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. Read the rest of this entry »