On Cleanliness
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To be clean means many things. When there’s pee on my hands or dirt under my nails, clean means a bit of soap, a splash of water, a sharp implement like a knife or a tooth pick to get between the seams. When there’s sin or moral taint, clean means remorse, exoneration, confession, perhaps tears. Sometimes clean means sterile, so even if your skin is rosy pink or your car shines, it’s not about how it looks but what the clean sheen hides: bacteria, grubs, parasites and disease. Then there’s the figurative sense, like lushes giving up the sauce, addicts who shun the needle, or a politician who declines a bill to line his pocket—these people are, yes, clean.
The clean that means the most to me is the clean that is void of moral taint. Perhaps it is because of some latent Catholic guilt, passed down from my father through my genes, a parcel or packet of obsession, time-released…waiting. When I was a kid I didn’t like to get in trouble, but I did a hell of a lot of mean things. I tripped this girl up, not by accident, when I was in the first grade. I kind of liked her, but I was shy. She ran by, I put out my leg, and down went the girlie right on her face. Needless to say she was hurt, perhaps hurt deep, for I’d never said a word to her and it must have seemed like an arbitrary action that could only have been motivated by hate. But maybe, and I say maybe not because I’m unsure as to what my intentions were at the time, but because in retrospect (think genes here, and capsules of self-hatred…time released) it could have been less about wanting to sneak a touch, less about trying to hurt someone who wouldn’t give me the time of day, but maybe, just maybe, it was to exorcise a part of myself I truly did hate.
And what part was that, if not lust? Perhaps love? Or maybe it was to reaffirm that there was something unclean, something wrong with the way I was feeling. Some say to cure poison you must take poison, and by poison be purged. Perhaps I could have simply burned or cut myself, and by pain felt cleansed, by fire purified. But I’ve never been that dramatic, except when sterilizing a needle to prick a blister, or when cleaning out a deep wound (the harder you scrub the less it’ll fester). Usually, though, I tend to take showers, make my outside shine and shimmer, so that whatever I feel is the state of my inner self, my soul perhaps, or perhaps my conscience, at least the juxtaposition will serve to shame, point a way out of blaming myself and towards making the inside better, more bearable, cleaner.
If you were ever to take a look—perhaps a long look—at the way in which I live, you’d think cleanliness a seldom-executed chore, a reluctantly done duty. My room usually tends towards disarray. There are several piles of clothes scattered around, an overfull ashtray or two, a phalanx of beer cans periodically dotted with tall and empty plastic water bottles like generals overseeing a battlefield. It is like a battlefield, but after a battle’s been fought; so no heroism is to be expected, no further action involved, aside from (and I could be wrong) a general clean-up effort, to bury the bodies of the dead, or maybe to plant gouges in the earth with appropriate seeds, perhaps clean up the ashes and distribute them to a favorable wind.
So my room is dirty, but my body is consistently clean. So my soul is a mess, but at least my hair’s parted, I don’t need a shave, there’s deodorant in my pits and there’s no scum on my teeth. Cleanliness feels good both for spirit and body because it’s easy to do and an easily measurable feat. When I was a kid and I’d wash my body (reluctantly at the time, but children love being dirty) I’d note with awe how the rivulets running down my legs were of an incredible brown color, as if the pigmentation of my skin were being washed clean away, as if a layer of pristine white would replace my brownish-yellowish hue. Getting out of the shower was a little disappointing because no transformation would ever take place: I’d merely be me, still yellowish-brown, just clean, not dirty. But in time, in the dirt I’d see spiral down the drain, there was a little of the shit of me in it, a little of the unsavory part, the unclean, spiraling down into that water-glutted abyss, a drowning of sin much more effective than any baptism could ever be.
I grew up and realized that no moral taint can easily be showered away. But it still felt good to shower every day. It gets you up, gets you awake. You can face the day much better after a shower: if it’s cold, you feel slightly warmer, if hot, you don’t feel sticky, if hungover, you at least don’t look it, if depressed…well, at least you’re clean.
What would it mean to be truly clean? To have been born pure and to have, to this day, been able to retain that purity? It would probably be like being a cat—they’re always cleaning themselves (and they certainly have no moral dilemmas). So you’d be a bit inhuman, but what’s wrong with that? I wouldn’t feel like shit about doing someone a half-harm, I wouldn’t feel like shit about thinking bad thoughts about people: I wouldn’t feel like shit because feel like shit is a phrase that originates from the feeling of dirtiness, of moral culpability. You feel like what? Like the brown smudge at the bottom of the bowl, the feeding ground for flies, disease and bacteria and viruses, the seat of all bad smells.
So we can’t be truly clean--cleanliness is an ideal. Like god. Perhaps that’s why I’ve taken to not showering some mornings, spilling beers on purpose all over my bedroom floor, on my bed, scattering cigarette ash in my more frustrated moments, missing the toilet when I pee so the smell seeps in and sticks and stinks. I’ve ceased to care about being clean or cleanliness in general, and maybe it’s because there’s no possibility of being really clean. Or maybe it’s because I don’t like being a Dorian Gray, fine on the outside, riddled with dirty guilt within…eternally stained. Or maybe it’s because I just like being dirty, that I find it conforms to our more natural state.
There will never be a time when we will be cleansed of one another, say, because we leave an indelible mark on the world, like my hands leak sweat and dirt on white pages, like my feet leave bad smells and flakey skin on once clean floors, like my anger and rage color my impressions of every passing face. So we’ll never be clean because we’re all walking piles of dirt, so perhaps clean should be taken out of the language, it’s too big in its implications to really carry any worth. Though, the same could be said about dirt.
—SS