Theories of cleaning

Cary Tennis at Salon has explained my obsessive compulsive cleaning behavior. I might have come to this conclusion on my own, but maybe it was just easier not to mull it over too much. In fact, only recently have friends pointed out to me that my maniacal clean-every-free-minute behavior might be--oh, a tiny problem. Since my house is still dirty, I didn't have a problem arguing with them about it. But this makes more sense now.

To clean is also to confront your silent enemy of long fruition, the dirt of secret accumulation. It can also represent an encounter with our own decay, which is so distasteful, that heavy, slow, dragging feeling that is the opposite of transcendence. It is an encounter with entropy, the tendency of things to lose their sheen, to grow dull in the air, to corrode, to weaken and rot, to become covered over and eventually unrecognizable. And so, as perhaps one might have guessed, it is ultimately a confrontation with death.

Of course--you know me--Cary's discussion, while excellent, doesn't address the basic gender issues implicit in our cultural understanding of who does housework. And I have a husband who became a semi-obsessive kitchen cleaner after living for a while with really nasty college roommates. But he doesn't see a dirty house as a reflection of his lack of moral worth in the universe either.