liberated shitting

GINSBERG [talking about a guy getting very angry at him, telling him he should go fight in Vietnam, cut off his long hair etc]: He is suffering more than me. How to get him out of this prison, that is the point. You don't get him out by locking the gates of hostility even tighter. You try and let in a flood of compassion. And I was almost crying for him. He seemed so PAINED it was horrible. He was like my mother, afraid.

GEOFFREY: Which was the relaxation of the muscular tonus to get rid of anal retention.

GINSBERG: If that's what the syndrome was.

GEOFFREY: It keeps people clamped in their heads so they can't relax. Fanon said that in the colonised countries the people had acquired so strong a muscular tonus that they were always tensed up. They didn't know where they were inside their heads.

GINSBERG: One technique that Kerouac discussed at great length in THE DHARMA BUMS is for Western nations to begin washing their sphincters after crapping. He had a big long essay/conversation, riding across country, talking about how the Indians and the Arabs had the good sense after they went to the john and defecated to wash their behinds. Leaving their behinds clean and sweet smelling, so that love-making could take place there, as is natural and also so that people sitting around could relax. They wouldn't have to clench their sphincter muscles to keep the moist damp from staining their underwear.

If people keep themselves ready for lovemaking in that area, or for pleasure, at all times, that might open out a whole new character change in every direction.

I think there should be a great campaign amongst the young for everybody, especially their parents, to wash their behinds. Which would poijt up an area of consciousness which is known but never spoken of - but which is so real that nobody can avoid it. Anybody can see it, smell it, touch it, everytime they take their clothes off to go to bed. But they keep it secret.

Ithell Colquhoun, 'Images of Joy' from Medea's Charms:

I was sitting on a rock between mountains and sea, and the sun was blazing down on the aloes, and I thought I was alone. But presently I heard a step, and a peasant came along who thought he was alone and let down his pants and had a good shit.

It was done in a minute with complete simplicity; he pulled them up again, not wiping his arsehole with so much as a leaf, fastened his belt and walked away.

I went forward to look at what he had done; it was beautiful, three concentric rings of golden brown, decorated like a cake with olive-stones and shreds of tomato peel. The topmost ring
ended in a little point aiming at the sky. I think the whole lot must have come away clean without leaving a trace; perhaps the
intestine had come out a little way like an animal's to form a funnel; though maybe there was a small stain on his trousers all
the same.

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