Moonflower Farm Occasional Dispatches III: On Shit

“I would rather write nothing at all than propagandize for the world as it is.”

-Anne Boyer

In the technocapitalist world, home is not where we fuck, sleep or cook.  It is where we shit.

This is why it is against the law to camp, even on land you own yourself.  (Did you know that?)  “Camping” means sleeping, fucking and cooking in a shelter which has no flush toilet.  The place you fuck and sleep and cook may be as elaborate as you like, it may be a bespoke yurt with stained glass windows and a $4000 professional range, but if it lacks a flush toilet you are camping — and that, technocapitalism does not allow.

“Homelessness” is not, if you think about it, the absence of a place to cook — nor a place to fuck or sleep.  “Homeless” people may have tents and campstoves.  “Homeless” people are people who cannot flush their shit.

But what does it mean to “flush,” then?  Left to their own devices, people, like all other mammals, shit on the ground.  (Foxes like to shit on rocks — foxes are tricksy and nasty.)  We shit on the ground, bacteria decompose it into its component parts almost immediately, and our shit provides nutrients which plants need to grow and survive.  This nutrient cycle is a fundamental aspect of life on planet earth.

But is this “flushing?”  No, it is not.  It turns out that “flushing” means shitting in water, and then, by means of infrastructure comical in its extent and complexity, moving the shit-filled water around in a baroque ritualistic manner, the details of which we can examine in a moment, but:  This is very strange.

It seems commonplace to us, living as we do in the midst of this system, but its strangeness becomes apparent upon a little consideration.  No other animal shits in water, excepting those that fuck and sleep and eat there too.  No other society in human history has ever done such a thing.  And not only do we shit in water, we shit in clean drinking water.  We have specialized ceramic appliances in our homes, kept permanently full of fresh water — not because we are fanatical about having cut flowers around, not so guests can wash their fingers after eating, not even, as would be quite civilized, to wash our buttholes after shitting — no, we habitually keep bowls ever-full of fresh clear drinking water so we can shit in it.

Once you start to really think about it, the perversity and raw yuck factor can kind of freak you out.

One of the biggest expenses involved in building a house in the country (in America today) is plumbing. The soil and underlying rock have to be tested by an engineer, to make sure your sewage won't contaminate the groundwater; a septic field must be excavated; all used wash water must be combined with perfectly good drinking water mixed with human “waste” (there is actually nothing wasteful about it — unless you waste it), and all of it channeled into a septic tank, which has to be pumped out every few years and the septage trucked to a treatment facility; standpipes for sulphurous gases from this morass and vapor locks and backflow preventers must be installed to keep any of this blackwater from contaminating the house water supply; etc.

Want me to keep going?  Oh, I will.  Yes, modern houses are — must be, to be legal — plumbed in such a way that all used water is combined.  This has the effect that all the water that flows out of a house has raw sewage in it and is a source of disease.

It doesn’t have to be that way.  It would be perfectly simple to, for instance, use greywater from the sink or shower to fill the toilet tank, thus halving water use; or to install separate plumbing systems for blackwater and greywater, and use the greywater on site — assuming you want to keep shitting in a bowl of water, for some reason.  But somehow these simple stratagems are outside the conceptual horizon of technocapitalist life; and so, because of the way our houses are plumbed, every drop of water we use is mingled with our feces, and must, for safety, be transported away.

And where is “away?”  If you live in a city, “on the sewer line” as they say, then huge pumps working 24 hours a day suction all your household water immediately out of your house and through huge pipes big enough to crawl down, on a journey of typically several miles to a vast building the size of a parking deck, where shitty water is subjected to several chemical processes to separate the shit out, compost it, and sell it to compost companies, who bag it and truck it to garden centers, where you can buy it back to make your peonies grow.

This is what happens when technocapitalist engineers set themselves the problem of managing a biogeochemical cycle.  It is a kind of cartoon of ecology, hilarious in its wastefulness.  And it turns out that “away,” as we always suspected, is actually another word for right here.

For of course, there are good intermediates between shitting in drinking water, piping sewage through a labyrinth beneath our feet, treating it with chemicals and buying it in bags; between that and simply shitting on the ground like a bear.  For those who live near where they garden (by which I mean, who shit near where they garden), the “slop bucket” or compost toilet or, as we like to call it at Moonflower Farm, the Poopoo Shelf is a great and time-tested alternative.  Shit in a bucket, add dry carbonaceous material (we use cedar shavings, a waste product of the timber industry); keep the full buckets around for a few months; add the resulting inoffensive slurry to the center of a hot compost pile and cover it with more carbonaceous material (chipped brush); and all the nutrients are conserved onsite, while disease organisms (bacteria, viruses, and worms) are utterly eradicated by decomposing bacteria and the heat they produce.

Many years ago, when I started working as a landscaper, the signature field of my emails said “GARDENS ARE REVOLUTIONARY INFRASTRUCTURE.”  That’s certainly true, but recently I’ve come to think it even more true that SHITTERS ARE REVOLUTIONARY INFRASTRUCTURE — because a garden is not really enough for food sovereignty.  Without any inputs of fertilizer, a few crops of corn are enough to denude the land they’re planted in.  And it’s not financially feasible to buy back your own composted shit in bags — no, the only way most farmers make it is by using chemical fertilizers, which are a petroleum byproduct, worldwide a significant driver of oil consumption.  And of course, the crazy thing is:  humans produce a lot of shit.  Tihkal and I fill a five-gallon bucket a week, like clockwork.  Composted, it’s beautiful rich slow-release nitrogen fertilizer, which, combined with kitchen scraps and the manure from our hens, supplants any need for petroleum inputs to our gardens.

Confirmation here comes from the acknowledged authorities on revolution:  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.  Marx notoriously wrote in Capital I (Section 6) of a “metabolic rift with nature” — there is an entire genre of ecosocialist analysis which arises out of this analogy, the “Metabolic Rift School,” associated with John Bellamy Foster and the Monthly Review.  But Marx was influenced by the chemist and proto-ecologist Justus Liebig; and Liebig understood this rift mainly in terms of soil fertility.  He was concerned, in particular, that the process of urbanization deprived the soil of human waste, because town-dwelling (literally “bourgeois”) humans no long shit on the ground!  So we see that the “rift” is indeed “metabolic” in the most basic sense!

And let us note in passing that the metaphor of a metabolic totality encompassing the spheres of both culture and nature is one way of approaching the Buddhist notion of emptiness, or what we call nonduality around these parts.

The study of Liebig’s writings is also why Engels wrote (in Anti-Dühring):  “The present poisoning of the air, water and land can be put an end to only by the fusion of town and country; and only such fusion will change the situation of the masses now languishing in the towns, and enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of for the production of disease”; a sentiment with which I could not agree more heartily.

Technocapitalists pity and look down on the underdeveloped world, where people use “pit toilets” and “squat toilets”; well-intentioned donors pave their road to hell installing indoor plumbing in villages all over the globe.  Users of pit toilets, meanwhile, look aghast at our personal hygiene.  For near every pit toilet, the world over, there is a pitcher of water, or even a bidet, to wash the butt after shitting.  It is unimaginably gross — to people outside the solipsistic and self-aggrandizing regime of technocapitalist fantasy — to leave the butthole only as clean as dry paper can make it.  No wonder, they exclaim, those people smell that way!

Thus we see that the mindset of technocapitalism, with its optimizations for short-term gain, its engineering for “efficiency” defined as efficiency of exploitation, has led to a kind of dark age, where the very production of food is unsustainable because unexamined cultural prejudices rob our gardens of nutrients, and instead of washing with water, we leave our ass dirty and waste unimaginable amounts of water trying to hide from ourselves and each other the fact that we shit, as well as sleep and fuck and cook.

Shitstick Shikantaza

A monk asked Yunmen … or was it that Yunmen asked the monk?  No, the way I heard it, a monk asked Yunmen:  “What is Buddha?”  Yunmen answered, “a dry shit stick.”

This is — for obvious reasons?  — one of my favorite Zen stories.  It is not much discussed, and sometimes not even included in lists of Yunmen’s sayings.  Much more often quoted is his response (to himself) in Case 6 of the Blue Cliff Record:  “Every day is a good day (日日是好日).”  Which is also one of my favorite Zen sayings, and probably would be better to concentrate on — but it is neither so assonant nor so funny as the dry shit stick.  And somehow I feel they point in the same general direction.

(I am going to comment on the “every day is a good day” story anyway.  The whole story:  Yunmen said to the assembly, ‘Without even bringing up the days before the 15th of the month, what of the days after the 15th?’  When no one answered, Yunmen responded himself:  ‘Every day is a good day.’

This story becomes a good deal less enigmatic when we realize that 9th Century China followed a lunar calendar — and so the 15th of the month is another way of saying, the Full Moon.  And when we learn that the Full Moon is a Chan analogy for enlightenment, we become even less puzzled.  Yunmen is simply saying that enlightenment is the beginning, not the end, of practice.

American Zen students whose teachers make them concentrate on stories from over a thousand years ago and halfway around the world are often put in this position, to my mind foolishly.  All that can result from breaking your head over a story to which you are denied the context is a big failure experience — which is one way of breaking through to insight into reality but only one among many, and, more importantly, not the intent of the stories.)

This story — the shitstick story — is Case 21 of the Gateless Gate, and the commentary of Wumen, the compiler, is worth quoting in full:  “It must be said of Yunmen that he was too poor to prepare even the plainest food and too busy to make a careful draft.  Probably people will bring forth this dry shitstick to shore up the gate and prop open the door.  The Buddha Dharma is thus sure to decay.”

And so indeed it has turned out to be.

There is a robust scholarly debate on the meaning of the characters used, 乾屎橛 (gānshǐjué), which you can read about on the Wikipedia page for “shitstick.”  The syntax of the classical Chinese allows for the same ambiguity as the English — Buddha may be a dry shitstick, or perhaps a dry-shit stick.  Which, honestly, and in view of the discussion above of hygiene methods the world over, I find it pretty hard to condone the idea that medieval Chinese monks or anyone else used sticks to wipe their butts, at least not habitually — you know, from time to time I can see it, any port in a storm, but, it’s not like they didn’t have pitchers of water available, not to mention paper, which was after all invented in China.  So, personally I come down firmly on the side of those who maintain that a shitstick is actually composed of dried up shit, not merely covered in it. Shades of Fazang’s “Golden Lion!” IYKYK.

Alright, enough of shitsticks.  What of Shikantaza?

Shikantaza is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese 只管打坐 (zhǐguǎn dǎzuò).  The “za” at the end is the same za from the word zazen.  In our last letter we observed that “Zen” is a series of misunderstandings of a Sanskrit word meaning “meditation,” and zazen is seated meditation — the Chinese 坐 , zuò (pronounced “za” in Japanese), represents two people sitting together and just means “to sit.”  With 打, dǎ, a verb meaning to hit as a ball or punch as a key, it means “do sitting.”  (Chinese verbs don’t like to be alone, they need a secondary or helper verb to keep them company.)  只管 (zhǐguǎn) means “merely.”

So:  shikantaza, merely do sitting.

The word owes its use to Dōgen Zenji, the 13th Century Japanese importer of the Caodong school of Zen, who claimed he got it from his Chinese teacher Rūjing.  Since then, absolutely unbelievable rivers of ink have been spilt trying to make the concept harder to understand, both by its enemies and its partisans — and yes, the idea of “just sitting” has enemies!  Shrug emoji.

I will try not to add to the nonsense too much.  I will just observe that, when one sets out to “just sit,” one quickly discovers that one is doing all kinds of other things (like daydreaming) in addition to sitting; and if one tries not to do any of those extra things, that exertion is yet another extra activity, added to the heap.

And then one ends up falling asleep, which, Dōgen is clear about this, is a totally different thing.

So, there is something deeply paradoxical about this practice.  Something which words are not going to do anything to resolve, nor to heighten — and so we gratefully take our leave of words and move on.

Here at Shitstick Shikantaza we are happy merely to shore up the gate and prop open the door.  Beyond that, we trust our relatives — our human and non-human relatives — to lead the way.

Touch

finished 25 December 2020