need

Having never in my life walked down it prior to last October, I now walk down Mortimer Street in central London maybe six times a week, because the bookstore where I work is, ridiculously, located there. It runs through Fitzrovia, from Regent Street east towards Tottenham Court Road, becoming Goodge Street halfway down. What that means is: it’s fancy. There’s not a corner shop or supermarket to be found. The post office/Ryman combo only sells multipacks of basic stationery designed to be expensed by offices. Try to find a bottle of water, a non-Pret sandwich, a sewing kit, a stepladder, sanitary towels or a single Sharpie: you’re shit out of luck.

But should you be higher up on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, well: there it is. Maslow’s at Mortimer House, a member’s co-working space ‘inspired by Abraham Maslow’s theory of human motivation and happiness… cater[ing] to both professional ambition and personal fulfilment.’ The lowest level of membership, access for five working days per month, costs £300. Per month, per person. Renting meeting rooms is extra. Eating is extra. 

You can walk past something hundreds of times and not notice it, because it’s not what you’re looking for. Because you’re not walking with a poet. I was with my friend Theo and language was dancing around us. For once, I wasn’t working or thinking about what I needed for the next day’s work (a Sharpie, a stepladder, a sewing kit, a sandwich, a sanitary towel). I was present, with a friend, walking into a strangely strong evening breeze (generated, I know, by the ferocious heat island of central London with its buildings and traffic), heading off to hear music. To listen, intently, as Meshell Ndegeocello sang the words of James Baldwin. 

And so, attuned, I saw it, was paused by it, the sign: MASLOW’S. With its ‘science-backed wellness programming’, its holistic approach to work as happiness, to happiness as work. 

Its hierarchy. 

Its absolute non-necessity.

*

I was already thinking about the word and concept of need because I’d been thinking about toilets; and writing poems about toilets. Or rather, being assailed by poems about toilets that demanded to be written, despite having no plans to write poems about toilets.

Assailed is a strange word for a creative practice, and it’s over-dramatic. Perhaps also over-dramatic if used for being called ‘disgusting’ by a customer horrified by there being all-gender toilets at a small indie theatre. Language is violence, but is it really that violent? Part of the question is the relief that it was only linguistic violence, an awareness of the constant threat of physical assault for trans, non-binary, genderfluid and gender non-conforming people using the loo.

In Bad Language (out now from Peninsula Press), I write about the strange entanglement of pissing, digesting and talking, that:

In humans, speech emerges as an amplification and shaping of breath in the flexible cavities of the respiratory system, which is intermingled with the digestive system from the orifices in our heads down through our thoraces to our bellies. So, it makes embodied sense that speaking out can literally feel like food or bile coming back up from our stomachs. It’s not a metaphor or all in your head: it’s one system where everything important happens.

We rarely think of speech as being intrinsically embodied because EW [Eurowestern] dominance culture associates language-making with cerebrality, and it also hates bodies. Transphobes are not toilet police by accident: toilets, and particularly public toilets, are a reminder that we are needful bodies, and that we articulate ourselves from those bodies. The need to pee is associated with being in-fans and lying down, with having failed to enter into the EW discipline of being upright and uptight. The rights to equity of evacuation and equity of expression are bound up sociologically as well as biologically, recognising the pee in speech. In a very real sense, a lack of accessible, inclusive, safe and free toilets prevents equity of expression because it removes people – disabled people, trans people, poor people – from public life.

This is what makes peeing, and insisting on our right to pee, such an effective and mischievous protest against dominance.

I wrote and rewrote this passage not only to ensure I was expressing its political and somatic significance, but to persuade my editor to let me include that pun of ‘the pee in speech’, and a lead in to a favourite quotation from Ursula K. Le Guin’s fiction, from the short story ‘The Day Before the Revolution’ [available at The Anarchist Library], when the ageing anarchist Odo remembers, as a younger woman, pissing on a brass plaque in the central square.

What I’ve found myself thinking about, continuously, is toilets. Toilet anarchism, maybe. Or rather, that toilets are a distraction; a sanitisation. Thinking about toilets is thinking about architecture, plumbing, health and safety. It’s business. It’s the privatisation of pissing and other bodily needs. It’s a hierarchy. There are queues and etiquettes, and everything is white, from the porcelain to the paper to (often) the paintwork. No bloody handprints here, please. No evidence you’re a living body with needs.

Excretion is the last need listed on the classic pyramidal diagram derived from Abraham Maslow’s 1943 paper ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’. ‘Breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion’ reads the lowest-level of the pyramid, labelled as physiological. Despite 30 years’ of bookseller training, I do still need to piss and shit more frequently than I have sex, and given the possibility of serious consequences when it’s prevented, deterred or blocked, I’d move excretion higher up the list. There’s been a lot of critique written about the pyramid scheme – sorry, structure – and the highly Eurowestern idea of a hierarchy that places embodiment at the bottom and higher-order thinking at the top, while including both property and propriety within the second rung of safety. 

It’s safe to say that neither holistic workspaces nor wellness appear on Maslow’s hierarchy, and nor does that poisonous little word ‘dignity’ – although there is respect by others and respect for others in the second-highest level (esteem). Perhaps someone could tell transphobes. If you haven’t been following the brouhaha caused by the incoherent, insulting, unworkable and (according to the Lemkin Institute) genocidal EHRC Code of Practice on excluding trans people from public life, it moots a specious ‘dignity’ rather than equal access to resources as what service providers should offer trans people while checking their documents and genitals before they can use the toilet. What ‘dignity’ seems to mean in this transphobic legal and political discourse is ‘denial of embodied existence’. Of its complexity, for sure, but actually of it in itself. ‘Dignity’ means not having a body.

Not respect but respectability politics. You can be trans in public as much as you want as long as you don’t have a body. As long as that body has no needs, not even the foundational one of existing.

*

Writing in the Guardian (US! the non-transphobic edition!), Imogen Binnie beautifully identifies being oneself in one’s body as a trans person as a need: ‘That need’, she writes, ‘was an internal, invisible Rube Goldberg machine of truths, fears and Do Not Enter signs, impenetrable and as ignored as possible.’ 

Internal as in thought, dream, spirit, sure; but also internal as in organs, as in cells. Our mitochondrial, microbiotic workings are as mysterious to most of us as those of the unconscious, on a second-by-second basis, and even to biomedical science, their functions and functioning – particularly the holistic connections between different internal organic systems, and between those systems and our mentation – are imperfectly understood. Being trans, like pissing, is a need: an internal pressure system. You can ignore it as long as possible by clenching; by taking short, shallow breaths; by numbing yourself out; by not feeding your thirst or hunger. It is a hunger, a thirst, a desire; it is safety, respect, creativity, facts, breathing: there’s no hierarchy of need.

*

Need itself makes a nonsense out of the idea of hierarchy – of needs, and of those whose needs are recognised and met and those whose needs are denied and replaced with ‘dignity’ or death.

Because at root, what need means is death. Confusingly, the Old English for this is nē-, nēo- (which led me to learn the origin of orc from orc-nēas, walking dead; another way in which orcs mirror and invert those inveterate walkers, the hobbits). It looks like Latinate words associated with new and with life. The Old English forms of need [nēoð] that meant lack also got blurred into a near homophone nēod, which means desire, earnestness, zeal, pleasure (as in needful). The OED adds ‘In Old English the word [need] shows variation both in form and gender’, with the feminine form of arising from the fusion with the near homophone that means desire. There’s something Freudian to say here about the confusion of lack and pleasure, of death and desire, variation in form and gender, inevitably. But let’s take it as said.

What matters is this. A need is something that will kill you if it’s not met. From late Old English until late in the Age of Empire, ‘at a need’ meant a time of necessity or emergency; a crisis. A moment when the whole matter of life and death was understood; and in being understood, perhaps addressed. It’s telling when it stopped being used, even poetically. When needs – of the body, of the community, of the ecology – were ruthlessly, brutally suppressed in favour of, ah yes, dignity, respectability and hierarchy. And money, of course, with which you can’t even any longer (at least in the UK) wipe your arse or light a fire.  

There is no hierarchy of needs. Need is our shared condition, the place where mutual aid springs and circulates and sustains.

*

Sometimes I do feel that my body, with all its pressing, constant and persistent needs, is a corpse that I carry around with me, already walking-dead. What makes it feel that way is shame. The need to pee, to shit, to bleed, to vomit, to sweat, to deal with hot flashes that make my feet hot enough to fry an egg on. To breathe despite pollution and pollen and panic. To move safely despite vehicles and climate crisis and the inimical structure of capitalist urbanism. To be in pain as little as possible, despite my body not fitting within normative standards of design (I’m too short for every adult-sized seat in existence, which fucks my already-dysplasic hip even worse). 

The need to ask for help. To ask for my needs to be met. To experience the risk of being denied, mocked, removed, even assaulted. The roots of the shame – or is that fear – go deep, because these bodily needs begin in infancy, when we are absolutely dependent for their meeting on adult carers. When we are all need. 

And sometimes, as my own adult carer for my adult self, I am also too tired or grumpy or ashamed or afraid to meet the needs of my own body; to open up that Rube Goldberg machine and look at its workings, and honour them with curiosity, respect and tenderness. I too have absorbed the hierarchy that puts capital’s self-actualisation up top, with respectability and morality a close second. I, too, press ‘dignity’ upon myself: wait, hold it together, hold it in, be less needy, be less of a body.

Some of that is structural: I can’t, by myself, solve the problems of modern design, or binary bathrooms, both because I don’t have the practical knowledge or capability to build my own chairs or bathrooms everywhere I go, and because they are constrained by the same systemic exclusions and oppressions, the same hierarchy of whose-needs. They are constrained by the built-up environment and its respectability politics, the insistence that everything we do goes through the system, through the industrial capitalist solution. When a bear shits in the woods, there’s no sign on the toilet door, because there’s no toilet. When a bear sits on a log, it can choose one of a comfortable height.

This isn’t about Goldilocks and bears that live in houses and eat porridge. It’s about Baloo and the bear necessities of life. 

Thinking through need bring us close to all the beings with which we are entangled, all the beings whose needs – physiological, social, psychological – are suppressed and destroyed by colonial capitalism. The need to grow, to roam, to flourish. Breath, water, food, excretion, temperateness, making new life, caring for continuing life, connection within and across species, generativity, expansiveness, movement. If need means a lack of something and its urgency, then need is not greed but humility and help, because understanding and recognising a need in ourselves – the depth of it, the press of it, the reality of it – means acknowledging it in each other, and doing what we can to address, not repress, it.

If need means death or corpse at root, perhaps one thing we can take from that is that is that it means a life that was valued and lost, a body that matters and has presence on this earth. Fuck the death drive. Enough with hierarchy. Let’s be each other’s need.