(from page 122 of For the Time Being)

"Sand

Earth sifts over things. If you stay still, earth buries you, ready or not. The debris on the tops of your feet or shoes thickens, windblown dirt piles around it, and pretty soon your feet are underground. Then the ground rises over your ankles and up your shins. If the segeant holds his platoon at attention long enough, he and his ranks will stand upright and buried like the Chinese emperor's army.

Micrometeorite dust can bury you, too, if you wait: A ton falls on earth every hour. Or you could pile up with locusts. At Mount Cook in Montana, at eleven thousand feet, you can see on the flank a dark layer of locusts. The locusts fell or wrecked in 1907, when a swarm flew off course and froze. People noticed the deposit only when a chunk separated from the mountain and fell into a creek, which bore it downstream.

New York City's street level rises every century. The rate at which dirt buries us varies. The Mexico City in which Cortés walked is now thirty feet underground. It would be farther underground except that Mexico City itself has started sinking. Digging a subway line, workers found a temple. Debris lifts land an average of 4.7 feet per century. King Herod the Great rebuilt the Second Temple in Jerusalem two thousand years ago; the famous Western Wall is a top layer of old retaining wall near the peak of Mount Moriah. From the present bottom of the Western Wall to bedrock is sixty feet.  

Quick: why aren't you dusting? On every continent, we sweep floors and wipe tabletops not only to shine the place, but to forestall burial.

It is interesting, the debris in the air. A surprising portion of it is spider legs, and bits thereof. Spider legs are flimsy, Oxford writer David Bodanis says, beause they are hollow. They lack muscles; compressed air moves them. Consequently, they snap off easily and go blowing about. Another unexpected source of aerial detritus is tires. Eroding tires shed latex shreds at a brisk clip, say the folks who train their microscopes on air. Farm dust joins sulfuric acid droplets (from burned fossil fuels) and sand from the Sahara Desert to produce the summer haze that blurs and dims valleys and coasts. 

We inhale "many hundreds of particles in each breath we take," says Bodanis. Air routinely carries intimate fragments of rug, dung, carcasses, leaves and leaf hairs, coral, coal, skin, sweat, soap, silt, pollen, algae, bacteria, spores, soot, ammonia, and spit, as well as "salt crystals from ocean white-caps, dust scraped off distant mountains, micro bits of cooled magma blown from volcanoes and charred microfragments from tropical forest fires." These sorts of things can add up.

At dusk the particles meet rising water vapor, stick together, and fall; that is when they will bury you. Soil bacteria eat what they can, and the rest of it stays put if there's no wind. After thirty years, there is a new inch of topsoil. (Many inches of new topsoil, however, have washed into the ocean.)

We live on dead people's heads. Scratching under a suburb of St. Louis, archaeologists recently found thirteen settlements, one of top of the other, some of which lasted longer than St. Louis has. Excavating the Combe Grenal cave in France, paleontologists found sixty different layers of human occupation.

The pleasantly lazy people of Bronze Age Troy cooperated with the burial process. Instead of sweeping garbage and litter from their floors, they brought in dirt to cover the mess and tramped it down. Soon they stooped in their rooms, so they heightened the doors and roofs for another round. Invaders, too, if they win, tend to build new floors on roofs they ruined. By the nineteenth century, archaeologists had to dig through twenty-four feet of earth to find the monuments of the Roman Forum."

A friend recently sent me a series of photographs that show the chaos in her new apartment shortly after she moved in, and then the order that she established several months later. I am struck by the contrasting energy captured in the photographs. Muffled versus resonant. Bogged down versus uplifted. Hectic versus serene.  

Before (just after the move):

After (several months later):

"It takes my mother all of a sudden toward the end of the afternoon, especially in the dry season, and then she'll have the house scrubbed from top to bottom, to clean it through, scour it out, freshen it up, she says. The house is built on a raised strip of land, clear of the garden, the snakes, the scorpions, the red ants, the floodwaters of the Mekong, those that follow the great tornados of the monsoon. Because the house is raised like this it can be cleaned by having buckets of water thrown over it, sluiced right through like a garden. All the chairs are piled up on the tables, the whole house is streaming, water is lapping around the piano in the small sitting room. The water pours down the steps, spreads through the yard toward the kitchen quarters. The little houseboys are delighted, we join in with them, splash one another, then wash the floor with the yellow soap. Everyone's barefoot, including our mother. She laughs. She's got no objection to anything."

Pippi cleans with gusto but follows her own unorthodox methods.  In her topsy turvy home, all the conventional pieties about housekeeping are turned on their head, so that cleaning becomes a fun and creative act.

Here's a sampling:

"We don't have any school today because we're having Scrubbing Vacation," said Tommy to Pippi.

"Scrubbing Vacation? Well, I like that!" said Pippi. "Another injustice! Do I get any Scrubbing Vacation? Indeed I don't, though goodness knows I need one. Just look at the kitchen floor. But for that matter," she added, "now I come to think of it, I can scrub without any vacation. And that's what I intend to do right now, Scrubbing Vacation or no Scrubbing Vacation. I'd like to see anybody stop me! You two sit on the kitchen table, out of the way."

Tommy and Annika obediently climbed up on the kitchen table, and Mr. Nilsson hopped up after them and went to sleep in Annika's lap. 

Pippi heated a big kettle of water and without more ado poured it out on the kitchen floor. She took off her big shoes and laid them neatly on the bread plate. She tied two scrubbing brushes on her bare feet and skated over the floor, plowing through the water so that it splashed all around her.

"I certainly should have been a skating princess," she said and kicked her left foot up so high that the scrubbing brush broke a piece out of the overhead light.

"Grace and charm I have at least," she continued and skipped nimbly over a chair standing in her way.

"Well, now I guess it's clean," she said at last and took off the brushes.

"Aren't you going to dry the floor?" asked Annika.

"Oh, no, it can dry in the sun," answered Pippi. "I don't think it will catch cold so long as it keeps moving."

And, from a scene at Pippi's birthday party:

When Mr. Nilsson had emptied his cup he turned it upside down and put it on his head. When Pippi saw that, she did the same, but as she had not quite drunk all her chocolate a little stream ran down her forehead and over her nose. She caught it with her tongue and lapped it all up.

"Waste not, want not," she said.

Tommy and Annika licked their cups clean before they put them on their heads.

When everybody had had enough and the horse had had his share, Pippi took hold of all four corners of the tablecloth and lifted it up so that the cups and plates tumbled over each other as if they were in a sack. Then she stuffed the whole bundle in the woodbox.

"I always like to tidy up a little as soon as I have eaten," she said.

from the novel Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson (p. 85):

I remember Sylvie walking through the house with a scarf tied around her hair, carrying a broom. Yet this was the time that leaves began to gather in the corners. They were leaves that had been through the winter, some of them worn to a net of veins. There were scraps of paper among them, crisp and strained from their mingling in the cold brown liquors of decay and regeneration, and on these scraps there were sometimes words. One read Powers Meet, and another, which had been the flap of an envelope, had a penciled message in anonymous hand: I think of you. Perhaps Sylvie when she swept took care not to molest them. Perhaps she sensed a Delphic niceness in the scattering of these leaves and paper, here and not elsewhere, thus and not otherwise. She had to have been aware of them because every time a door was opened anywhere in the house there was a sound from all the corners of lifting and alighting. I noticed that the leaves would be lifted up by something that came before the wind, they would tack against some impalpable movement of air several seconds before the wind was heard in the trees. Thus finely did our house become attuned to the orchard and to the particularities of weather, even in the first days of Sylvie’s housekeeping. Thus did she begin by littles and perhaps unawares to ready it for wasps and bats and barn swallows. Sylvie talked a great deal about housekeeping. She soaked all the tea towels for a number of weeks in a tub of water and bleach. She emptied several cupboards and left them open to air, and once she washed half the kitchen ceiling and a door. Sylvie believed in stern solvents, and most of all in air. It was for the sake of air that she opened doors and windows, thought it was probably through forgetfulness that she left them open. It was for the sake of air that on one early splendid day she wrestled my grandmother’s plum colored davenport into the front yard, where it remained until it weathered pink. 

(thanks to Paul VanDeCarr for suggesting Housekeeping)

The unpaid work that enables our roles as paid workers and consumers is “shadow work,” according to philosopher and historian Ivan Illich. Shadow work is work that must get done to sustain the life of the individual in our capitalist system, but does not itself provide for subsistence. Shadow work

…comprises most housework women do in their homes and apartments, the activities connected with shopping, most of the homework of students cramming for exams, the toil expended commuting to and from the job.  It includes the stress of forced consumption, the tedious and regimented surrender to therapists, compliance with bureaucrats, the preparation for work to which one is compelled, and many of the activities usually labeled “family life.” (Illich, Ivan, Shadow Work, p 100)

In the pre-modern era, when families lived on farms or ran cottage industries, shadow work did not exist. There was less of a distinction between work performed to maintain life and work performed for money. Cooking, cleaning, tending children, harvesting a crop, and shoeing a horse would all have been seen as contributing to a family’s subsistence. Illich points out that our current concept of “work” did not exist a few centuries ago:

Both “work” and “job” are key words today. Neither had its present prominence three hundred years ago. Both are still untranslatable from European languages into many others. Most languages never had one single word to designate all activities that are considered useful. Some languages happen to have a word for activities demanding pay. This word usually connotes graft, bribery, tax or extortion of interest payments. None of these words would comprehend what we call “work.”

For the last three decades, the Ministry for Language Development in Djakarta tried to impose the one term bekerdja in lieu of half a dozen others used to designate productive jobs. Sukarno had considered this monopoly of one term a necessary step for creating a Malay working class. The language planners got some compliance from journalists and union leaders. But the people continue to refer to what they do with different terms for pleasurable, degrading, tiresome, or bureaucratic actions – whether they are paid or not. All over Latin America, people find it easier to perform the paid task assigned to them than to grasp what the boss means by trabajo.  For most toiling unemployed in Mexico, desempleado still means the unoccupied loafer on a well-paid job, not the unemployed whom the economist means by the term.

What today stands for work, namely, wage labor, was a badge of misery all through the Middle Ages. It stood in clear opposition to at least three other types of toil: the activities of the household by which most people subsisted, quite marginal to any money economy; the trades of people who made shoes, barbered or cut stones; the various forms of beggary by which people lived on what others shared with them. In principle, medieval society provided a berth for everyone whom it recognized as a member—its structural design excluded unemployment and destitution. When one engaged in wage labor, not occasionally as the member of a household but as a regular means of total support, he clearly signaled to the community that he, like a widow or an orphan, had no berth, no household, and so stood in need of public assistance. (Illich, Ivan, Shadow Work, p 101)

 
Karl Polanyi, in The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, describes the destruction that has accompanied the move from subsistence economies to market economies:

To separate labor from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organization, an atomistic and individualistic one.
 

This effect of the establishment of a labor market is conspicuously apparent in colonial regions today. The natives are to be forced to make a living by selling their labor. To this end their traditional institutions must be destroyed, and prevented from reforming, since, as a rule, the individual in primitive society is not threatened by starvation unless the community as a whole is in a like predicament. Under the “Kraal” land system of the Kaffirs, for instance, “destitution is impossible: whosoever needs assistance receives it unquestioningly.” No Kwakiutl “ever ran the least risk of going hungry.” “There is no starvation in societies living on the subsistence margin.” The principle of freedom from want was equally acknowledged in the Indian village community, and, we might add, under almost every and any type of social organization up to about the beginning of the 16^th century Europe, when the modern ideas on the poor put forth by the humanist Vives were argued before the Sorbonne. It is the absence of the threat of individual starvation which makes primitive society, in a sense, more humane than market economy, and at the same time less economic. Ironically, the white man’s initial contribution to the black man’s world mainly consisted in introducing him to the uses of the scourge of hunger. Thus the colonists may decide to cut the breadfruit trees down in order to create an artificial food scarcity or may impose a hut tax on the native to force him to barter away his labor. In either case, the effect is similar to that of Tudor enclosures with their wake of vagrant hordes.

Now, what the white man may still occasionally practice in remote regions today, namely, the smashing up of social structures in order to extract the element of labor from them, was done in the eighteenth century to white populations by white men for similar purposes. (Chapter 14, "Market and Man")
 

As family members in the modern era began to sell their labor outside of the home, women found their sphere of work in the home devalued. In fact, it became doubtful whether keeping house counted as work at all, as evidenced by the question too often posed to American women in the late 20th century: “Do you work?”  This helps explain why so many housewives found themselves depressed over the last century, and why they struggled to gain access to employment outside the home. Illich advocates a selective return to at least partial subsistence as a way to create happier societies that are better stewards of the environment. When work does not exist to produce goods for industrial consumption, but rather to satisfy human needs, shadow work as such will no longer exist, because all useful activities, including housework, will be valued.

Thanks to my friend Ian Chang for introducing me to Ivan Illich’s Shadow Work through this New York Times  article.

An artist I interviewed for this project told me that he has an embroidered sampler that reads “A clean house is a sign of a wasted life.” I’ve spent most of my life following that philosophy. For me, disdaining housework was part of my emancipation as a woman.  I grew up in a generation where women were attaining education and entering the workforce in higher numbers than ever before.  Our freedom was freedom to do something other than child-rearing and keeping house. Yet there’s something a bit rotten in my finding liberation in disdaining the work my mother and grandmothers did. This is one of the shortfalls of women’s emancipation. We have gained the right to enter the working world, but we have not succeeded in raising the stature of the work traditionally performed by women, not even in our own minds.

That's why Mierle Laderman Ukeles' “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” is still so provocative over forty years later. In 1969, Laderman Ukeles mounted an exhibition that consisted of her cleaning and maintaining a gallery space for several weeks, asserting this care as a work of art. In the accompanying manifesto she writes, “Clean your desk, wash the dishes, clean the floor, wash your clothes, wash your toes, change the baby’s diaper, finish the report, correct the typos, mend the fence…change the sheets, go to the store…I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother (random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also (up to now separately) I “do” Art. Now I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them as Art.” 

The “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” asks us to question the paradigm that values cultural creation above the maintenance of life. Housework, child care, and elder care are still either unpaid or poorly paid work with little protection for workers. This won’t change until we begin to value the work of caring.  We can begin by valuing it in our own daily lives.

After the first few interviews, I began to think that I should gather these stories into a book, along with making the film. The stories people were sharing were rich and elaborate, and yet the film could only contain a couple of paragraphs of text for each person. I immediately thought of one of my favorite books: Working: People Talk About What They Do All Do and How They Feel About What They Do, by Studs Terkel. I wanted to do for cleaning what Studs Terkel had done for working.

When I read Working, I felt incredibly stimulated by other people's accounts of their working lives. Halfway through the book, I felt compelled to make a list of all the jobs I had ever had in my life (29 jobs in 28 years, it turns out, including several summer jobs, like "shoe salesperson," that I had almost forgotten.) Working made me want to reflect more deeply on my own daily routine of work. I sort of wanted to be interviewed myself, to have an interlocutor draw out my thoughts on the topic. But I was alone with my book; there was nobody around to ask me questions or listen to my answers.

I hope that the stories gathered here will stimulate you to reflect on your own practices and mental orientation toward cleaning. If they do, please enlarge the breadth of this discussion by sharing your stories and images on this site.

I was expecting houseguests, so my plan was to spend three or four hours in a high intensity (but not overly thorough) clean-up of the entire house. The plan quickly veered off course when I spent two solid hours scraping and scrubbing the stove. It's a beautiful, old, white enamel stove, an O'Keefe and Merritt that I've lived with for ten years. I started with my usual cursory wipe to get rid of coffee spills and crumbs. Then I noticed the waxy brown substance oozing from behind the dials. I must see that ooze all the time, but suddenly it occurred to me that it might be possible to get rid of it. Maybe this novel thought popped into my head because it's almost the New Year, and I know that new year's cleaning is a ritual in many cultures. I was also thinking about the feng shui notion that a clean stove brings prosperity. So I tried putting some vinegar on a toothbrush to see if that would dissolve the ooze. That didn't do much. Then I soaped the dials with a warm rag and followed up by digging into the crevices with a wooden skewer that I found in a drawer next to the stove. Ribbons of brown waxy stuff peeled away on the skewer. It was quite satisfying. I felt like a dental hygienist, plying my sharp implement to free the enamel from the encasing crud.

Enamel is an amazing substance. It can last for generations and clean up to look new, with a little work. I was reminded of what Jo Ann and Richard said in their interview: "We take care of things so that they last. Our folks were that way, because they lived through the 1933 Depression. Young people today tend to want to throw things out and get something new." We've been sold this bill of goods about convenience that tells us not to be bothered to scour a pot to make sure it lasts for thirty years. Instead of "wasting time" like that, we are advised to use a disposable one. It's much more convenient. It saves time. And time equals money. But the thing is, it doesn't. It's an illusion. The money it costs to buy a new one, is much more than the time it takes to care for it. If you take care of your things, it's worth it.

My dad, who also grew up during the Depression, has had pairs of shoes for thirty years, and suits for forty years. He'd pull out his shoe polish and polish those shoes, and they looked great. And he was always telling us kids that we needed to do that. But it kind of fell on deaf ears. Fortunately for me, I have had another frugal influence in my life over the last several years: my wife Colleen Hennessey. The seventh item in her Financial Manifesto is "Clean the objects you own, rather than buying more. Wanting something new is often an illusory desire. Sometimes all that is wanted is the sheen of newness, which can be achieved by cleaning the objects you already have." Come to think of it, there are a lot of old time "make it last" values in Colleen's family: Her sister Molly de Vries is on a mission to live "a non-disposable life," creating kitchen textiles that remind us of older traditions that preceded our current throw-away culture. And another of Colleen's sisters, Mikaela, sews "moon pads," menstrual pads that can be washed and used repeatedly.

I have to admit that I felt some waves of panic during the second hour of cleaning the stove, because I felt like I was going to run out of time to get all of the other cleaning done. The deep cleaning blitz started to spread out to the areas adjacent to the stove, which I now saw with a razor vision. All that oozy stuff on the wall behind the stove. The dusty ladles hanging on the wall. The grease on the hood over the stove. It all got cleaned. But I also really enjoyed the activity, and I pondered how arbitrary it is that we classify certain activities as chores, as opposed to leisure. My loving attention to the enamel stove gave me an inkling of what it must be like to spend an afternoon polishing an antique custom car. It was satisfying. It gave me time to think. And now whenever I look at the stove's gleaming surfaces, I feel good. And a little bit more ready for a new year.

Photo by Gjon Mili, from Life Magazine, September 9, 1946, originally printed with the caption, "Pattern of light streaks show how an efficient housewife makes a bed."

A couple of years ago, I ran across this photograph by Gjon Mili and stared at it for a long time. It took me a few moments to puzzle out what I was seeing. To make the image, Mili had affixed a light to a woman’s hands while she made a bed in a darkened space. Leaving the camera’s shutter open for several minutes caused all of her movements to collapse into one image. That compression of time, along with the aerial perspective, seemed to ask me to take a big step back as a viewer, to try looking afresh at something as familiar as making a bed.

The photograph stuck in my mind. I started to imagine how I could make a film that would invite viewers to take that kind of “big step back” in looking at housework.

 

It is only at a certain distance (and from a certain angle) that we can recognize the character of the communal life of the individual – or the communal reality of those who appear so convincingly under other conditions to be individuals.      – Jeff Wall

Soon I began asking people to tell me about their experiences with cleaning. I also asked them to perform some of their regular housekeeping tasks for the camera. The 91 minute film that resulted is titled MAINTENANCE. My main motivation in making the film was to have conversations about cleaning. I wanted to know how people made sense of the never-ending cycle of messing and tidying. I wanted to know whether they resented the work, the way I often do. I wanted to know what it meant in their lives. I learned a lot from these conversations, and I’ll share more thoughts about them in future posts, but for now, I want to return to that photograph by Gjon Mili that was the catalyst for the project.

Gjon Mili created the bed-making photograph in 1946 as part of a commission by Life Magazine to illustrate efficient housekeeping techniques (September 9, 1946, p.97-107). A few years later, Mili used a similar technique to make time-lapse photographs of Pablo Picasso drawing with light.

The photographs of Picasso drawing with light are familiar. They are famous representations of his virtuosic artistry, the kind of thing you find on a postcard in a museum gift shop. It’s interesting to ponder what the arcing line of light in the photograph of Picasso represents, as compared to the squiggly line of light in the photograph of the woman making the bed. Both represent movements of the hand, but the work Picasso performs is much more highly valued than the work performed by the housewife. These photographs represent two sides of a dichotomy that is deeply rooted in Western culture: creation, immortality, genius, and spirit on one side; and maintenance, the ephemeral, grunt work, and the body on the other side. Part of the purpose of this project is to explore this dichotomy, and all of the other cultural conceptions we bring to the work of keeping house.