In his Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1985), Italo Calvino suggests that “melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness,” just as “humor is comedy that has lost its bodily weight” (19). He also observes that the ancients thought the so-called “saturnine” temperament was the one “proper to artists, poets, and thinkers, and that seems true enough. Certainly literature would never have existed if some human beings had not been strongly inclined to introversion, discontented with the world as it is, inclined to forget themselves for hours and days on end to fix their gaze on the immobility of silent worlds” (52). Calvino contrasts the saturnine temperament with the mercurial one, the former “melancholy, contemplative, and solitary,” the latter, mercurial one, “inclined toward exchanges and commerce and dexterity” (52). Yet despite the fact the saturnine or solitary temperament is essential for artistic creation, and for reflection and introspection (“know thyself”), individual (private, solitary) experience is typically denied or devalued by the general culture. Roland Barthes makes the observation in Camera Lucida, “Photography cannot signify (aim at a generality) except by assuming a mask” (35). He goes to say, "Society, it seems, mistrusts pure meaning: It wants meaning, but at the same time it wants this meaning to be surrounded by a noise . . . which will make it less acute" (36). What he is talking about, it seems to me, is the way "society" (to use Barthes' term) prefers the stereotypical (the general truth) rather than the singular (the particular), in this case, the undeniable validity of solitary, contemplative experience. I think Barthes is here making the same point as Michel Leiris in his essay, "The Sacred in Everyday Life" (1938), in which Leiris uses his own past experience to argue for what he calls "the personal sacred" (the need for the sacred in a secular society). Following both thinkers, society tends to avoid the difficulty of the singular or personal, preferring general meaning instead, because the general meaning (the stereotypical) is more easily accessible and therefore "safe"--the comfort of generalities and commonly accepted truths, rather like Flaubert's “received ideas.” Hence Leiris's essay is unusual in that he is trying recover the validity of the personal, singular experience, the undeniable reality and value of his own experience, which the general culture devalues or denies. As Camera Lucida reveals, for Barthes, the value of photography is precisely its ability to capture the This, the singular, irrecoverable moment. In turn, Leiris would say that the validity of singular experience is abject, that is, is degraded (as irrelevant) by the general culture. What Leiris is trying to recover is the value of the personal (private) in human experience.
I was once told by a friend that because my astrological sign is cancer, the crab (one who carries his home on his back), my temperament is to prefer being home. I take this to mean that I'm happy to be alone, to be solitary, and I think that's probably true. Not that I'm a misanthrope, but my temperament is saturnine. I'm perfectly content to be alone because, as the title of the song by XTC says, "my bird performs." The cage is open but I have no urge to fly . . . because my bird sings sweetly. I guess you'd have to call this song by XTC my theme song.
Jacques Lacan observed that public life in the Western world, rather like the majority of primitive communities, is subjected to the laws of urinary segregation. The bathroom serves the function of sorting society into men and women. Ludwig Wittgenstein once told a few of his students that one of his strongest childhood memories was the bathroom of his parents’ house, in which on the wall there was a discolored patch of broken plaster that suggested a sort of terrifying duck. No wonder, then, that he was attracted to the theory of the “duck-rabbit”: he wished to transform that demonic duck into a friendly rabbit. And perhaps the most influential work of the twentieth century is Duchamp’s “Fountain,” a urinal.
Today’s date should remind us that in the history of rock the principle of urinary segregation led to one of its more celebrated episodes, one that took place in England at a roadside petrol station on Stratford’s Romford Road. In the late evening hours of 18 March 1965, a Daimler carrying Rolling Stones’ members Mick Jagger, Bill Wyman, and Brian Jones, their chauffeur and various others, pulled up to the station. Bill Wyman got out and asked the manager, Charles Keeley, for permission to use the toilet. Wyman was told by Mr. Keeley that the public toilet was out of order, and he wasn’t about to let the long-haired Wyman and the rest of the motley crew use the staff bathroom. The need to urinate being rather severe, Wyman, Jagger and Jones out of necessity relieved themselves against a nearby wall, violating Mr. Keeley’s sense of public decorum. At a hearing the following July, the three Rolling Stones were each fined 5 pounds, roughly equivalent at the time to about 8 dollars. Subsequently, the toilet contributed to the rock community sorting itself out into rival camps: there was the Beatles camp (clean and wholesome), and the Rolling Stones camp (dirty and dangerous).
Of course, the toilet has always figured highly in both the formation of rock culture (urinary segregation as a consequence of racial segregation in the South in which Elvis grew up; Elvis would later die in his bathroom) and in its depiction (George Michael being charged with “lewd conduct” in a public toilet in Los Angeles in 1998). In order to commemorate March 18 as the day which acknowledges our social practice of urinary segregation, I have assembled the following playlist, to be listened to, of course, in addition to the Rolling Stones’ album Beggars Banquet (1968; pictured).
Ten Songs Of The Commode: She Came In Through the Bathroom Window – The Beatles Norwegian Wood (“I . . . crawled off to sleep in the bath”) – The Beatles Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room – Brownsville Station God’s Own Drunk (“I wasn’t . . . commode huggin’ drunk”) – Jimmy Buffett Mirror in the Bathroom – The English Beat Bathroom Wall – Faster Pussycat Rockstar (“And a bathroom I can play baseball in”) – Nickelback Rock ‘n’ Roll Toilet – The Soft Boys 867-5309/Jenny – Tommy Tutone Why Does It Hurt when I Pee? (“I got it from the toilet seat”) – Frank Zappa
Update (3/18/09, 4:25 p.m. DST) – Subterranean outhouse blues: Apparently some of Bob Dylan’s Malibu neighbors are complaining about a portable toilet that has sat for seven months on the singer-songwriter’s estate. They say at night the sea breeze delivers odors strong enough to drive people from their bedrooms; see the complete story in the L. A. Times about the ghastly smell blowin’ in the wind here.
60x50 is an experiment in invention and discovery, inspired by an observation made by William Stafford in Writing the Australian Crawl. The purpose of this blog is to demonstrate Stafford's insight that a writer "is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them." The date used in each blog entry is merely a prompt, a method used to open up a particular direction of research and discovery. I find this a more interesting and more amenable process than the use of newspaper "headlines" or "current events" that in effect would predetermine my subject for me.
