How to Clean a Toilet Bowl

The toilet bowl is situated on the very edge, perhaps even a little more on the far side, over there, than over here on our side, the safe side, the legible side.

It is a tear in the fabric of the curtain. By getting down low, really low, and by moving your body close, unbearably close, the most awkward of embraces, you can almost feel the breeze of the abyss on the skin of your face, you can almost taste the minerals in the air, as familiar as they are otherworldly, underworldly.

The toilet bowl, it might also be said, is a shark bite. Several rows of teeth line the jaw. Each one of them is sharp enough to perforate the skin of language, of the text, of the horizonless soup of signs that we swim in, that we splash in, limbs flailing, that submerges our every action, almost.

It is at that place, at the foot of the toilet bowl, scrub brush in hand, war paint smudged on your cheekbones, crouched down, bent low, hunched over, that suddenly, like an irruption, like the past invading the present, you can sense it, its terrifying presence, its untranslatability, its refusal to negotiate, the Lacanian real on the other side of the imaginary, of discourse, just beneath the surface, poised to strike.

It is not something that someone else can do for you, not any more than someone could lose your virginity for you, not any more than someone could get up in the middle of the night and go pee for you. No, it has to be you.

Trabajo forzado (2004), Liliana Porter, part of the Forced Labor series

And there are no short cuts, no sleights of hand, no cheat codes, no secret methods. Sure, you can squeeze the spray bottle, you can surround the toilet bowl in a cloud of chemicals, you can sing jingles from all the commercials of your favorite cleaning products, the most expensive ones even, the very best, hitting every note, but it won’t change anything. With or without gloves, black latex or otherwise, there is no way around it. There’s no way around getting your hands dirty.

Don’t be alarmed if, right before you start scouring, the room goes dark. This is perfectly normal. The room, in fact, has not gone dark. It is just what happens when you abandon yourself to the experience, when you allow your hands to do what they already know how to do, without injunctions from the superego, when the benign fury rises up from its hidden wellspring, unadorned and unadulterated, when the pistols start churning and the beads of sweat gather on your brow.

As you labor, vision dimmed, world receding, going under, your senses will heighten. You will feel yourself sinking lower, all the way down. You will feel yourself growing smaller, more insignificant, more accurately situated. And you will feel yourself getting closer, close enough to feel the skin of the porcelain, the bones underneath, the blast on the other side, when it comes, any second now.

Porcelain gleaming, reinvented, reimagined, the aftershocks will be enough to make you recalibrate, to approach language differently, to finally comprehend the stakes involved, in the games we play with words, the power they possess to shake the curtain, to send ripples across its surfaces, to straighten its folds or deepen its creases.