Incontinence: A Teacherman’s Dreambild
by Paul Stephens and Robert Hardwick Weston
After seeing a John Cage performance on stage, the teacherman dreams his students are conducting scatological experiments in his back yard. Two students push a geriatric porta-toilet on wheels through the thick grass. The liquid shit sloshing inside the white-plastic container of the hospice toilet belongs first to Adorno, then, later in the dream, to Artaud. [Experiential Urtext: Recherches de la Fécalité; “Je ne ferai plus jamais caca!”] The teacherman approaches his students, walks alongside their moving toilet, and begins to criticize the theoretical principles guiding their experiment. He cannot quite articulate the problem. It has something to do with teleology, with the reduction of faeces as mere means. It is all rather vague. Can faeces really serve the students’ end, can it do the conceptual work they expect? Eloquent resistance from the students. The teacherman is sitting on the portable toilet in his blue three-piece suit. His students push him around the yard through the tall grass. He shits himself. Bad. Hot oily shit streams down his pant legs. [Tagesrest: are these the “treatment effects” of those diet pills he read about? “You may get gas with oily spotting, loose stools that are difficult to control.”] He lets slip: “I think I just shit myself.” Jumping up from the portable toilet he tries to cover up the embarrassing mishap. “Your liquid faeces has splashed on my pants.” He pulls off his suit pants [Tagesrest: Before the tutorial on Wednesday he had changed out of his suit at a student’s house, pants first]. Standing in crisp white boxers, vest, jacket and tie, the teacherman tries to wash the fecal discharge out of his pants. He thinks to himself “These are tropical wool, I really shouldn’t get them wet…but water can’t stain worse than this oily faeces.” He does not wonder why his white boxers are not soiled. The suit pants become brown, heavy woolen herringbone trousers. His students are repulsed by the muddy run off as the teacherman wrings out his poopy pants. He thinks this an excellent opportunity to teach them a lesson. “Surely you students do not belong to that species of intellectual who instrumentalizes faeces in his research but who finds the material itself disgusting.” [Tagesrest: Last week he taught Sade’s “An Essay on Novels” and Adjunct Professor P. taught Bataille’s “Language of Flowers.” In his temporary office, they discussed whether Sade’s statement “Any fool can pick a rose and pluck its petals”<1> influenced Bataille’s arresting final image of the Marquis de Sade “who had the most beautiful roses brought to him only to pluck off their petals and toss them into a ditch filled with liquid manure.”<2> Perhaps the dream-indictment of students for misvaluing and instrumentalizing faeces shares the logic of Bataille’s charge that the Surrealists misunderstood, misvalued, and instrumentalized Sade]. It’s six in the morning. The teacher man wakes up gassy and bloated. He feels his way through the darkness to the bathroom, sits down, and takes a huge, steamy dump. Outside the bathroom window, outlined in pre-dawn shadows, he thinks he sees two black bears.
–Friday, September 28th 2007, 6 a.m.
Next Denkbild: Teacherman/Preacherman: Overteacherman
Notes
1. Donatien-Alphonse-Francois de Sade, “An Essay on Novels” in The Crimes of Love, trans. David Coward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 15.
2. Georges Bataille, “The Language of Flowers” in Visions of Excess, ed. Alan Stoekl, trans. Stoekl et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 14.
Copyright 2008 by Paul Stephens and Robert Hardwick Weston