Up The Tailpipe: A Meditation on Flatulence, Civilisation and the Anal Orifice

THIS November gone by, a Sunderland man stuck a Black Cat Thunderbolt rocket up his tailpipe and, apparently apropos of nothing, set it alight.

“Fuzzy mobile phone footage,” I have it on the authority of no less than USA Today, “shows a blinding white flash and the group of spectators laughing.” “The man, whose injuries include a scorched colon, is still in hospital,” the newspaper reported.

Ejecting bubbling, hissing shards of undigested mirchi ka salan from my innards, as I have been compelled to spend this morning doing, I know just what the Black Cat Thunderbolt must have felt like. I am not laughing. I am contemplating, instead, our civilizational attitudes to flatulence and the anal orifice.


I.
IN my beloved watan, it is considered acceptable to fart as loudly and often as you might wish. Sticking things up your tailpipe, though is deemed a crime, even though nine out of ten desi men are closet bundus.

By contrast, in Jesustan, you may stick almost anything you like up your tailpipe – as the story of the Black Cat Rocket demonstrates. To expel hot air through the anal orifice, though, is to cross the limits all decency.

Consider this passage from Mark Twain’s Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors:

“… ye blody bucanier had got his wind again, and did turn his mind to farting with such villain zeal that presently I was like to choke once more. God damn this windy ruffian and all his breed. I wolde that hell mighte get him.”

Now, I know plenty of Desi women who wolde that hell mighte get him. For the most part, though, their ire has to do with their husbands’ drunken demands to stick things up their tailpipe – not flatulence. In the Jesustani imagination, however, flatulence is almost akin in its horror to paedophilia. It is a perversion so horrific that it may not even be named.

An excessive assessment? Miss Manners, that great chronicler of Jesustan’s mores, tells us that there are Acceptable Noises “such as burping or the sounds accompanying choking, to which the response should come from the noisemaker himself. Society acknowledges that these noises are made from time to time, but does not dignify them with a response. The offender says ‘Excuse me,’ and the subject is considered closed.”

Not so for the Unacceptable Noises. Miss Manners mandates, chillingly, that these “be acknowledged by neither the noisemaker nor the noise recipient, because socially they do not exist.”

II.
MISS Manners' insistence on Omerta has ancient roots in the western tradition. Concerned that Rome’s citizens were poisoning themselves by retaining flatus, the chronicler Suetonius records in The Lives of the Twelve Ceasars, that the Emperor Claudius was compelled to pass a law legalising farting at banquets.

Perhaps the Romans’ deep fear of farting had its origins in Semitic rage against the body. Flavius Josephus reports in The Wars of the Jews that a Roman soldier raised his clothes and farted at the Feast of Unleavened Bread. This profane act so enraged the Jews that it caused a riot in which many thousands were killed.

“Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta,” reads the last line of The Inferno, Chapter XXI: “and he made a trumpet of his buttocks.” For Dante, flatulence denoted a demoniac condition. Similarly, in St. Augustine’s The City of God Against the Pagans, farting was closely intertwined with heresy. Augustine takes jaundiced note of men who “have such command of their bowels, that they can break wind continuously at will, so as to produce the effect of singing.”

Farting in fact occupied an honoured role in some cultures at the margins of western civilisation. Irish professional farters, known as braigetori, found mention with other performers and musicians in the 12th century Tech Midchúarda, a diagram of the banqueting hall of Tara. As entertainers, these Flatulists ranked at the lower end of a scale headed by bards.

In the late nineteenth century, Jesustan saw a brief rebellion against the shame-system that had stamped out Fart-Art. While still a child, Frenchman Joseph Pujol discovered that he could suck up water through his arse and then squirt it out several feet. Not surprisingly, Pujol’s comrades-in-arms in the French army found this an entertaining spectacle. He became a part of Moulin Rouge in 1892.

Pujol’s most-applauded act included playing a flute through a rubber tube stuck up his anus, and fart-effects of cannon fire and thunderstorms. He could also blow out a candle from several yards away. Between 1894 and 1904, Pujol refined his act, adding a wide array of new sounds to his repertoire: the calls of farm animals, for example, or a virtuoso impression of the great San Francisco earthquake.

World War I broke Pujol’s heart. He retired from the stage in 1916, and never performed again.

III.
DESPITE many months of research, I have yet to find a Jesustani who is willing to forge art in the crucible of his shame; to transform his flatulence from biological imperative to art. it is tragic, but this probably means the end of Fart-Art: it cannot be outsourced.

My watan will never produce a Pujol, for flatulence, unlike anal penetration, occupies no great place in its imagination. You will never find fart-toys retailing in Lajpat Nagar market, because no one will think there is anything especially funny about the sound - and because there's no call to spend good money on a gadget to produce noises that be had simply by eating nice hot mooli-parantha.

Science, though, offers some hope of freeing farting of the shame that taints it in Jesustan. In 1998, the eminent scientists Michael Zanakis and Philip Femano filed U.S. Patent application 09/088,006, for a fart-powered ballistic missile. Zenkis and Femano’s research enabled them to manufacture a “gas-fired missile and launcher assembly whose missile is composed of a soft head and a tail extending therefrom formed by a piston.”

“To operate the assembly,” the Zanakis-Femano patent application states, “the operator places the inlet tube with its valve open adjacent his anal region from which a colonic gas is discharged. The piston is then withdrawn to a degree producing a negative pressure to inhale the gas into the combustion chamber to intermix with the air therein to create a combustible mixture. The ignitor is then activated to explode the mixture in the chamber and fire the missile into space.”

Our unnamed Sunderland man may yet turn out to be a martyr.

Will Jesustan make spiritual, rather than merely utilitarian, peace with the fart? I doubt it. Both the Jesustani and the Desi, you see, have a deep need to feel shame. Although the Desi feels no shame at farting, his need for guilt is met by loathing his own sexuality. And although the Jesustani feels no shame at sticking things up his tailpipe, his craving for self-loathing is met by his proscription of flatulence.

Shame.

Here, stuck on a pearl-white toilet seat in the heart of Jesustan, with nary a plastic mug of water to cool my burning buttocks, I suddenly feel that I have never left home.