire system of the society, throwing into disorder concepts that were by now ascertained, because of absolute validity.
Man since some time, or maybe since always, feels alone, because he doesn’t recognize himself among his fellow men, he is scared of being different and fears of not having the same value as the others maybe due to the capitalistic mechanism which ratifies the predominance of the stronger over the weaker, but according to a logic that isn’t always meritocratic.
We can find evident examples on a macroscopic level, think of the problem between the western countries and the middle east, of the skepticism about a United Europe approved by a constitution or of everyday arguments and prejudges.
In other words, on the one hand there is the danger of transforming the current system in a place in which differences are just discriminated, and on the other, because of this discrimination, people aren’t propelled to develop an own individuality that can contribute to elaborate diversified answers towards the needs of society.
In order to remember the value of “égalité” and “fraternité” we just need to always consider the nature of man, as much his soul provided of great reason as his biological condition.
Indeed it seems ridiculous to remind that everybody comes to life and dies, and that every man has physiological needs in common with each other, like for example the extremely more trivial need to go to the bathroom.
It is a great truth, maybe a little difficult to face, but every human settlement has to deal with the need to defecate, without differences of cult or religion.
Shit is one of the most democratizing elements because to the gold-food inequality corresponds a total and substantial ano-fecal equality.
The human equality is structural. The ways and the places of dumping change, not the dump. It is simple: every one of us does it, from the stars of Hollywood to the powerful, from the Queen of Britain to a simple crook who lives like a hobo.
Like this it is possible to put into effects a downsizing of the deism of stars, simply by thinking of the on the john. We arrive finally to the revenge of the housewife: how does the envied diva make it? Solid, thick and sturdy? Gassy?
The game is done! The principle is the one of the carnival, social stabilizer thanks to the mechanism of the turnover. King for one day or, in this case, all men made of the same prosaic substance of who is on the silver screen.
Therefore it isn’t “music that brings people together”, rather it is shit that we have all in common, men, women, old and young!
It is important to keep in mind that shit, like all the other common features, is yes a formal unity principle (thus man has to be treated equally in front of law), but at the same time it doesn’t limit its action in this direction, on the contrary, in a curious manner it is able of creating very interesting differences among all of us.
As a matter of fact in psychology feces have a pivotal role in the explanation of certain behaviors, because the influences of society, of the social classes, but above all of the first educators, have modified the mysterious connection between “product” and producer. Between man and his wastes.
It is absolutely dangerous to underestimate this aspect, which loses value in our environment a bit hypocrite and easily scandalized. The problem of waste is a global one, the environmental alarm, could truly produce devastating effects on the world’s asset, with the result of a danger also for the humans.
Thus it is fundamental to understand the connection that exists between man and his wastes in the different social classes, so that we can elaborate a new view that will enable us to treat different problems that exist in our present thanks to new methods.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
“It seemed like a village festival with the crackle of the farts” G. Pascoli

A paper. He liked to read at stool. Hope no ape comes knocking just as I'm.
In the table drawer he found an old number of Titbits. He folded it under his armpit, went to the door and opened it.
He went out through the backdoor into the garden: stood to listen towards the next garden. No sound. Perhaps hanging clothes out to dry. The maid was in the garden. Fine morning.Want to manure the whole place over, scabby soil. A coat of liver of sulphur. All soil like that without dung. Household slops. Loam, what is this that is? The hens in the next garden: their droppings are very good top dressing. Best of all though are the cattle, especially when they are fed on those oilcakes. Mulch of dung. Best thing to clean ladies' kid gloves. Dirty cleans. Ashes too. Reclaim the whole place. Grow peas in that corner there. Lettuce. Always have fresh greens then.
He kicked open the crazy door of the jakes. Better be careful not to get these trousers dirty for the funeral. He went in, bowing his head under the low lintel. Leaving the door ajar, amid the stench of mouldy limewash and stale cobwebs he undid his braces. Before sitting down he peered through a chink up at the nextdoor window. The king was in his counting house. Nobody.
Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper turning its pages over on his bared knees. Something new and easy. No great hurry. Keep it a bit. Our prize titbit. Matcham's Masterstrike. Written by Mr Philip Beaufoy, Playgoers' club, London. Payment at the rate of one guinea a column has been made to the writer. Three and a half. Three pounds three. Three pounds thirteen and six.
Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive one tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat certainly. Matcham often thinks of the master-stroke by which he won the laughing witch who now. Begins and ends morally. Hand in hand. Smart. He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received payment of three pounds thirteen and six (…).
He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it. Then he girded up his trousers, braced and buttoned himself. He pulled back the jerky shaky door of the jakes and came forth from the gloom into the air (…). James Joyce’s “Ulysses”(episode 4 “Calipso”)

In society everything that is seen as negative has to be necessarily hidden. Society battles an endless war to ignore certain of its obscure sides, unthinkable, or more likely unspeakable. This happens also in the present, where everything is allowed only in appearance since everything is administrated by the logic of propaganda and by the pseudo-liberalist market.
The establishment has to be clean, stiff-necked, with a deep-rooted concept of ownership and of order, with honor and a perfect reputation as passwords.
In this situation the influence on the single is fundamental because the dominant way of thinking succeeds in transforming the single in order to adapt to the group.
So to enter in the club of the “bigs”, of those who live the “great life”, you must reorganize yourself and deny some aspects that don’t coincide whit the bon-ton of the bourgeois prototype.
According to the popular imaginary, if you want to pertain to the ideal prototype of health and wealth everything that you posses must be “stainless”. It means that you have to eliminate all nuances of life. (So as to enter the sheep-pen you must shear all your black wool).
Therefore there isn’t anymore room for the various vices that belong to the lower class, to that part of the population which is accustomed to every sort of infernal circle. You can imagine dammed who live in the slums or in any sort of Hooverville where chaos and delinquency spread.
We arrived to the point of confirming a neurosis common to everyone: we realize it when we admit that the entire society is affected by obsessive-compulsive syndrome towards hygiene. Dirt is linked to danger and danger is the effective cause of fear.
The bourgeoisie becomes the synonymous of removal and concealment, while the quest for “purity”, socially absent, appears fundamental for life’s stability.
Obviously not every one is willing to make these big sacrifices and so, like in the Victorian society, these people begin to live a double life, on the one hand the official and respectable one, glittery and dazzling, represented by a beautiful home in a dignifying residential neighborhood, regular family, son, daughter and a golden retriever that completes the perfect happy frame; on the other hand there is the life of the dark suburbs, of the sordid, of the illicit, of the most secluded perversions.
Lo and behold, man has a new schizophrenia, caused by the social aspirations that end up generating only morbidity and too often neurosis of all sorts.
An emblematic example is the quite bizarre character of Petrolio, Pasolini’s last book.
The protagonist, il Merda (the Shit), young around twenty five years old, small in height, with narrow shoulders, with thinning hair and a little greasy, with small yellow teeth that form a glut and secure smile, and thus a certain disdain for everything. One of the many Parioli (the richest roman neighborhood) guys with a well-off family behind his back and an eternally full billfold, as well as not many preoccupations in his head. However il Merda, model of the bourgeois respectability, is described in a grim and revolting way. The conformism that the character represents decays as soon as the author shows the his hidden personality. Pasolini brings the character on the usual night walk, during which we can catch a glimpse of the hell populated by women with dubious sex appeal, rent boys, junkies and pushers. In short the suburbs frequented by il Merda are the mirrors of his corrupt soul, which he would never show during the daylight.
Pasolini therefore, through his il Merda, wants to offer us an image of the Italian bourgeoisie very difficult to digest.
Anyway it isn’t a chance if Pasolini chose this name for his repressed and wretch anti-hero. Shit, in fact, represents par exellence what the individual has to refuse to delimitate the boundaries of his subjectivity. Shit becomes separated from the individual, who doesn’t recognize it anymore as his own. Man is caught between his desires and his unconscious impulses, which he must restrict in order to remain in a social order (culture, language and law).
This constraint is taught since infancy. Freud says that a child, during the anal phase, is used to hold his feces stimulating the nerves around the anus and hence feeling an erotic pleasure. In order to stop these “harmful” habits parents start a system of interdictions and inhibitions, which will provoke the debasement of the ritual concerning excrement.
Nevertheless the educational interference can be disadvantageous, fixing the child in that situation of total insecurity that can determine the emerging of an obsessive neurosis. Virtually the child is castrated for his, otherwise, natural behavior, and consequently he remains confused and bewildered, he doesn’t know anymore how to act, because the mother denies his fecal-gift, which, in his mind, should have produced self-affirmation and appreciation.
After this traumatizing experience the first symptoms of shame, guilt and repression are developed.
Hence the main desire that follows us since early childhood is the need to transgress the limits of civilization, to break all the chains around our instincts too often knowingly abjured.
To criticize the society we use the taboos that were created by society itself. Symbol of this is Carlo Emilio Gadda's (Italian writer) real obsession towards shit, which he uses as a metaphor of degradation in many of his books (among which "Una tigre nel Parco"). The reason is probably found in his dissolute biography. Maybe, just child, he brought his feces to his mother, so that he would establish with her his first love exchange. The mother, bourgeois of the Italy full of hope and will, denied his gift, that according to her was only disgusting and fetid...in other word to eliminate as soon as possible.
As a matter of fact, during his childhood, Gadda came across the Milanese status symbol, for which solidity and efficiency were its fundamental totems.
The engineer felt a cult for the rational, for the love of order appropriate to the bourgeoisie.
However he lived split life because the other part of him violently hated the insubstantial law of appearance. In appearance he was powerless because he couldn’t reveal his real personality (he couldn’t show his mother his small inconvenient secrets because she would have found them highly harmful for the his career); as a result not even finding order in the bourgeois life he decided to criticize it. The poor writer was nauseated by the sewer world into which he was forced to live and he used shit to attack fascism and his Duce, maybe the last pivot of his quest for order, which collapsed for obvious reasons; therefore Mussolini becomes Merdonio who embodies Kant's radikal Böse.
Traumatized by the horrors of the fascism and by the fall of those values, sense of hierarchy and obedience to the superiors among them, in which he can't believe anymore, the "Ingegnere" tried to transfer all his fears, that were his dominating passions, in sordid images, declaiming an epiphany of diarrhea that was just a consequence of his discomfort.
Sure enough Gadda was the greatest exponent of that part of the society that looks for purity at all costs because in his personality existed a chaos that made him unstable and created a paralysis that blocked his life.
The same is for Joyce, who recognized the problem of the impulses and the role of the society in front of the single. Indeed, the author had the power to break up the trinity identity, system and order describing in his books a protagonist with habits and corporal needs that weren’t anymore "magic"; thus we see the protagonist walking around with his pants down searching for a place to defecate as if he were a child who wasn't educated to the common behavior in society, synonymous of a bourgeois man (like Gadda) who isn't anymore capable of living in an environment of constrictions and lets go, yet remaining in conflict with that social class he comes from.
Joyce tried to definitely free the protagonist (that in this case could be his alter-ego) from a mental invasion of the trash around him, as it appears evident in the episode "Calipso" from the Ulysses, where he provided a fun and at the same time cruel equation between excrement and bad literature; in this episode Leopold Bloom, feeling a light intestinal movement, goes to the narrow water cabinet outside his house to accomplish the excremental act, not without bringing an adequate literature, that will accompany and, in a certain way, facilitate the act itself. The reading is spotted in the "awarded story" of a newspaper. The final act of Bloom (He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it) tells about Joyce's fiercely critic disposition towards social and literary principles ruling in his time. Bad literature in this story is the symbol of all those bourgeois principles applied entirely to the human knowledge. Joyce was against that literature because in reality it limited his, more original, but less excepted. So artists like Gadda and Joyce, who never abandoned their bourgeois vein, lived in two worlds, between the desire to find an impossible harmony and a will to live in the full artistic and spiritual freedom.
The guilt, the sense of shame, the repression become superfine artwork, however the human being in these books is unable to manage by himself in the crushing and incomprehensible social system and ends up being an inept. Chiharu Shiota (“Bathroom”)







“La propreté des desmoiselles belges”
Elle puait comme une fleur moisie
Moi, je lui dis (mais avec courtoisie):
"Vous devriez prendre un bain régulier
Pour dissiper ce parfum de bélier."
Que me répond cette jeune hébétée?
Je ne suis pas, moi, de vous dégoûtée!"
- Ici pourtant on lave le trottoir
Et leparquet avec un savon noir!
Charles Baudelaire

Prolètariat pantagruelique: “Quel magnifique affaire fecal!” F. Rabelais

Two of Trygaeus’s laves are seen in front of the stable, one of them kneading cakes of dung, the other taking the finished cakes and throwing them into the stable.
SERVANT A: Quick, quick, bring the dung-beetle his cake.
SERVANT B:There it is. Give it to him, and may it kill him! And may he never eat a better.
SERVANT A: Now give him this other one kneaded up with ass's dung.
SERVANT B: There! I've done that too. And where's what you gave him just now? Surely he can't have devoured it yet!
SERVANT A: Indeed he has; he snatched it, rolled it between his feet and bolted it. Come, hurry up, knead up a lot and knead them stiffly.
SERVANT B: Oh, scavengers, help me in the name of the gods, if you do not wish to see me fall down choked.
SERVANT A: Come, come, another made from the stool of a fairy's favourite. That will be to the beetle's taste; he likes it well ground.
SERVANT B: There! I am free at least from suspicion; none will accuse me of tasting what I mix.
SERVANT A: Faugh! come, now another! keep on mixing with all your might.
SERVANT B: By god, no. I can stand this awful cesspool stench no longer.
SERVANT A: I shall bring you the whole ill-smelling gear.
SERVANT B: Pitch it down the sewer sooner, and yourself with it.
To the AUDIENCE Maybe, one of you can tell me where I can buy a stopped-up nose, for there is no work more disgusting than to mix food for a dung-beetle and to carry it to him. A pig or a dog will at least pounce upon our excrement without more ado, but this foul wretch affects the disdainful, the spoilt mistress, and won't eat unless I offer him a cake that has been kneaded for an entire day.... But let us open the door a bit ajar without his seeing it. Has he done eating? Come, pluck up courage, cram yourself till you burst! The cursed creature! It wallows in its food! It grips it between its claws like a wrestler clutching his opponent, and with head and feet together rolls up its paste like a rope-maker twisting a hawser. What an indecent, stinking, gluttonous beast! I don't know what angry god let this monster loose upon us, but of a certainty it was neither Aphrodite nor the Graces.
SERVANT A: Who was it then?
SERVANT B: No doubt Zeus, the God of the Thundercrap.
SERVANT A: But perhaps some spectator, some beardless youth, who thinks himself a sage, will say, "What is this? What does the beetle mean?" And then an Ionian, sitting next him, will add, "I think it's an allusion to Cleon, who so shamelessly feeds on filth all by himself."-But now I'm going indoors to fetch the beetle a drink.

Extract from the “Peace” by Aristophanes

The bourgeoisie has been able, through the denying of defecation, to officially remove the aura of subversive comedy from shit. It succeeded in muzzling shit, which as a result is not anymore able to arouse some playful moments without malice and shame. The positive vision resident in the grotesque representation of shit has become purely negative with the arrival of the medium-upper class together with its contradictions and repressions included in the package. This happened because the proletariat, till a little while ago, was relegated in the area of filthy and disreputable class, therefore discriminated, along with its background culture.
In the ancient times the use of shit in comedies was very popular because it was supposed to remind the abundance and the richness of the earth, the health and the prosperity of the body which had to procreate kids full of strengths on the one hand and on the other bring sexual pleasure. Thanks to shit the soil became florid so it could fulfill humans’ vital needs.
Also for this reason, the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin analyzing the work of Rabelais explained: "Let's not forget anyway that the excrement is a joyful subject that at the same time lowers and lifts, transforming fear into laughter".
It lowers because the value is minimal, but it lifts because, even though it isn't a very suitable theme for high poetry, it represents a central substance for the life of those populations who depended for their survival on agriculture.
They recognized the importance of shit even at a religious level; an example are Aristophanes's comedies (like "the Peace") which were performed during the festivals in honor of the god of theater Dionysus, to satisfy a need to reverse the categories of reality and to create a new structure in the social order, that would change the prospective of the public, transporting it in a fantastic universe.
The carnivalesque element, the satirical inversion, has in shit its philosopher’s stone!
Also the act of eating shit (see the dung beetle that succeeds in taking his master Trigeo, an Athenian peasant, to the Olympus to ask the gods to stop the war, just by eating his master’s excrements) is an all time classic of the satire. There is a psychological aspect that affects in the depths. Anciently it was even a ritual of the religious clownery together with drinking urine: apotropaic obscenities that concealed subtle symbolic meanings that today we couldn’t anymore conceive.
Subsequently the Latin culture brings back comedy and submits it to significant revisions, therefore regenerating it. The Latin people were very attracted to the trivial sphere, this was inborn in the nature of the countrymen; for this reason the comedies of Plauto had uproarious success thanks to their promiscuous content and their street language.
Other celebrated example of coprophagia in literature are Swift’s novels; Swift used shit as an eccentric metaphor to attend the functioning of the interpersonal relationships, as if it were an answer to other problems…in other words a panacea.
Recently coprophagia and the humor about feces have assumed a degenerating role in the allegoric representations, maybe due to the evolution of the culture and of our alimentary habits.
Obviously we aren’t linked anymore to the rural world because the factories produce our food. From here the synonym eating-shit-eating-to-consume is born.
This new interpretation appeared often in the Italian cinema during the period that followed the economic boom. The cinema like Perseus, who, thanks to his shield, reflects Medusa and kills her; cinema reflects the reality of the moment through its universal dialectic, but above all to that part of the population to whom the critique and moralistic message is addressed. To those people who don’t whish a proletarian revolution, but who are satisfied being ridiculous petits bourgeois with the frenzy of becoming full-fledged ones. They want to become something that before was their worst enemy. They want to homologate themselves with the most boorish world possible!
In “La grande abbuffata” (M. Ferreri) four friends (P. Noiret, M. Mastroianni, U. Tognazzi and M. piccoli) reunite in a villa out of Paris, determined to perform a quadruple gasto-erotic hara-kiri. A pinguid angel of death, insatiable and maternal teacher accompanies them (A. Ferréol). This apologue hyper-realistic has the snaps of a irreverent and salacious buffoonery, the wrathful tones of Lenten preach and, together, the provocative impiety of a satirical pamphlet; it isn’t anymore a joyful Rabelaisian comedy; there is instead black humor, desperation and sorrow. Its traumatic force resides in the calm lucidity of the eye and in the honesty of the language. The four friends, tired of life, abandon themselves to what capitalism imposes: the law of consume. In a disgusting way they eat so much that the toilet is filled up and overflows the shit, extreme metaphor that indicates what is properly happening in reality. The waste that is winning over the characters, forces them to live in a villa more and more filthy. The protagonists are convinced of being on a happy island, where they can forget all of those constrictions of the external world by being libertines, but what they don’t expect is that in reality they are following the cruel laws of capitalism.
Also in “Le 120 giornate di Sodoma, Salò” by Pasolini of the same years, we assist at a message of the same expressive force, the one with which Pasolini wants to criticize sourly the system-world by now grown exclusively into a economical gear.
Pasolini reproduced the architecture very similar to the one in Dante’s hell, even adding the circle of shit in which the kidnapped kids are coerced to eat their own shit just to satisfy the turpitudes of the fascist hierarchs.
The obscene metaphor of shit is needed to underline the anxiety of equality (equality to that so abject bourgeoisie), in the consumerist degradation symbol of the capitalistic perversions. Consumerism becomes authentic dictatorship that imprisons the minds of those people who aren’t aware of living in a second “fascism” much more worse than the first.
Like this other European directors, Luis Bunuel and Greenaway out in front, who remember the ancestral desolation that resides in man thanks to their acid and cattish attacks.
In particular, in the movies of Luis Bunuel there are bizarre scenes, like the one in “Belle de journ” in which Katherine Denevue is covered in shit, or the shit that comes out of the piano in “L’age d’or”, but ultimately the most emblematic and significant scene is in “The phantom of liberty” in which Leonardo’s last supper is parodied in order to engrave with force the agonizing scream that the viewer should listen to, the scream preoccupied because the entire human species is committing a slow suicide with the continual production of wastes: corporal, industrial, atomic, of the earth and of the air.
At the end these great intellectuals are part of that group of revolutionary subjects capable of knocking down the system that Marcuse had anticipated in the “One-dimensional man”, the ones who recognize the disgust and the superfluous in the product of the surplus economy. These damned activists are the ones who understand that shit is the tragic expression of the today society, but they, through an art accessible to the many, manage to give hope, an utopian gasp thanks to which you can transform once more the tragic in comic, giving back the comic essence that pertains to shit.

Artist’s shit and shitty artists: “J’ai pètri du merde et j’en fait de l’or!”C. Baudelaire


(Shit vision 1)
Gala: Salvador, darling, I have a bad feeling, you know?
Dalì: What do you mean?
Gala: Your friends say that you are eating shit. I would like to know if this rumor is true or not; it is always better to know if the person you love has particular tastes in the kitchen. Just think that those suspicious bastards didn’t have the balls to ask you themselves and they wanted to throw you out of the circle, alas such hypocrites, like if they didn’t have some kind of mania! Obviously I am the only one to have the guts to face the subject-matter, you know, certain things don’t disgust, by now I am a woman of the world darling!
Dalì: Ahahahaha, I enjoy your foolishness. Scatology is for me a shocking element just as locusts and blood. I loathe such perversions.
Gala: Alright Salvador, I believe you, even though I think that you want to keep up appearances. I remember quite well you picture of the man with the boxer full of his own excrements. Also in other pieces of your work there are turds everywhere and you are so gut that your painting almost stink, transude a certain fetor!
Dalì: I believe that the excrement is symbol of life and if shit were semi-liquid, like a string similar to the one the Moerae weaved and cut to their delight, life would be longer.
Gala: Very fascinating, but we can talk about it later. Let’s decide that you concentrate more on creation instead and in the meantime I bring home the bred!
Dalì: Fair enough, then get two baguettes, with a phallic shape possibly, or even better shaped as a turd, maybe mushy if I am lucky.
Gala goes out exasperated.

(Douche d’or poetic license)

Saturday night, Riccione, Cocoricò, I enter the bathroom-dance floor.
I ask: “Who is that that crazy hysteric masked at the dj-set? She looks like a madman.”
An anonym face dressed in a scanty way replies me: “Why that is Isabella Santacroce, the writer, don’t you know?”
While the hyper active girl was whispering indecipherable words to my ear I was thinking about her book that I read, Destroy.
I go up to the dj-set to ask her about the book.
Isabella looks at me: “Hello! How do you do.”
I answer: “How do you do! I admire you a lot, you know? I liked your book. I found it incredibly bizarre and interesting.”
She exclaims: “Galaxy in my blood slave and shy. What follows is just boredom. Yours forever Isabella.
Now I have to go to the loo, wanna come with me?
We enter it. She closes the door. She continues: “I hate company, the only moment in which I can stay in front of someone is when I sit on the john.”
Embarrassed I try to reassume from where I left: “But do you believe that the characters of your books reflect the postmodern nihilist life?”
She sits on the toilet indifferent to the question just asked. She lights a cigarette. The music explodes from the boxes. Everything vibrates. Outside every one writhes, slave of the rhythm.
Isabella: “Reproduce the sound of my essence that flows!”
I feel confused and lost. I satisfy her: “psssssssss!” (An admirer must always satisfy his idolatrized artist, I believe).
In the meantime she gratifies her need and she continues to speak as a Cumaean Sibyl: “I read fairy-tails to destroy them right after. Lines after lines of fantastic words in flame. Fire and dreams. To burn fantasy right when this has brushes with its wings my heart. Romantic, don’t you find it?”
I nod and reply: “Isabella have you ever fallen in love?” (A question that didn’t have anything to do with this moment, in this place, asked at this woman)
A guy walks in that bathroom that was just occupied by us with a glass. He comes out with the glass full of a yellowy liquid. The robber yells: “Dear Santacroce, now I will sell your piss on eBay! Somebody will certainly buy it!”
Santacroce turns around and answers him: “My ego that comes out of my orifice. I can’t use it. It would be egoistic. I give it to the world. A part of me disseminated in the space. A transcendent Isabella. My gold.”
I leave between disgusted and fascinated. The acid music of a porno projection continues to slam against my body.

(Shit vision 2)

“Come Dolcenera, come and sit on me”, Gabriele told her before laying down on the mauve colored carpet with the perfume of web woven by some exotic beauty. “You will be more comfortable on my abdomen, in front of the fire that will warm up your blood. I want to live uniquely in you and for you, without tomorrow, without yesterday, without any other bond, without any other preference, out of the world, entirely lost in your being, for ever, till death. What pleasures you can give to an exquisite lover!
Gabriele comes close to her ear and caressed her with is sweet and voluptuous words; he longed for a terrible erotic act that she initially didn’t want to perform.
Dolceamare woman of many virtues, of such a delicate beauty, like a north Europe tulip, never considered such depravation, instead she thought that his amorous demand was a vain cruelty.
Nonetheless Gabriele insisted designing with his fingers the magnificent outline of her back only comparable to the Greek statuary and asking again to satisfy him.
She, persuaded from the pleasure she was feeling, pleased him. She began doing what she normally did on Arial’s elegant urinal decorated with the eye of God at the bottom and the writing on the back “keep me clean, use me often, what I see I won’t tell the public.”
While Dolcenera was concentrated not to disappoint him, D’Annunzio was looking at her perfect anal sphincter contracting, he felt the warmth of the woman on his chest augment more and more, and he kissed her with passion still dirty from the gift received.

“We are what we eat”. This is one of Salvador Dalì’s fixation, not very known, but very meaningful to understand a good portion of the modern times.
Dalì was obsessed with all the nutritive-digestive procession, from the lunch plate to the expulsion of the physiological needs: he inspected scrupulously all his intestinal products, analyzing them in every detail through sight, smell and maybe also touch.
He calculated the time and the frequency of production and also the fatigue or the pleasure felt during the act and he deduced his present and past health conditions with his paranoic-critic method. He arrived, in the moments of maximum self-celebration to claim that his feces were clean, pure and odorless thanks to his cosmic perfection.
However Dalì is just one of the many artists that had a certain enchant in front of the scatological material.
Piero Manzoni in his most famous piece of art, “Artist’s shit”, uses Duchamp’s “Fountain” concept revolutionizing it, bestowing it a new life. As a matter of fact, instead of using a ready-made made from a third party (maybe some industry) he reposes the whole procedure in the hands of the artist. The ready-made becomes a pure material, directly born from him.
The metaphor of the “Artist’s shit” alludes with irony at the deep origin of the artist’s work, or in a wider meaning to man that creatively produces.
The artist’s body is offered to the public as a work of art and the body’s vestigial become relics.
Manzoni therefore gives a corporeity to art and he throws the foundations for what will be art performance like the one of the Japanese Chiaru Shiota, who uses the scatological metaphor in “The bathroom” in order to turn over the ritual of hygiene, to denigrate the society’s obsession and to radically refuse the technological fetish (because according to her the technological society isn’t able to muzzle all problems) returning to forms of art more physical and simple. In her performance Shiota claimed of being reborn after her submission to her miseries.
These artists recognize the authenticity of Freud’s theories about excrements, according to which shit is the child’s first real property connected to creativity.
The first form of the human expression.
The anal phase in fact is a phase during which the mind of the child elaborates to achieve a goal, to create something, just like he creates his “golden eggs”.
In other words after having said that for the child feces are a proof of his almighty creativity, enclosed in a fragment of the libido, we understand that to produce art is innate in the human’s soul and in the man’s psychology.
Obviously only the ones who can overcome shame, guilt and the moral teaching around certain topics are able to produce something great.
The attempt of silence towards art and literature is translated into a new esthetic and linguistic code for which trespassing taboos becomes the way of expression.
Initially a subculture will be produced that will be a revelation to what was before rejected, but that is now revaluated as an inspiring element.
Hence shit, that we all despise and denigrate, assumes a visceral philosophical meaning; a universal archetype meaning, the desire of transcendental unity, for which it is important to know one’s limits overcoming them once and for all.
The artist does just this. Or better still Piero Manzoni, the artist for antonomasia, does just this: he uses shit, part of his body, his product, selling it to people that in reality despise it. He succeeds in giving a new life to something that the others would trash. He is able, with his opinion, to change the way of thinking, to modify morality, to evolve the mind of those people who live in a continuous fog.
Gabriele D’Annunzio and Isabella Santacroce aren’t afraid of doing it either. They use the return of the repressed in order to find one of art’s characteristic form, always expression of a human crave for liberty. They, the real transgressors, move the point of view risking to be repudiated for a value that not everybody has. The one of liberty.




Refuse to flush our shit from the public view

I found the occasion to use a Trojan horse thanks to which I could observe without being seen. Understanding the mechanisms that were normally hidden.
However the opening of the mouth was too high for me, out of reach, and the belly button one was sealed, a downright cul-de-sac, thus the only way that remained was the one on the back, the secondary door, the service one. This door that not many decide to enter, because uncomfortable and with thousands of hidden dangers, brought me along an interesting backwards journey, where everything was reversed.
A journey in the intestine of the mythical horse where the waste, the superfluous and the useless are the background to the encounters with the various authors and artists who are looking for new inspirations produced by what everybody else evacuates and ignores.
(Someone’s trash is someone else’s treasure).
Of the same opinion is Levi Strass, who claims in his book “L’homme nu” that the excrements have always been useful and recyclable, whether figural or literally. Gary Bloom, proud inventor of the Goose poop art, collects geese’ shit, he separates it in four different colors on the basis of the alimentation of the beasts, he dries it in a toast machine, reduces it into powder and afterwards uses the shit-colors to paint.
At last Oliviero Toscani, cunning photographer who doesn’t need presentations, editor of the book Cacas, a coffee-table book, conceptual homage to shit with 70 photographs of animal excrements, of all forms, colors and sizes. Homage because shit is something natural, but removed.
What these great men want to tell us is the importance of understanding feces in order to understand what we are doing. Because, on the environmental point view, the humans have reached the climax of the problem caused by wastes.
Indeed the other side of the coin of the technological progress at all costs is shit and if we don’t learn to coexist with it, to use it in the best way, we are going to be invaded both psychologically and physically. Practical examples are the ones of Naples and other cities with waste problems.
We have to begin to face our problems, to resolve them without looking for scapegoats as the immoderate mania for cleanness.
We must refuse to refuse our won refuse! In other words we must regain the contact with our natural side and stop putting it aside. If we were in harmony with nature, with our nature, crisis of this type wouldn’t arise anymore.
Thus let’s say a radical yes to shit, as a synonymous of the knowledge of our limits and as the recognition of the illusion of mass-production’s endless power, of having to look further than our noses, of having to free the human mind, of tout se tient!
If every one of us will succeed in regaining the connection with our nature, with our natural cycle, we will arrive to a personal transformation that could, together with the transformation of many other, bring an economic and cultural evolution on great scale, finally modifying society’s sick mentality and probably reaching a democracy in which man is accepted for what he is and not because he lowers his head for the fear of being ostracized, of becoming an excluded.

The end