The Urge to Purge

Seeking order in a mad mad world

Lion, Auguste Herbin, 1947

The first time, in 2016, I attempted to assuage the pain, mitigate the fear, and ease the disgust of our epic national mistake by furiously reading, writing, raving and pacing. I researched organizations to help, subscribed to news outlets under fire, and shared whatever helpful information I could find. I raged at the gods and clutched my tired little head in bereft confusion.

This time, the focus is inward.

I’ve taken little walks and hot showers, cut my hair, canceled subscriptions. Good books and drinks with friends. And, oddly, the thing that has reliably given me peace is cleaning. I don’t mean the daily grind cleaning — dishes, laundry, sweeping, toilets — that’s still there, no more satisfying than ever. No, I mean the underbelly cleaning. Organizing forgotten closets, purging aggressively, finding the hidden scum and scouring it away — a top to bottom reassessment of my space. I have been least unhappy, in these recent dark days, when furiously ferreting out the baggage, rounding up the filth and removing it. Seeking the light.

America is in dire need of such a deep clean.

Every bag of trash jettisoned feels like a tiny triumph. Every shower is an exercise in grout scrubbing, every item in the long-ignored linen closet is assessed, folded and filed in a maniacal search for order. Nothing is safe in my house now. Cumbersome pieces of furniture are scrutinized with new eyes, fraying rugs seen for the filthy doormats they are. I am seized with a newfound zeal for the clean sweep, yearning for a calm, organized environment with no unnecessary thing, no excess, no bloat. I am desperately seeking control. The clutter-clearing gurus make much of the creation of space, making room for better things. We need so much room.

We need to make order out of chaos.

This is, of course, ripe with metaphor. It’s a classic response to trauma — circle the wagons, gather the valuables, throw the superfluous overboard. I feel like we can’t be lean, mean, and clean enough in the midst of all this ugliness. “Drain the swamp!,” they said, and the swamp grows while the worst of the swamp dwellers revel in the filth.

Way back in the days of relative certainty, the innocent days pre-’16, there was a moment that really irked me (okay, there were thousands of irksome moments, this one just sticks out). Our ruler-in-waiting referred to Venezuelan beauty queen, Alicia Machado, as “Miss Housekeeping.” The first ugly takeaway is his racist slur, the cultural stereotype that turns the stomach. The second is disgust with his constant loathsome misogyny. The third, though, is the denigrating use of the term ‘housekeeping’ and all that it implies.

This isn’t new. It’s a time-honored trope among the moneyed classes, hinting at an oppressive gender divide. Housekeeping happens to be the very first, most important, step in the construction of a life. Every single day. Keeping house — house being the very engine at the heart of society — has been bled of meaning, an undervalued, unpaid or underpaid job for women and the underclasses. This witless, artless, puppet of evil would be sitting in his own mess if people weren’t doing the real work in the shadows. Someone has to press those suits and polish those gold faucets. Someone has to clean up the ketchup.

And so, my elbow grease is fueled with pride and honor in the noble task of homekeeping, but also with anger and disgust at those who benefit and denigrate. I wish I could scrub and scour this national blunder away. Many millions voted for sanity, and yet we are left with this mess. Someone took a dump in our collective house and now we are left to purge and sanitize.

If only cleaning my windows was the answer.

🧹 Lisa

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Things to share:

• I’ve written about cleaning before, it’s a fascinating subject. We’re all doing it, or thinking about doing it, all the time.

• Sara Eckel
  has given us this great post, We Need Some Heroes. So tired of being told to DO SOMETHING, “We want leaders.” We poured into the streets, we’re cleaning our houses and yelling at our absent reps, we voted for fuck’s sake — where are the leaders?!

• Snow yesterday, here in the Northeast, but Tom Waits sings You Can Never Hold Back Spring every year for me and it helps. “Winter dreams the same dream every time.” Sigh.

• Any good ideas for one good line, every single day for FIVE YEARS?! The paralysis is real.