“Smooth and odourless”: Salvador Dalí thought perfect poo was the secret of life
It might not be the sort of thing that we would want to willingly admit, but a lot of people might argue that their greatest ideas happen to come to them while they’re sitting on the toilet. If you’re ashamed by this, then perhaps remind yourself that this is something you have in common with the exceptional mind of Salvador Dalí.
I’ll happily admit that this is the case for me, too. There’s something about the peace and privacy of being perched atop your chrome throne that allows you to unlock parts of your brain that you wouldn’t otherwise tap into with so many distractions happening around you. The bland and sterile environment of a toilet or bathroom tends to be far from the most inspiring setting in most homes, and yet, having so little to capture the imagination around you can lead to the mind wandering in curious directions.
Okay, perhaps I’ve exaggerated the extent of my lavatorial musings. They aren’t exactly the sort of earth-shattering revelations that are capable of changing the world, and they mostly consist of throwaway jokes that get shared with an audience of one (ie, me), and juvenile poems about my family friends that I wrote aged six. Dalí’s ponderings, on the other hand, delve deep into existentialism and really begin to question the importance of defecation to the existence of humankind.
Now, we all need to take a dump regularly, some of us more so than others. But have you ever considered what it truly means to squeeze out a satisfying turd? In a 1952 diary entry that paraphrases the teachings of the Swiss physician Paracelsus, Dalí delved into the “truly remarkable piece of insight” that he conceived while routinely taking a crap, all the while providing non-sequiturs about how his bowel movements on that particular morning were “perfectly exceptional […] smooth and odourless”.
“I was thinking about the problem of human longevity,” Dalí begins, as all good scatological meditations should. “My intuition is that if it were possible to make human excrement as fluid as liquid honey, man’s life would be extended, because excrement (according to Paracelsus) is the thread of life, and each interruption or fart is but a moment of life flying away.”
He continues, spouting more reflections on his daily discharge: “Since man’s highest mission on earth is to spiritualise everything, it is his excrement in particular that needs it most. As a result, I increasingly dislike all scatological jokes and all forms of frivolity on this subject. Indeed, I am dumbfounded at how little philosophical and metaphysical importance the human mind has attached to the vital subject of excrement.”
His final admission, after much consideration, underlines how little time others have dedicated to this line of thought: “The day I write a general treatise on this subject, it is quite certain that I will astonish the whole world.”
Dalí may have been a master of conjuring up surrealist imagery in his work, so it’s important to take these writings with a pinch of salt. There’s very few studies of significance that substantiate the Spaniard’s ‘findings’, and while he isn’t wrong in his assertion that people don’t dedicate enough time to pontificating over their poo, it’s probably fair to say that he’s frankly talking a load of shit.
