roachboy

in a hallway i found a lithograph that was either a copy of or a fantasy of a copy of a scene involving anonymous romans debating something or other it is hard to say. the central character in the sequence was seated atop something that looked a whole lot like the tank of a toilet, and his feet were resting on another white oval thing that looked a whole lot like the closed seat of a toilet.

what i learned from this was: (a) the toilet emerged gradually from underground. it was implicit in lots of places at different times. (b) the roman implicit toilet was made of marble and was apparently understood as a Significant Formation, probably in the way that the Monolith was understood as somehow important in 2001. we know this because the roman dude who is seated on the toilet-like marble formation is wearing a wreathe of bay leaves atop his forehead and other romans, who are not privy to the proto-toilet as space for sitting and disquisition, are not wearing wreathes of bay leaves on their foreheads. (c) there is a particular look of satisfied relief on the face of the speaker who wears the bay leaf wreathe, like a solid point has been made or like something that had been building up for a while had just been released. it's possible that there was some connection between this particular type of relief, the wearing of bay leaf wreathes and the proto-toilet. which was marble. which was white.

that is what looking for many days at this curious lithograph, which i took from its closet and hung on my bedroom wall for a long time, taught me about the Important Question of why the toilet is white.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite