Saturday, October 28, 2006

When young pinochiette sweeps a room

When young Pinochiette [sic] sweeps a room
I vow she dances with the broom

I'll hit you right away with it: I'm rather fond of cleaning, although not when it comes to downright scrubbing. I prefer dusting, a light yet fulfilling sweep, and arranging.

The quote above comes from a poem by Nancy Byrd Turner which I read when I was younger than Larry. [Note: Larry is a fictional character and any resemblance to anyone real is mere coincidence. He will appear often in my blog and he is used as a yard stick to express extremity of youngness, oldness, fatness etc.] It’s a poem about a little girl (that was in the days when boys were given blue shovels and girls were given pink brooms) who has been ordered to sweep by unseen gods and, using her broom as a dancing partner, she jigs, capers, and whirls through the house until it is clean.

I used to like this poem even though I found the subject matter dull as doughnuts (or Larry if you prefer). I liked it because our young sweeper extraordinaire was called “Pinochiette” and even if we didn't get our kicks the same way, at least we had the same nameday.

So I was thinking about this poem the other day in the context of my current life and I found an editorial review of it which says that the poem “captures the enthusiasm and imagination
children can bring to the most ordinary task”.

Lots of feminist writers have talked about how there is no creativity in cleaning
and how throughout history women have been assigned repetitive tasks lacking creativity whereas transcendent man (usually called Larry) has been allowed to go wild with a paint brush and climb new heights of creativity.

Obviously I’m all for division of labour with women and men both sharing the task of vacuuming the cat hairs out of the laptop ventilator and removing the kitty litter
from the cracks in the floorboards, but I think we can't accept that there is no
creativity in cleaning or we're just going to get depressed. Cleaning and household chores are
a big part of life for many people and the repetitive nature of the tasks can feel futile. Why wash the dishes when I'm just gonna have to wash them again tomorrow? Can't I just throw the plates in the bin and buy new ones like that rich rapper guy who is keeping capitalism on its feet?

Nancy (if I can be so bold as to call her by her first name) has the right idea - we need to inject creativity into these tasks the way kids do. But Gaston Bachelard also says a thing or two in
his book Poetics of Space. Now I don’t have a copy of the book at the moment
and I read this book many moons ago, so I’m just going off the top of my head and will accept no responsibility for any acts of cleaning anybody commits as a result of reading the following, but very basically: Bachelard talks about cleaning as being a creative act in the sense of making things new. When you clean something you are changing it from the state it was in before and ultimately creating a new bath tub, your very own work of art.

I think we all need to read that book (again) and have a think about how we can transcend cleaning, like other great thinkers such as Nancy Byrd Turner and Gaston Bachelard have done.

Just one last comment, while writing this post I was thinking about the mundane task of withdrawing money from an automatic teller machine. Well I love doing this in France because when you choose the english language option you get a message on the screen which says “please wait while we are preparing your money”. It makes me think of a chef behind the machine preparing a veritable feast of money which I am going to receive on a plate with a side
helping of hot money sauce.