The Hagiography of Clean

What is the operation “to clean”, and where does its inherent virtuousness spring from? If in cleaning something is made uglier, is it still cleaned?

In anonymous suburban America, a kind and cheerful twenty-thirty-something makes content about cleaning up people’s driveways. There may be several of these guys. I wouldn’t know – the formula is the same. The hours and minutes dissolve away in a satisfying fast-forward dance.

What was once a grassy verge now reveals yellow cragged concrete. The archaeologist perfectly frames the body of Lazarus, cutting away the grass at edges to form a neat line of exposed soil I know now is called “edging”.

The big reveal – the house’s residents are surprised there was ever anything there beneath that grass. Clean of moss and the occasional fleck of grass, the driveway paints a stark contrast to the lawn either side that is positively calligraphic, like the strokes of black ink a master leaves on white paper.

I watch back the reveal and the residents’ words sit uncomfortably as I digest them. The expressions are hard to make out with the camera placed at this distance. There is some surprise in their voices, but, whether I project it or not, I feel a distinct twinge of apprehension buried under appearances being kept up. I can’t help but feel the question burning in them as it does me. Is this better?

It’s cleaner.

Is that better?

Newton or someone like that once said that all closed systems must become more entropic – more disordered over time.

It feels right to imagine that to clean is our attempt at the reverse of this operation. The messy room mires the mind. The brain cannot reduce the colours and the shapes. A loose cloth can be just that, or it could be hiding the pen I’ve been looking for all damn week. Psychic energy is expended as I process my writing-paper having fallen off the sofa onto the tray from yesterday’s breakfast.

But reversing this is surely not simply as much as returning to what once was. Few want the tree back as a sapling. A trim, perhaps. But what cleaning is to cut down, and what cleaning is to trim the grass?

Is it always the cleaning itself that heals us, or can it be the knowledge that we are now clean? If it was enough to have undone the day’s dirt a bath would be simply a worse way to achieve what you can do with a shower.

All that is to say there is an undeniable therapeutic effect to cleaning which goes beyond undoing what has been done. But that also especially in more extreme forms, cleaning comes with the risk of losing what we might have wanted to preserve whether we realised it at the time or not.

Pristine white walls and grey empty countertops are an externalisation of that kind of therapy to me, with similar drawbacks. A blank wall is free from the entropy of the past, but also free from what became of the past we may have enjoyed in the present. It saves us from having to confront what of the past we wanted to keep. The past is undone regardless, and the present is freed of its baggage – both good and bad.

I think that cleaning is a form of construction. My dissatisfaction from my driveway-by-proxy becoming clean stems from my dissatisfaction with what it became:

We often believe, as the power-washers do, that what is cleaned is simply better. Occasionally we are confronted with the reality that we are doing more than curing the future — of the past and find ourselves confused by the present we have constructed. The raccoon dips its candy floss in water expecting it to come out better, but instead it is gone.

I don’t want this understood as an anti-clean analysis. During the pandemic, I picked up a real penchant for long baths and nice soaps on difficult days and I’m still that person today.

Conversely, I’ve found happiness in the realisation that when I tidy my home, my goal isn’t an empty table, but an ordered one. I used to move my pen into my desk-drawer where I would lose it. Now, it has its own place in a little wooden holder on my desk.

I hope that when you decide to clean, or not to, you ask what change it makes and what that change means to you.

Thomas