Posted using ShareThis
One of my recent discoveries included the World Toilet Day. Back in 2006, they were celebrating the Global Orgasm Day ... three years later bloggers are called to unite in raising awareness of the world's sanitation crisis.
The event organisers address the public:
Imagine life without a toilet. No toilets in your home or at work, no public toilets, no toilets anywhere. Imagine the mess. Imagine the disease.
WaterAid is working hard to change this, using simple and low cost solutions, and there are many easy and fun ways you can get involved.
I don't know about "easy and fun ways" in which one can get involved in celebrating the World Toilet Day. I do know, however, about the times when there were no toilets. Those times are known as the Dark Ages. The examples of Western crusaders who succumbed to the Eastern delights in the form of the acts of personal hygiene had long become proverbial, having received notoriety through depictions in medieval chronicles.
Speaking of England - and I quote from The Dictionary of British Social History by L. W. Cowie -
water closet was known as early as 1597 when Elizabeth I's godson, Sir John Harington, described one he had erected at Kelston, near Bath. The Queen had it tried at her palace at Richmond, but it did not come into general use until it was re-invented by Alexander Cummings in 1775 and Joseph Bramah in 1778.
As we can see, the post-Roman Europeans have lived with a toilet for little longer than 230 years, equalling a nearly 10 generations' span. Yet this is the example when a good thing instantly becomes indispensable to the extent when not having it becomes a matter of life and death.
You may like to check out The Wordsworth Dictionary of British Social History (The Wordsworth Collection Reference Library)
Speaking of "toilet affairs" and the month of November: in de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, November was the month of "simple passions" that included coprophagia. As it is uniquely related to the toilet issues, it is a bizarre coincidence that the World Toilet Day is also celebrated in the month of November, although this can hardly be even considered as intentional.
As for me personally, I have just been reading The Story of the Eye by George Bataille, finding many references not only to de Sade but also to a surrealist movie classic, Un Chien Andalou by Louis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. In the context of this post, however, there are many references to toilets and relieves of the natural needs in Bataille's novella. To quote one of Amazon's reviewers,
Many have said that this book has no redeeming value, or indeed no artistic value. That's only true if you have a very narrow view of the scope of literature--one so narrow, that most important works of fiction from the twentieth century and beyond are probably unintelligible to you. Story of the Eye has had more than its share of influence, in everything from fiction to painting to film, and provides a gripping, if upsetting read.
It does look like November 2009 is packed with toilet references - but is there any wonder if one recalls that the Sun is presently in Scorpio which is ruled by Pluto, the God of the Underworld? Passion, dirt, sex, you name it, all pertain the sign of Scorpio and, so it seems, the month of November. And so it goes...
And just as I was finishing this post, I remembered one very impressive image in Paul Arden's book. It is used in the chapter called "It's not always good to have ideas", and the image has a caption: "where too many good ideas end up". The answer is obvious, as well as the message:Having too many ideas is not always a good thing.
It's too easy to move on to the next one, and the next one.
If you don't have many ideas, you have to make those you do have to work for you.
0 comments:
Post a Comment