Two By Fire

The first, Monday morning. The sole remaining resident of the apartment building just a few blocks down from mine--the one on giant pillars, leaving its ground floor open to the air. On the day he was slated to be evicted, he shot himself in the head. Fire built from somewhere--he was said to have about him the record and detritus of decades in that very apartment--and consumed the unit.


Damage to the building was not estimated, as it has been slated for demolition. The man himself was the building’s caretaker. Most did not know the building had any remaining residents.

The second, Friday afternoon. Red Square, University of Washington. A “staff member.” Not faculty, The Post-Intelligencer was quick to mention. He doused himself in gasoline. He sat in a pool of it, right at the center of the square--where the topography of the brick allows a pool to collect. A young man saw him and tried to wrest his matches from his hand.

This failed--the man at the center of the gasoline set himself aflame. The young man, branded a hero, stripped down to his boxers and used his clothing to try to suffocate the flame. Others came, removed their own clothes, fetched fire extinguishers. Others reported their own anguish at their paralysis as the man in the center of Red Square burned.

Eventually the fire was put out; the man at the center, 61 years of age, died from the burns.

I thought immediately of two events: the Vietnamese monk who sacrificed himself in protest, and the Reno woman who attempted to kill herself in her motel room in November of 2006.


The first harmed only himself; he was transformed to icon. His charred skin and his absolute still are, in fact, two of the textures of the Vietnam War for us now. The second survived; she had pushed a mattress against her door and lit it aflame. The resulting fire would eventually kill eleven others. This was the Mizpah Hotel--a residential hotel, a home to those in permanent flux. She was arrested.

When we kill ourselves under fire, perhaps we seek grace. This is too fast and too simple, I know--but what feels more gracious, what feels larger than leaving the world as light, as heat, and overcoming pain to do so?

But fire carries its heat, too: to the shoes of one boy in Red Square, to the rest of the abandoned building in Capitol Hill, to the memories of all who see the image of the immolated priest, and straight through the lives of six others back home in Reno--claiming as home an outpost, a waystation that was lost under the force of someone else’s violent flux.

But still, it feels like lifting--like sublimation. Some are carried out on flame. In the case of the two this week, they leave behind them that had rendered them completely impotent (the first, a new condo development; the second, the bureaucracy of the University): and they responded by turning their bodies to fire.

The Wipe Interval

I don't remember when they arrived--it started with sinks, then urinals. Nothing too controversial there. In our quest for risk aversion, they seemed something of a perfect solution, in fact: sensors to replace steel. When handles vanish in favor of radiation, germs lose their favored waystations, it’s true.

But risk-averse culture is, at its heart, normative culture. It may not wish to, but it identifies as "risky" any action or desire outside of a preapproved set of allowed actions. In order to safely trim away probable danger or damage (not damage itself, mind you, but the likely future occurrence of damage--the haunting of potential), it must regulate actions. And it’s worked well: we’re pretty trained to snap into line at this point. (Don't get driving tickets, and your auto insurance drops. Maintain a smoke alarm, and the same thing happens to homeowner's insurance.) Many of these turns toward prevention have, in fact, drastically reduced rates of infection and injury due to a panoply of previously common evils: exploding toasters, Hep A, baby's-throat-sized toys. For the most part, risk-averse culture has made impressive inroads toward health and longevity.

But that brings me to the little steel cyclops on the toilet, and to the heart of the problems of normative behaviors under risk aversion: It's the wipe-interval problem. To get specific, I'm talking about pooping. More directly, the period between standing after having expressed oneself and flushing: the time of the wiping.

You see, one of the tenets of risk aversion (as mentioned above) is the identification of exotic new forms of assimilation and then (through marketing or law or, in this case, hardware) enforcement of the new standard. It can be quite a shock when you're first told that your habits fall out of the norm: you wonder how your trespasses might reflect a larger pattern of disobedience, or ignorance, or hedonism, or apostasy, or any other of a number of fatal character flaws you expect one day will lead to your failure or your imprisonment or your quarantining or your demise.

And in the Wipe Interval I found just such a caveat. You see, by the time the toilet flushes, I am nowhere near done wiping. I'm left with a clean, vacated bowl (beneath me), a wad of sullied paper (in my hand), and a great question (in my head): is my wiping practice in need of intervention?

I should say that I used to live in Istanbul. I mention this because the Turks have a very different relationship with their rears. They all have bidets: nothing fancy, just a tube hooked up to the plumbing that shoots a stream (water-fountain style) of freezing cold water right to the anus. It's jarring at first, then slowly that shock of cold comes to signify clean toosh. You go in later with paper, but mostly you're just drying off. This is important, because Turks don't flush their paper--they dispose of it in the trash. (Funky pipes, I was told. Silly Ottomans [or Romans or Byzantines or Constantine himself] didn't allow for toilet paper when they plumbed the city.) But when you’re done, you have evidence of cleanliness: you’re washed, you’re dried. It’s like a microspa.

When I got back to the States I found one of my primary implements of cleanliness management eliminated: no more electric shock of cold water against asshole. The only tool left in the kit: toilet paper. Really, using toilet paper to wipe an ass is about as efficient as using a dry kitchen rag to clean up spilled honey. The tool’s a poor match for the job. So I found, upon repatriation, that my own personal wipe-interval had greatly increased as I struggled to get that Turkish sort of clean. No worries, at the time: for the most part, the length of my toilet-stall tenancy was never really monitored or questioned (unless there was a line).

Now, though, The Great Eye stares at my back, and as soon as I stand from the seat I know I'm under the gun. I've yet to complete a satisfactory wipe in the time allotted me, and each time the flush triggers while I've still got a was of toilet paper dug deep in, I find myself feeling a bit incapable, a bit excessive, a bit outside of the norm. Ironically, it's for too much cleaning, rather than too little, even though the genesis of the Wipe-Interval Crisis lay in its supposed boon to hygiene.

It makes me wish I could take a poll: when you are under the gaze of the auto-flush toilet, how sufficient do you find the time allotted to you for ass-wiping? Entirely sufficient, moderately sufficient, slightly insufficient, wholly insufficient? But maybe establishing a new norm is not the answer--rather, why not let improvisation and individuality flourish? Why not bring a bit of free-market theory to the Wipe Interval, let ingenuity and self-interest inspire a whole generation of trust our judgment a bit more, in other words?

But what sort of device would return our power to us? What would blind that terrible eye? How might I return the act of cleaning my own ass to my own semiotic map (poor replacement for shot of cold water) instead of losing it to the dominant narrative (tick tock, tick tock)?

I guess a handle would do it. I'll wash my hands when I'm done--I promise.