Gut feelings and the body’s truths

That which we cannot control, we feel compelled to turn into humour. You might be led to believe that I’m thinking of political satire, but it’s actually the scatological that I mean.

We have only as much control over our sleep and who we come to love as we do over our dreams and bowel movements.

The first three of these, sleep, love, and dreams, fill us with varying degrees of wistfulness – they provide subject and form to the poetic; the last, the phrase ‘bowel movement’ itself, tickles, as if a laugh were waiting at the brim, in need of toppling over. Not for those who suffer from the lack of control of how the traffic moves inside them, of course.

The young couple in Gwendoline Riley’s first novel, First Love, discuss their mothers through their morning habits: ‘I used to hear these dreadful noises in the morning,’ Edwyn said.

And pleating his lips, and narrowing his eyes, to more precisely recall, so that eyebrow quills stood rampant, he said, ‘Gurgling and spluttering. Like bad plumbing. Which it was, I suppose. Her grossly over-functioning digestion! The thundering waterfall of her first piss! Terrifying. I thought bodies were terrifying...’

I told him: ‘I have memories of my mum on the toilet, too. Noises in the night. She had IBS. Stress-induced. I heard her crying once and got up and found her sitting with her nightie all gathered up between her knees. She said, “Leave me, please, go back to bed, Neve! Just leave me!” And there were these little splutters. In the morning I wondered if I’d dreamt it.’

I found myself thinking of Riley’s novel, with the mothers suffering from problems to do with ‘bowel movement’, while watching yet another mother in the film Toaster – the landlady, Mrs D’Souza, sitting on the toilet, a bird’s eye view of the bathroom, her son outside it, she struggling to get stool out of her, her words interpreted by her son to mean something far beyond the literal. ‘I will die trying to...’ She’s dead in the next scene, inside a coffin – the struggle of the insides to come out literalised. T

he film is called Toaster – there’s a homily about how bread causes constipation smuggled into it. It’s the stuff of the comic, the top-view shot, censoring what will not be shown, the face of the suffering woman, between contortion and distortion, the tragicomedy of death.

We seek transparency – a glove-less encounter with life – in art. Or so we summarise to ourselves when something feels too curated or kept back from us. But we are reluctant to meet indigestion and gas, diarrhoea and constipation in literature and art.

Writers seem to find ‘gut feeling’ as hard to write (about) as socialising often feels for sufferers of ‘digestion’ problems. In ‘creative writing’ spaces devoted to such medical issues, poems like this appear – a poem that has the title ‘Pardon Me’, an apology for one’s digestive system:

‘Pardon me, for being so rude,/ It was not me – nor my food;/ I have this thing called IBS/ That puts my innards to the test./ My dear old tummy cannot cope/ With salty food, chips and coke./ Sometimes bread and pasta too/ Can have me dashing to the loo.../ Sensitive guts are a sensitive topic,/ And sometimes symptoms are microscopic,/ But one thing’s really vital, please,/ Do not jeer, and do not tease/ Gas and poop are stuff of jokes/ And can be funny for some folks;/ But think of those who must be wary/ Of carbs and fat and salt and dairy... It’s not our fault, this handicap,/ Feeling bloated, sick and crap./ It’s an illness; a disease,/ That brings us groaning to our knees...’

I notice that most of these poems, often posted anonymously, are in rhyme. Perhaps this reiterates the comic energy of such a medical condition, giving it the quality of limerick or even the nonsense rhyme.

The word ‘out’ appears in these poems with the tone of a sigh, but it seems more like a prayer, a chant, a kind of pep-talk to something that does not have ears – the way one psyches oneself up with motivational quotes before a job interview. This ‘out’ is not the ‘out’ of poetry – it is not ‘Out, out, brief candle!’, even though our ‘gut feeling’ is predicated on ‘tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow’.

The writer is an author and poet. Her books include How I Became a Tree and Provincials.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)