I did quite a lot of thinking about toilets when I lived in Europe. (That was how crazy Germany made me.) I once even attempted a classification of people on the basis of toilets.
“The History of the World Through Toilets” (I optimistically wrote at the top of a clean page in my notebook) “an epic poem???”
British:
British toilet paper. A way of life. Coated. Refusing to absorb, soften, or bend (stiff upper lip). Often property of government. In the ultimate welfare state even the t.p. is printed with propaganda.
The British toilet as the last refuge of colonialism. Water rushing overhead like Victoria Falls, amp; you an explorer. The spray in your face. For one brief moment (as you flush) Britannia rules the waves again.
The pull chain is elegant. A bell cord in a stately home (open to the public, for pennies, on Sundays).
German:
German toilets observe class distinctions. In third-class carriages: rough brown paper. In first class: white paper. Called Spezial Krepp. (Requires no translation.) But the German toilet is unique for its little stage (all the world’s a) on which shit falls. This enables you to take a long look, choose among political candidates, and think of things to tell your analyst. Also good for diamond miners trying to smuggle out gems by bowel. German toilets are really the key to the horrors of the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.
Italian:
Sometimes you can read bits of Corriere della Sera before you wipe your ass on the news. But in general the toilets run swift here and the shit disappears long before you can leap up and turn around to admire it. Hence Italian art. Germans have their own shit to admire. Lacking this, Italians make sculptures and paintings.
French:
The old hotels in Paris with two Brobdingnagian iron footprints straddling a stinking hole. Orange trees planted in Versailles to cover cesspool smell. Il est défendu de faire pipi dans la chambre du Roi. Lights in Pans toilets which only go on when you turn the lock.
I somehow cannot make sense of French philosophy amp; literature vis à vis the French approach to merde. The French are very abstract thinkers-but they could also produce a poet of particularity like Ponge, who writes an epic poem on soap. How does this connect with French toilets?
Japanese:
Squatting as a basic fact of life in the Orient. Toilet basin recessed in the floor. Flower arrangement behind. This has something to do with Zen. (Cf. Suzuki.)
It was after twelve when we finally got to our hotel and we found we had been assigned a tiny room on the top floor. I wanted to object, but Bennett was more interested in getting some rest. So we pulled down the shades against the noonday sun, undressed, and collapsed on the beds without even unpacking. Despite the strangeness of the place, Bennett went right to sleep. I tossed and fought with the feather comforter until I dozed fitfully amid dreams of Nazis and plane crashes. I kept waking up with my heart pounding and my teeth chattering. It was the usual panic I always have the first day away from home, but it was worse because of our being back in Germany. I was already wishing we hadn’t returned.
At about three-thirty we got up and rather languidly made love in one of the single beds. I still felt that I was dreaming and kept pretending Bennett was somebody else. But who? I couldn’t get a clear picture of him. I never could. Who was this phantom man who haunted my life? My father? My German analyst? The zipless fuck? Why did his face always refuse to come into focus?
By four o’clock, we were on the Strassenbahn bound for the University of Vienna to register for the Congress. The day had turned out to be clear with blue skies and absurdly fluffy white clouds. And I was clumping along the streets in my high-heeled sandals, hating the Germans, and hating Bennett for not being a stranger on a train, for not smiling, for being such a good lay but never kissing me, for getting me shrink appointments and Pap smears and IBM electrics, but never buying me flowers. And not talking to me. And never grabbing my ass anymore. And never going down on me, ever. What do you expect after five years of marriage anyway? Giggling in the dark? Ass-grabbing? Cunt-eating? Well at least an occasional one. What do you women want? Freud puzzled this and never came up with much. How do you ladies like to be laid? A man who’ll go down on you when you have your period? A man who’ll kiss you before you brush your teeth in the morning and not say Yiiich? A man who’ll laugh with you when the lights go out?
A stiff prick, Freud said, assuming that their obsession was our obsession.
Phallocentric, someone once said of Freud. He thought the sun revolved around the penis. And the daughter, too.
And who could protest? Until women started writing books there was only one side of the story. Throughout all of history, books were written with sperm, not menstrual blood. Until I was twenty-one, I measured my orgasms against Lady Chatterley’s and wondered what was wrong with me. Did it ever occur to me that Lady Chatterley was really a man? That she was really D. H. Lawrence?
Phallocentric. The trouble with men and also the trouble with women. A friend of mine recently found this in a fortune cookie:
the trouble with men is men,
the trouble with women, men.
Once, just to impress Bennett, I told him about the Hell’s Angels initiation ceremony. The part where the initiate has to go down on his woman while she has her period and while all the other guys watch. Bennett said nothing.
“Well, isn’t that interesting?” I nudged. “Isn’t that a gas?” Still nothing. I kept nagging.
“Why don’t you buy yourself a little dog,” he finally said, “and train him.”
“I ought to report you to the New York Psychoanalytic,” I said.
The medical building of the University of Vienna is columned, cold, cavernous. We trudged up a long flight of steps. Upstairs, dozens of shrinks were milling around the registration desk.
An officious Austrian girl in harlequin glasses and a red dirndl was giving everyone trouble about their credentials for registration. She spoke painstakingly schoolbook English. I was positive she must be the wife of one of the Austrian candidates. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five but she smiled with all the smugness of a Frau Doktor.
I showed her my letter from Voyeur Magazine, but she wouldn’t let me register.
“Why?”
“Because we are not authorized to admit Press,” she sneered. “I am so sorry.”
“I’ll bet.”
I could feel the anger gather inside my head like steam in a pressure cooker. The Nazi bitch, I thought, the goddamned Kraut.
Bennett shot me a look which said: calm down. He hates it when I get angry at people in public. But his trying to hold me back only made me more furious.
“Look-if you don’t let me in I’ll write about that, too.” I knew that once the meetings got started I could probably walk right in without a badge-so it really didn’t matter. Besides, I scarcely cared all that much about writing the article. I was a spy from the outside world. A spy in the house of analysis.