keeping house

sensuality, cleaning, and louise glück.

If you try hard enough, there’s a type of eroticism for every way of existing. Good erotics, evil erotics, exhausted and energetic erotics, independent and dependent erotics, controlled and hedonistic erotics; so on, so forth. It all comes down to power. To some degree, we’ve always been societally aware that power and sex are intertwined, whether it’s through the commonly quoted “everything is about sex except for sex, which is about power”¹ or songs about sexual attraction having the artist in some sort of sway. One could even argue that death— notoriously attached to sensuality by Georges Bataille— operates under a similar schemata of power, as death is the only thing that humans haven’t yet learned to defy.

If sex is a matter of power, it’s only fair to say that in return power is about sex, which is where these hundreds of little erotics come into play. Any and all decisions made have power. Choosing a university to attend and deciding to not have a snack both have some sort of force to them, although drastically different amounts. There is sensuality to be found in that, should one desire. Not all forms of sensuality are necessarily healthy ones, though; self destructive choices can be erotic, despite being detrimental. Sex is inherently a neutral act that we can’t (or shouldn’t, at least) ascribe moral values to, and sometimes places we find pleasure are places that want to hurt us. In several aspects of my own life, I haven’t resisted the call of that void. To a certain degree, I do think that doing something kind of bad for you can actually be good for you— humans need a little perversion and transgression to truly feel happy. It’s easy to go overboard with it, though, and I did so several times until I quit those vices and stuck myself into eternal limbo, where I still remain today.

Most of those vices, at least. Smoking, mainly the act and ritual surrounding smoking (but also nicotine), seems to have stuck with me.

So, let’s talk limbo. Most people haven’t done limbo the way I’m doing limbo, which sounds like bragging, but it’s closer to being a sign of misery than something you tell people about at parties. I don’t work, I don’t go to school, I can’t drive, I rarely leave the house while the sun is up, and I have exactly one in-person friend. I also don’t mind it that much, due to either a miracle of repression or my brain just functioning in a way where I don’t get bored and I definitely don’t get lonely, both of which are likely. Most people would say I’m wasting my life. Honestly, I consider it wasting my life, and I don’t even believe that life can be wasted in any capacity. The nothingness that’s defined the past two years of my life— because I’ve been in limbo for two years, if not longer— has been so all-consuming that there’s nothing else it could be at this point.

Once you get to that point, you start brainstorming. At first you’ll think you need new vices, which is true, but not true enough. Then you think you need your driver’s license, a massive fur coat, tickets to a reunion concert for a band that broke up before you were born, a couple thousand dollars in the bank, a frost green 1969 hardtop Chevy Camaro, a Fred Perry polo dress, and a cure to all of your ills. None of that would hurt, but that’s not it either, because it’s about power— power over your life, over yourself, power to not let your life be ruled by fear and complacency and convenience. You need new eroticism and you already tried most of the self destructive ones, so you need a sort of cleansing now. This is how this works. You go and get dirty, and now you need to get clean.

I’m not one for metaphorical acts. It’s time to clean. I picked up a broom.

I spent Thursday taking down and rearranging all the decorations in my room, putting pictures in frames and painting over any scratches or marks on the walls. In May, I spent a couple days painting my room white— it’s much better than the fleshy tan it used to be, but now there’s a bit of upkeep required. It’s not difficult, just a couple layers of craft paint every once in a while, but it still eats up about an hour of my afternoon. Who cares? It’s not like I was doing anything else. The poems taped above my desk are moved, moved again, and eventually removed. Only The Drowned Children by Louise Glück² remains (death must come to them differently, so close to the beginning. As though they had always been blind and weightless). The end result is more minimalist than I’m used to, but I’ve been moving away from maximalism for a while now, so being able to see some of the freshly white walls feels like an opening instead of a hole. It’s Rothko-esque. I used to see graves, now I see doors.

Friday, I’m on my hands and knees and decidedly not in love. Pull the carpets from the floor! Rip the sheets from the bed! Nothing can stop me and my bottle of cleaner! My bed linens are washed, then comes dusting, then wiping down the mirrors, then sweeping the floors, then mopping, which takes unexpectedly long after I discover that the soap I was using to scrub the floor is practically lubricant when it comes into contact with human skin. Almost two hours is spent skidding diagonally across the room in whatever position is funniest in the moment— on my side like I’m posing for a drawing, on all fours, tucked into the fetal position so I can use my bed frame to spin myself around in endless circles. I’m slamming into doors. I’m leaving wet, soapy imprints on the walls.

Afterwards, I look like I got fucked in a water park. My knees and elbows were beginning to bruise and there were scratches on my back from throwing myself into the hinges of a door several times, not to mention the fact that I was covered in fluid.

I woke up in clean sheets and the throes of grotesque soreness on Saturday. And isn’t that the best kind of love affair?

Sunday is a funeral that I don’t attend, but I use the time my parents are gone to tackle the kitchen. We live in a house from the 1930s, which I’ve been cleaning for as long as I could clean. Certain aspects of old houses are wonderful, mainly the original design choices— we’ve got crown moldings, antique glass doorknobs, mint green bathroom tiles, hardwood floors, the list goes on— but the kicker is that you’ll never truly get an old house clean without entirely remodeling it. I came to terms with this when I was around five or six years old and just starting to get really into cleaning. Some dirt just doesn’t come out, no matter how hard you scrub. I’m sure that’s a lesson that can be applied to several different situations. The point is that the weird beige linoleum that was put in the kitchen in the 90s looks like shit, and the (also beige) Formica on the counters is gross too, and the broom can never fully get under the fridge and I’m dead certain that the dust bunnies back there are fucking like, well, bunnies. There’s almost a century of grime caked into that crown molding. You really got to cut your losses, here. But I get the dirt and grease that I can reach— the top of the ceiling fan, the counters, the stove top, the floor. It’s all a girl can do.

We’re lucky. My family is really, really lucky. We moved into this house four days before I turned a year old, and we were only able to afford it because it was in terrible shape. My father and the old landlords struck up a deal that if my family would pay out of pocket for any repair work under five hundred dollars, the landlords would only make us pay half the rent, which was already low. We were living off food stamps. This deal was the only thing that kept us in a place with enough room for a family of four. As soon as my fine motor skills developed, I was enlisted into the cleaning brigade. My weekends were spent picking up chunks of plaster or helping scrub graffiti off while my father filled in holes in the wall— I’m not kidding about it being in bad shape, the previous tenants had completely trashed the place— or replaced the doors.

When the landlords came down to check on us a few years after we moved in, one of them apparently burst into tears, which is when we learned that this was her childhood home and it had been passed down from her parents to her. Seeing it repaired back into the way it looked when she was young was enough to make her cry. Lucky for us, it was also enough for her to knock another two hundred of the rent. Repairs on the house continue even today, because with time comes necessary rewiring and replacing, but I’ve never forgotten the luck we had to live here in the first place. If I had to pin my fascination with cleaning down to a singular formative event, it would be this.

Now, if I get two formative events to pin my fascination with cleaning to, the other one would be having rich friends. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but by the time I entered elementary school, my mother had managed to get cozy with a little group of upper-middle to upper class women that had children around my age. Ultimately, this rocked— most of them had second houses and property we could go to in the summers, and the children shared my passion for playing in the dirt. There were some irreconcilable differences, though. Watching their complete disregard for the expensive clothes they wore and the cleanliness of their houses and the ways they threw tantrums when they didn’t get what they wanted radicalized me. The first time I ever remember truly seeing red was watching one of them draw on the walls in permanent marker, casually dismissing my concern by telling me that the maid would take care of it. He didn’t even know her name. I could’ve killed him on the spot.

Time passed, as it’s prone to doing. They grew up and got more entitled. I grew up and got more into cleaning, and probably more entitled, too. Things went from “fun” to “cool” to “hot”. At some point, we all learned the meaning of masturbation and sex— I don’t want to think about how they discovered that, but I can tell you that the first time I ever jacked off, it was to a housekeeping magazine. Filth only excited me because it meant that cleaning would need to be done. I’m not really someone who gets properly turned on, but if I was, my obsession with cleaning could almost classify as a paraphilia. It’s not even cleanliness itself— I couldn’t care less about how clean something is. It’s not connected to anxiety or mental health in any way, shockingly. It’s the act of cleaning that does it for me.

As I lay me down to sleep in my clean sheets and my clean room and my (mostly) clean house, I pray soap and water my soul to keep. Most kids were into dinosaurs; I was into the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. I could probably get off to the smell of bleach if I wanted to.

Therefore the rest is dreamed, the lamp, the good white cloth that covered the table, their bodies.³ Amen.

1. Commonly (and falsely) attributed to Oscar Wilde. There are multiple theories to its origin, ranging from an editor changing a line in one of his books to “everything is about sex…” to it just being an old saying in psychoanalytical circles. Who knows?

2. This is for sure one of my favorite poems of all time.

3. See footnote 2.