Cleaning Rituals II

Clean Graffiti

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post, Cleaning Rituals I. Let’s make a distinction between types of cleaning:

Physical cleanSing. Mikvas, baptisms, exorcisms, even “ethnic cleansing.” The idea is not to clean so much as to purify. The thing that needs to be eliminated is the physical manifestation of some moral or spiritual obstacle to purity. I went to a mikva one time, in Israel, when i was sixteen. I don’t remember anything about it. It would be nice to think that it was some kind of transformative experience that brought me closer to appreciate the religion I was raised with. But, like every other experience designed for that purpose, it wasn’t.

Every single result on the first page of a google search for “cleansing” is about colon cleansing.

Spiritual cleanSing. Often accompanied by, but not the same as, physical cleansing. Confessions, acts of contrition, acts of redemption, acts of forgiveness. Hamlet couldn’t kill Polonius because he was praying, and therefore in a state of grace, and would go to heaven. Harvey Keitel ends up in a state of grace at the end of Bad Lieutenant, and so does Sean Penn in, well, State Of Grace. Part of the problem with attaining a state of grace is that you have to be ready to die. Which might be part of the reason that it’s something we see so often in fiction: we want to vicariously experience it more than we want to actually experience it. A high school principal had a Santeria cleansing ritual performed on the school, complete with chicken blood. They make those janitors work way too hard. Also, I knew a guy who is a Santeria saint. He runs a video store in east Los Angeles. He’s a dick. Cleaning in the traditional sense of the word. Water and sometimes soap, brooms and maybe mops, used to remove dirt and dust. In other words, the removal of the dust that signifies our mortality from the places that constitute our vitality: our homes, our faces, our sexual organs. We remind ourselves that we are not ready to rot.

Cleaning in the modern sense of the word. The elimination of bacteria and natural body odors. Spotless kitchens and bathrooms. Shaved faces, armpits, legs, and genitals. In other words, the removal of those aspects of life that indicate our mortality less directly: our need to eat, drink, piss, shit, and reproduce. We do those things, because we have to. And then, as quickly and efficiently as possible, we clean up all indicators that we did them. It was Louis Pasteur who pioneered the idea of “germs.” He was, for a while, generally seen as a hypochondriac lunatic (at least according to the movie with Paul Muni that is apparently not available on DVD, even though it won three Oscars). Pasteur’s argument that making something look clean was not the same as making it actually clean seemed counter-intutive and silly. Maybe he had such a hard time because he was creating yet another whole concept of cleanliness: not clean as in washed, not clean as in pure, but clean as in everything living that touches the object in question has either been removed, or been boiled to death. You know, like a lobster.

Aesthetic cleaning. Organizing, arranging. The reduction of clutter. The metaphor of a clear mind played out and then reflected back to make the mind clearer. Here’s what happens when my apartment gets dirty, and cluttered, and full of junk that reminds me of my mortality and other problems. I decide that I have to “clean” in every major sense described above. But I don’t know where to begin, or where to end. Do I start by scrubbing the floors, or organizing the books, or throwing away the draft of a screenplay I wrote ten years ago that has taken up space everywhere I’ve lived since? Which would make me happier faster: elminiating bacteria, or clutter? And what about all the in-between objects: a small philips screwdriver, an unmatched power adapter, a recipe book that came with my immersion mixer and actually looks pretty cool…

…but not cool enough for me to ever actually make the recipes…

…but I might someday.

(Unfortunatey, the book is so small that if I put it with my other recipe books, it will quickly get buried and lost.)

WikiHow has a nice, if unfortunately short, article on “how to perform a cleaning ritual.”

clean graffiti image by givepeasachance

clean coal image by A Siegel