There's Flowers on my Toilet Paper: Bataille's Design

I was in a contemplative mood this morning, when I noticed that my toilet paper has flowers printed on it and what appears to be abstract representations of leaves. The niceness of the image contrasted sharply with what I was about to do with it. With Valentine's day just around the corner, we are reminded that flowers are associated not with the more basest (and smelly) of bodily functions, but with the perfection of infatuation and the ideals of love. The end of which tends to coincide to the end of that period of time when you haven't yet smelled your partner's first fart – generally, it occurs without the kind warning of our foghorn, saying, keep your distance! 

http://www.origami-resource-center.com/toilet-paper-origami-book.html

It's amazing the lengths people go to hide one of our most common denominators. Even going through an entire pregnancy without farting once in front of her partner. In one birth story I read (I've been reading too many of those), the new mother bemoaned how terribly embarrassed she was to have farted in front of her spouse while giving birth. I would have thought she would have other concerns at that moment.


Flowers represent the tidiness of love and friendship. We give them to one another on special occasions like birthdays and Valentine's day, when both sides on their best behaviour and wearing their cleanest shirt. The stems are free from the messiness of dirt and roots – cut cleanly away to leave only the beauty of the blossom. The softness and sweet smell of its petals gives a more exalted impression of the blossom than its actual function as a reproductive organ to attract as many insect partners as possible. 

Whenever I see a bouquet of flowers standing in front of a store or at the entrance to a subway, I cannot help but think of these colourful displays as blatant exhibitions of what's between mother nature's legs. I wonder, does not anyone else notice this? 

Divorced from context and sanitized, the flower in Western society disgusted Georges Bataille long before I gaped at mother nature's exposure. In a short article at the beginning of the 20th century called “The Language of Flowers”, he wrote: 


But even more than by the filth of its organs, the flower is betrayed by the fragility of its corolla: thus, far from answering the demands of human ideas, it is the sign of their failure. In fact after a very short period of glory the marvelous corolla rots indecently in the sun, thus becoming, for the plant, a garish withering. Risen from the stench of the manure pile–even though it seemed for a moment to have escaped it in a flight of angelic and lyrical purity — the flower seems to relapse abruptly into its original squalor: the most ideal is rapidly reduced to a wisp of aerial manure. 

Unbeknownst to the toilet paper designer, the cheap paper in my bathroom captures in a most apt way Bataille's musings: the perfection of the printed flowers return to their messy origins – leaving their form completely unrecognizable. It's cyclical and bound up in the way we deny the existence of our bodies. Where ideas or ideals fail is at their meeting point with reality or the physical. 


Wiping my orifices with an image of a plant's sexual organ seems now to be a meeting of minds, rather than a disconnect between my second brain, my bowels, and the imaginings of my first brain, those pesky ideals.