Codex of the Synapse: Folio C2.3
Toilets as Portals: The Profane and the Sacred
"Through me the way that runs among the lost....." ~ Dante, Inferno: Canto III;2
Strangers
to the Synapse often express surprise, even indignation, at the
proliferation of toilets, or toilet-images, they find within it.
It seems strange at first that such a sacred task - preserving
the structural integrity of the Continuum - should be consigned
to a vessel so inherently profane. Yet The Synapse depends on
portals, and the toilet is perhaps the most intimate portal we
possess. It is our private oblivion, and whatever we send through
its gates is knowingly banished irrevocably from our familiar
domain.
Through ordinary doors we casually pass and return, pass and return. Through habitual use, such doors become invisible, impotent and meaningless as portals. The rooms they connect become fused into one homogeneous place. By contrast, the "room" beyond the toilet's threshold, is never brooched, thus never conflated with the room before it. Passage is one-way, obscure, and eternal, a likely route to the Underworld, or to the place between worlds.
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