The
Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret hung a sign up above his
toilet. It read (in French):
Be silent out of respect for the holy sacraments, perpetually revealed.
That is to say, don't groan out of exertion while you're
shitting- it isn't appropriate while
God is watching. Péret also attached a
cross to the rope-pull which flushed the toilet. An anonymous
photograph exists documenting the horrible and very effective
sacrilege of this tiny room.
The
puerile technique of specific anti-
authoritarianism conducted by bringing whatever was
pure or elevated down to the level of the lowest
bodily functions was very in keeping with Péret's life and
art, where by art he intended
cartoonish attacks and visual
one-liners instead of
masterpieces of
virtuosity. Consider part of a stanza from his 1936 poem "
Joan of Arc":
Then Joan realized she was right in front of God
and she swallowed the cowpie as if it were a relic
So God immediately crystallized into hemorrhoids
and all the dogs from Domrémy licked her ass
But Joan knew God inhabited her
and every evening he'd say
I'm here through the will of the pope
and I won't leave until I'm blasted away by your farts
While this association of the
holy and the
physical seems automatically
blasphemous, the reason it works so well is that it can be maintained to merely be the
logical continuation of so much of
organized religion, which elevates body functions such as eating,
fucking, and shitting, by consecrating them to God. Looking at the photograph of Péret’s water closet, the only thing I can think of is “
Asher Yatzar”, the Jewish
prayer to be recited after emerging from the toilet, in which one thanks God for having health enough to shit. And so while most
Catholic practitioners- Péret was originally Catholic- might think of the toilet as the one place they could go to get away from God, any entirely pure minded Catholic could feel right at home in that water closet, comfortable with the notion that even there one needs to maintain an awareness of God’s
omnipresence.
Then again, the exercise maintains a fantastic cryptic
ambiguity. Is the "sacrament" of the sign related to God's presence at all, or is it the only items that are always revealed in the bathroom:
asses and
genitalia?