On Cleaning

I recently took the time to clean my house. I dusted and wiped, swept and mopped. I cleaned the glass in the windows, and the glass in the mirrors. I scrubbed the tile behind the kitchen counter. Although this may seem quite common, like something that would normally happen on a weekly basis, it is not quite so common as all that! I moved into this place some six months previous and had yet to mount such a thorough and gratifying assault.

It felt good.

I have never read any of Henri Bosco’s novels, but his work is constantly referenced in Gaston Bachelard’s book, The Poetics of Space. In that text, Bachelard remarks on a passage of Bosco’s in which a housewife is cleaning an old house. She is polishing the wood, slowly, carefully, sensually. Bosco says of it that “this was the creation of an object,” or as Bachelard rephrases the sentiment, “the housewife awakens furniture that was asleep.” Creating, awakening: aren’t these beautiful ways to talk about cleaning? And that’s indeed how it felt to me, moving about my house with my dust rag and broom. It was as if shifting my care from object to object was at the very least an act of discovery if not creation. With my eyes and my hands I was exploring dimensions of the house that had hither-to been practically foreign to me, even if I saw them or was in contact with them everyday.

While Bachelard’s translator used the word housewife, I believe the more politically correct term is actually ‘home-maker’. This takes on an interesting additional level of depth in this context. While I always thought the phrase was a bit silly, seen in this light, I like it very much. I like to think of the home-maker transforming a house into a home through their care. I like to think of ‘care’ (in the sense of the sort of love that St Exupery alludes to in The Little Prince) as having that sort of power of metamorphosis. I like to think that care has the power to transform the world and even to connect us to it. Indeed, another way of speaking about this genesis of the world that takes place in care and attention, like how the housewife makes furniture by cleaning it, is by saying that care has the capacity to ground us existentially. Cleaning, in its requirement of close attention, repetitive movement, and, well, the slowing down that it asks of us, can really bring us into the present moment. It can, if we allow it, connect us to our place in time and space, a connection that can seem to get lost in the hurried business of our lives.

What Bachelard means when he likens the act of cleaning to making is that it makes it real for us. It brings it closer to us, and us closer to it. How often I’ve missed out on the potential of this kind of activity by rushing through a task. In the right frame of mind, as the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn has written, “even washing dishes after a big meal can be a joy.” I often just race through the process of scrubbing dishes, thinking about something else. Nhat Hahn actually recommends these sorts of tasks as meditational exercises.

And yet we’re constantly inventing machines to do these things for us, like the new breed of carpet cleaning robots. It is as if cleaning was somehow below us. I mean, as if vacuuming wasn’t already a pretty easy task, now you can buy a robotic device that will roam around your house, avoiding objects and pets with a built in sensor, cleaning up your dirt for you. Similarly, they’ve recently invented a robot that will clean your windows for you too. It’s a spider-like thing that suctions onto your window and moves around it, cleaning as it goes. These devices are primarily designed to save you time and effort which you could be expending on more important things. I mean, that’s the basic principle of the division of labour . . . if you can afford a cleaning robot, then your time and energy would be better spent on some other activity. I can’t help but feel though that in sacrificing daily activities we lose out on something important. Home-making, the phenomenal genesis of our home (our symbolic grounding-place), are we not also sacrificing this? In relying on these tools to do the work for us, are we not sacrificing an important aspect of our relationship with our home?

But pointing just at the tools here is a bit dishonest. The wedge driven between us and our environment by our disinterest in caring for it is only part of a larger problem. The cleaning machines are there to clear up time and effort for other purposes, in which case the question becomes how we actually spend our extra time and effort. Do we do something equally worthwhile? If we don’t, then the desire for these sorts of cleaning machines seems awfully like laziness. The immense rush forward often seems largely without a clear purpose.
Nhat Hahn’s take on Zen Buddhism offers guidance in reclaiming the mundane:

Washing dishes is at the same time a means and an end – that is, not only do we do the dishes in order to have clean dishes, we also do the dishes to live fully in each moment while washing them . . . we do not have to be swept along by circumstances. We are not just a leaf or a log in a rushing river. With awareness, each of our daily acts takes on a new meaning, and we discover that we are more than machines, that our activities are not just mindless repetitions.

While it is not necessary that our machines rob us of this awareness, the impulse that leads to the creation and acquisition of cleaning machines stands out starkly against Nhat Hahn’s comments, and I think it is a stark contrast that is worth noting.

If our cleaning of the floor is already mechanical – if we are elsewhere and our body is performing tasks rather than doing them – then there is little difference between this and a machine doing the cleaning for us. However, if we treated such ‘small’ tasks as somehow of existential importance, as Nhat Hahn and Bachelard would suggest, then we would truly lose out by letting a machine take over.