by Lei Wang
I have often been envious of how characters in stories don’t seem to need to do dishes or laundry or buy groceries, except when it serves their story, like a meet-cute at the farmer’s market or perhaps a juicy conflict between two in-laws over the most efficient way to load the dishwasher. Otherwise, in novels and TV but especially in short stories and movies, the refrigerator fills itself and even eating is an afterthought: food is for pleasure, not necessity.
The boring things of life are given the ax, or no one would watch; imagine a maximalist reality show, each episode 24 hours long, corresponding exactly to a day in the life of someone that you play alongside your own life, minute by minute. Even if it were your favorite celebrity, would you really want to accompany them as they sleep for seven hours? I suppose there are such dedicated viewers out there and also such dedicated livestreams, like Firefox’s red panda web cams. I remember years ago coming across a crowdfunding campaign by a European twenty-something who decided to reduce his carbon footprint by sleeping or otherwise staying in his room all day. He was asking for money in order to do nothing, to contribute as little to the world as possible, and prove it via the most boring livestream. If I remember correctly, he had quite a few patrons—if only for the novelty of the idea.
What are the boring bits of life? Sleep, except for dreams. Chores. The things we have to do, and the things we do again and again and again. Life seems to be a constant battle against entropy, and we are losing. “I don’t identify as transgender… I identify as tired,” said Hannah Gadbsy in the comedy special Nanette. Don’t we all. This was the true punishment of Sisyphus: not the moving of the boulder or even the futility of it, but the day-in, day-outness of it all. We just showered yesterday and our hair is greasy already. The kitchen sink was empty a moment ago, but now there are no forks. The dog needs to be walked, again. Why can’t there be a pet that truly eats one’s garbage?
In The Quotidian Mysteries, a book on the mystical aspects of laundry and other domestic tasks, Kathleen Norris writes of how she found her way back to Catholicism through an Irish-American wedding in which, after the ceremony was over, she watched the priest doing dishes. “In that big, fancy church, after all of the dress-up and the formalities of the wedding mass, homage was being paid to the lowly truth that we human beings must wash the dishes after we eat and drink,” she wrote. “The chalice, which had held the very blood of Christ, was no exception. And I found it enormously comforting to see the priest as a kind of daft housewife, overdressed for the kitchen, in bulky robes, puttering about the altar, washing up after having served so great a meal to so many people.” She couldn’t quite understand the service, but she could understand eating, drinking, and housework.
Sacred is something that is “set apart” from the ordinary; something is sacred because it is not meant to be ordinary. But to treat an ordinary task as extraordinary is also to stand out from the ordinary.
“Whatsoever you do can become creative,” said the crazy wisdom guru Osho. “Cleaning a floor can be a tremendously creative act. Creativity means enjoying any work as meditation; doing any work with deep love. If you love me and you clean this auditorium, it is creative. If you don’t love me, then of course it is a chore, it is a duty to be done somehow, it is a burden. Then you would like some other time to be creative. What will you do in that other time? Can you find a better thing to do? Are you thinking that if you paint, you will feel creative? But painting is just as ordinary as cleaning the floor. Here you are washing the floor, cleaning the floor. What is the difference?”
One can imagine a nun who imagines, as she sweeps the abbey, that she is cleaning God’s nostrils: an intimate act. She wants to be thorough and yet respectful; she doesn’t want to make God sneeze (or maybe she likes to be provocative). A friend of mine likes to wash dishes at her friends’ houses; it is her act of love. Meanwhile, the dishes pile up at hers. When I did them for her the other day, it felt easier than doing my own, perhaps because then it was a favor, not a chore. But doing our own dishes is still doing them as a kindness to someone else who would have to do them anyway: one of our future selves.
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water, the Buddhists say: and the same after enlightenment. The outside looks utterly the same, and yet the inside is completely different.
How does the priest feel washing the cup of what he considers to be Christ’s blood? How does he wash a cup at home? Does he pretend sometimes it’s a chalice too, and why not? Children enjoy “playing house,” such that they sell miniature sinks, miniature dishes, miniature messes to clean up–and they often love to play the same things again and again. G.K. Chesterton writes of children: “They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. Perhaps God is strong enough… it is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon.”
When does play turn into work? And how can we make the opposite happen? “Putting the kitchen to bed,” a friend calls washing the dishes at night—a tender act.
Marie Kondo made millions of dollars because she transformed decluttering into an art. “The life-changing magic of tidying up” wasn’t just a clever bit of marketing; she really believed it was a spiritual act, it was magic. Sparks, or no sparks? By asking people to pay attention on the inside for an action on the outside, she gave purpose and meaning to throwing things away.
I can’t remember which probably cheesy self-help book I read this in now, but one of them told a story about a factory in which workers glued pieces of black and white resin to small blocks of wood. When asked what they did, most of the workers replied as such: “I’m gluing these bits to wood.” But the best worker of the bunch, by far, said, “I’m making pianos.” And she was. So were the rest of them, but it is easy to forget. In this case, it was a neat nugget of capitalist motivation, but what is it that we are really doing in the bigger picture?
Yes, the hair needs to be washed, again and again, the elbows constantly reintroduced to lotion. We just put the mugs away, and how come, again? In the fight against entropy, we are like the sharks that must not stop swimming in order to breathe. But each time we take care of something, we are making inside the infinite chaos a tiny nest. How is that not magic?
I believe this, even as I neglect the dust gathering on my floors. Perhaps I am just waiting for the bunnies to appear. Whoever came up with dust bunnies—and villakoira (poodle wools) in Finnish, gatti di polvere (dust cats) in Italian, and Wollmause (wool mice) in German—was someone who made housework into a creative act. I imagine the same for the domestic mystic who invented tea leaf divination. If prophesizing can be done with tea leaves, why not dirty dishes?
My therapist says she asks herself, “In what way am I the dream of my ancestors?” The existence of Roombas, surely. Of refrigerators and air-conditioners, of washing machines, of delivery. In some near future, supermarkets may become obsolete. Already, there are the refrigerators that notice your habitual consumption and automatically order your favorite Greek yogurt (or let’s be honest, butter pecan ice cream) when you’re low. I imagine a time in which grocery shopping is only for fun, like people who forage nowadays in the forests; we have moved on, so now foraging is not a necessity, a chore, but an art. Someone I know doesn’t use his dishwasher for the dishes because “they lack that handwashed quality”—the avant-garde, artisanal unsqueakiness.
What if we pretended we are already living in the future, now? What if we learned that the Sahara desert is the largest source of dust in the whole world, such that our dust bunnies are hopelessly exotic? Or remember that it is dust that causes the beauty of sunrise or sunset—dust in the atmosphere that absorbs the blue and green light so we can see the red and orange? This is not even imagination, just science.
The Duchamp toilet wasn’t just about seeing that one toilet as modern art; it could be about seeing all toilets as such.
Once, at the end of a meditation retreat, when participants were assigned tasks to get the retreat in order for the next cohort, I was given the worst job of all. This was not a luxurious retreat; the main meditation center was still being built, so it was a temporary affair that felt more like a rough campsite, buildings with ruffled tin roofs and a series of outhouses that grew all manner of mold. My job was to clean the moldy outhouses, which I had avoided as much as possible all retreat. And yet because the hours of meditation had done their magic by the end, I did this distasteful job with joy. Wasn’t mold just another lifeform? And didn’t it make such interesting shapes and colors against the cracked yellow tile? Because I was paying so much attention to cleaning the actual toilet, I was not imagining the job was beneath me, and so I did not resist it. I was not living in my mind.
This is a column on imagining, and yet there are dangers to imagining. All the demands of ordinary life—the menial and the mundane, words that simply mean “householdly,” “worldly”—are so demanding in part because we use the imagination too much, and in the wrong direction. That is, we weave stories with our minds that make the reality of the household and the world worse.
So when we see a messy home, a dirty pile of laundry, dishes in the sink, we are often not looking at them for what they are: just shapes against other shapes, really, just entropy at work. Instead, we are seeing not just the objects but an inconsiderate partner, a disobedient child, a lazy self. We dread the thought of putting it all back together, and what’s the use anyway? It’ll just fall apart again. But if you really looked at the laundry—if you could see not just what needed to be done but a soft mountain of colors and textures, the socks just so—could it be art to you?
Could it be, to me? I am remembering how the basket in the closet is full again. I am forever trying to figure out the tricks to life because I am one of those people who identify as tired. I remember, too, that I don’t have to do anything. I could have a dirty house, and it doesn’t have to mean anything about me at all. Still, the wool mice are waiting. So are the dishes, which my past self was not nice enough to do for me, but I suppose I can be the bigger person.