Boblet: Poop, The Sequel: An Addendum to The Sewer Opus

Poop:  The Sequel

By Robin Ford Wallace

            This is why you have a blog!  I was just bursting with things to say in this week’s Radio-Free Robin column about sewers (below), but no matter how tight a ball I rolled the universe into, I couldn’t squeeze in everything I had to say in my outside limit of 950 words.  So here, at no additional cost, is an addendum.

            I conceived the notion of writing such a column in the first place because I wanted to explain to news readers – assumin’ I’ve got some – why I keep raving on and on in the Sentinel about the county’s sewer projects as if they were the most important thing in the county:  They are. 

One of the major perks to being an underpaid, under-appreciated local news reporter is that, sitting in those county commission or tax or water board meetings that everybody else finds so boring, one really does sooner or later pick up an idea of how the world works.  And the world works on these boring concepts no one normal cares about, like you can’t have a lot of people living in one place without some way to handle the poop.

Then you’ve got the way communities pay for these things.  Most people understand the basic notion of taxes but I imagine they’d be astonished if they studied up on these bond issues.  Bond issues are basically the way governmental bodies borrow money for public projects.  But lately it looks to me like there’s a trend of doing it to back up private projects or in some cases just out-and-out pay for them.  I won’t carry on much more about that because I’d rather talk about poop, but I hope to God the water board is smarter than I am.

            Now.  Poop.

            One of the tenets I started out with was a linguistic revelation:  The presence in English of the words “hungry” and “thirsty” bears witness to the sad truth that people have sometimes not had enough to eat or drink.  But the absence of words denoting a need to do No. 1 or No. 2 attests just as eloquently to a more uninhibited history of toilet habits. 

Though there are of course adjectives etymologically related to these functions, they do not in fact describe a need to perform them; rather, they refer to abstract and largely negative qualities.  The obvious conclusion is that our ancestors never allowed pressure to build up long enough in those departments to require language referring to the frustrated need for relief, but went ahead and “went” wherever and whenever, whether alone or in company, possibly without interrupting their sentences.

Now, the second point I wanted to make:  You will note how increasingly Victorian the last couple of paragraphs became.  Please observe the progressive increase in syllables and the rather spinsterish use of the semicolon.  This tendency is due to the fact that I am a girl writer not a boy writer, and I am talking about poop.

Mr. W. Hodding Carter, who wrote the book my sewer column discusses, is a boy writer, and possibly boy writers should not be allowed to write about poop at all!  Bless their hearts, no matter how old boy writers get they still cannot seem to resist bathroom humor. 

            All of Carter’s lurid descriptions of the most luxurious new toilets and all of his tasteless references to “floaters” and the like I endured with some pain and will not perpetuate with further comment.  But I did plan to share Carter’s delving up of the ribald 16^th–century musings of Rabelais’s literary monster Gargantua, translated from the French, concerning his experiments on what to use in place of toilet paper, which, one gathers, had not yet been invented.

“Once I did wipe me with a gentlewoman’s velvet mask, and found it to be good; for the softness of the silk was very voluptuous and pleasant to my fundament,” the monster begins.  “Then a hood, and a neckerchief, then some earpieces of crimson satin, but there was such a number of golden spangles in them .. that it fetched all the skin off my tail with a vengeance.”

Gargantua raves on in this vein, and Carter faithfully follows him, for some pages.  He tries out a page’s cap and then a cat, which turns out rather worse than the spangles, and cures himself by next time using his mother’s gloves. 

“After that I wiped me with sage, with fennel, with anet, with marjoram, with roses, with gourd-leaves, with beets, with colewort, with leaves of the vine-tree, with mallows, wool-blade …with lettuce and with spinach leaves.”

I am just excerpting Carter’s excerpts of Rabelais here, mind you.  I am leaving out a lot and I expect he was, too.  “Then I wiped my tail in the sheets, on the coverlet, in the curtains, with a cushion, with arras hangings, with a green carpet, with a tablecloth, with a napkin, with a handkerchief, with a combing-cloth; in all which I found more pleasure than do the mangy dogs when you rub them.”

And on to the animal world:  “With a hen, with a rooster, with a pullet, with a calf’s skin, with a hare, with a pigeon, with a cormorant, with an attorney’s bag ..” 

Finally, after pages and pages, he settles on the warm neck of a downy goose as being the optimum to his purpose.  Great stuff, and I really did plan to dress up my column with sprinkles of it (“with mercury, with parsley, with nettles, with comfrey…”) but I just plain ran out of room, as I am doing here again.

But I cannot conclude without pointing out that, being a girl writer, I had never come across that bit of Rabelais even in my college years, though – for reasons I no longer remember – I am a girl writer who majored in French.  It just goes to highlight the fundamental differences between the sexes regarding certain delicate matters, and to underscore the wisdom of avoiding discussion of them in mixed company.

END