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If you scrub, the shine comes off.
The intermittent music of scrubbing, a half-heard melody.
Cleaning is not a window but a mirror: it doesn’t make transparent, it reflects. Cleaning is invisible work. You only notice when it’s dirty. There is no praise for cleaning.
No heroes of some sort. Failure is present in success, rather than one following up the other. The glaze of ceramics is like the make-up of the skin, it gets stuck on the irregularities. Cleaning focusses the attention on the unspectacular. Is that a political act? Cows are brushed like in a car wash before they’re slaughtered. “I throw everything out.” Karl Lagerfeld, 2016, on the importance of the trash can. “When I let go of who I am,” Lao Tzu says, “I become what I might be.”
If life is a mess, “go someplace out of your life, come back new bring it around and make a little money. Clean your apartment.
Write some.” Eileen Myles, 1994. In Germany there is a special devil for cleaning: der Putzteufel. “The party went too far, but it was totally worth it.” Grace Jones, 2008.
Those who clean, always end up throwing something away.
Text by An Paenhuysen