The imagination is often thought of as the antithesis of ordinary life, as something that escapes from the everyday into the exotic and strange. But one implication of this newsletter’s motto, “Imagination as the home of human life,” is that imagination begins at home. The ordinary and everyday are also constructed by the imagination, which invests common objects and daily rituals with significance. Someone could write a book called The Mythology of Ordinary Life, and perhaps someone should. Or perhaps a newsletter, which gives me an opening to recommend a new Substack newsletter, Everything I’ve Learned, by my friend (and, yeah, former wife) Stacey Clemence. My newsletters are long because I see everything as interconnected and forming, or at least suggesting, a Big Picture. Stacey’s more succinct newsletters see the world in a grain of sand. They are, in fact, parables, personal and yet universal. I recommend them: they are a quietly wise delight.
Recently, I have been coming across articles dealing with the issue of the clean and the dirty—an issue that is unexpectedly fraught, unexpectedly to me, anyway. I had not realized how touchy an issue personal and domestic hygiene can be. Several articles asked the question of how many times clothes can be worn before being thrown into the laundry. Authorities on the matter—how does one get to be an authority on laundry?—seem to roughly agree that, while socks and underwear can only be worn once, jeans can be worn several times. Others vociferously disagree. “You may not be able to smell yourself,” said one woman on a discussion board, “but I can smell you on the subway.” How often one takes a shower is an even more delicate question—so much so that the responses are not always very delicate. The reaction to someone who is considered “dirty” can be visceral. But on the other hand, the reaction to what is seen as neurotically fastidious can be equally visceral.
The dirty shades over into the messy. To be untidy is not necessarily the same as to be dirty, but there is a line to be crossed between the two, and different people draw it at different points. Again, attitudes can be markedly judgmental. A teenager’s proverbially messy room can be referred to by words such as “slovenly,” not to mention “pig sty.” The dating site Okcupid.com provides questions that you can choose to include as part of your profile. I expected “Do you make your bed every day?” to be among them, but not necessarily “Do you fold underwear?” Upon such things does one’s status as a relationship candidate depend. It can be daunting.
Germ theory created a whole new phobia. The idea that there are germs absolutely everywhere, no matter how much you clean and scrub, freaks some people out. Articles abound online about the most germ-infested places in your house, the authors seeming to take a wicked delight in informing the germophobic that the shower curtain and toothbrush holder may have more bacteria than the toilet. In the kitchen, sponges are germ utopia. And, of course, there are invisible agents in the air, alien invaders. The pianist and harpsichordist Glenn Gould was a notorious germophobe who wore fingerless gloves while performing, which no doubt contributed to the originality of his interpretations of Bach. Covid has left a number of people with a kind of PTSD about contagion: one still sees people wearing masks in the classroom, in public.
However, animals clean themselves without being informed by theory that they should. One online expert says that virtually all animals able to reach areas of their body engage in grooming behavior. We all know that cats give themselves tongue baths. Hamsters and guinea pigs brush their faces with their paws. Wild turkeys give themselves dust baths. An Internet fun fact is that honeybees groom themselves while flying, sort of like the women putting on lipstick looking in the rear view mirror at a stop light. Yet animals, like us unfortunately, are subject to stress neuroses, and we have probably all known a cat or dog that has to be discouraged from licking itself compulsively because of an anxiety disorder. That the motives for animal grooming are psychological as well as hygienic is evident in social grooming, as when monkeys bond by picking lice off each other.
For human beings, cleanliness is more connected with order than with illness. A classic study of the subject was Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, published in 1966. One of my pleasures is recommending scholarly works that, unlike far too much scholarship, are actually readable, and Douglas writes in a lively, down-to-earth style. She begins with the saying that dirt is matter in the wrong place, an aphorism that is well known despite the fact that no one quite knows who first came up with it. What the saying implies is that dirty and clean, purity and pollution, are categories—that is, they are constructs of the imagination, ordering the world for reasons that have nothing to do with the practical danger of disease. Douglas pokes fun at what she calls medical materialism, the attempt to interpret various taboos and rituals of purification as prompted by a dim intuition of germ theory among ancient peoples: “Jewish and Islamic avoidance of pork is explained as due to the dangers of eating pig in hot climates” (29). No: “Even if some of Moses’ dietary rules were hygienically beneficial it is a pity to treat him as an enlightened public health administrator” (29). But if we abandon such reductionism, we are left with a seemingly intractable problem, which Douglas confronts in an entire chapter titled “The Abominations of Leviticus.” The account of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt into the desert is swift-moving and dramatic. But then the Exodus comes to a dead halt while the Law is expounded at the base of the sacred mountain. Not ten succinct commandments, but chapter upon chapter of strictures, many of them taking the form of taboos guarding against “impurity” and “pollution.” In particular, scholars have racked their brains about the dietary laws, based on categories of animals that are clean or impure. The classifications seem to make no sense:
Why should the camel, the hare and the rock badger be unclean? Why should some locusts, but not all, be unclean? Why should the frog be clean and the mouse and the hippopotamus unclean? What have chameleons, moles and crocodiles got in common that they should be listed together (Levi.xi,27)?
Are the categories based on some perceived but not actual relationship, as when Northrop Frye jokes about literary categories that they have to be based on real structural principles, rather than grouping a spider, an octopus, and a string quartet together because they all have eight legs? Or are they arbitrary stipulations designed to enforce obedience—in other words, do they amount to “because I say so”? After all, a case could be made along those lines for the first food taboo of them all. Don’t eat the fruit of the forbidden tree, God said to Adam and Eve. Why not? Because it’s forbidden. The fruit isn’t poisonous: it’s a test of your obedience. Douglas thinks there is more at stake, and what follows expands from her analysis into, well, a Big Picture.
The distinction between clean and dirty, pure and polluted, is closely related to the distinction between the sacred and the profane as discussed in the work of theorists such as Mircea Eliade. The sacred forms a temenos or boundary, a circle that sets off what is within it as special, as holy. The profane is what is outside the boundary, rejected, polluted, impure. Taboos about the sacred have to do with preserving that boundary, like the woman asleep inside a ring of fire, or (in the case of Sleeping Beauty) of thorns, waiting for the hero to penetrate the ring, rescue, and awaken her. It is a taboo of dangerous power. When David moved the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem, with great ceremony, someone slipped and the Ark began to tip over. A man who touched it in the attempt to balance it was instantly struck dead, as if he had touched a 12,000 volt power line, because within the Ark was the Holy of Holies, the temenos inside which was the presence of God himself. Similar taboos surround a woman’s virginity: hence the strictures about violating her “virgin knot” (Shakespeare’s phrase in The Tempest) before the right time. The sacred is associated with light and with whiteness. Underwear is traditionally white to designate the cleanliness that is in a very real sense next to godliness. Brides wear white, the color of virgin purity.
The profane, the non-sacred, is to a greater or lesser extent “impure,” with connotations ranging from the crude and vulgar to the disgusting to the nauseating and even horrifying. Most taboos clearly have to do with an ambivalence about the body and its functions. Spirits are totally “pure,” having no bodies, while the demonic has a strong association with physicality, for the body is “fallen” and “shameful,” at least in its “natural” state. In previous centuries, indigenous tribal people around the world were said to be still in the state of nature, without the benefits of culture. To some of the more extreme bigots, they were “filthy savages.” Children are supposed to hate baths (though actually I doubt that all of them do) because they too are not yet socialized and are therefore in the state of nature. Calvin, in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, always resists taking a bath. We should qualify: it is boys who are little savages. Girls are supposed to be prim and proper, always clean and horrified by the prospect of getting dirty.
We may think we are beyond these old nature/culture stereotypes, but in fact we do not seem to be at all: we are simply unaware that some of our prejudices are informed by it. The gender stereotypes are an example. There is a conservative argument that boys are supposed to be little savages, not just in their appearance but their behavior. To socialize a boy, which includes teaching him manners as well as personal hygiene, is to effeminize him. Conservatives sometimes blame female teachers who, they say, are feminists trying to suppress a boy’s “natural” tendency to be rambunctious and undisciplined. Boys really want to go off and run with a wild pack of males who are free of demands to take baths and wear clean clothes. And, the argument goes, women are secretly attracted to the uncivilized man, with his rough, animal vitality. He is a “real man,” whereas socialized men are not only effeminate but effete: there is a social class component to this reactionary ideology. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights dramatizes this in the contrast of the two houses, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The males of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff and Hareton, are rough, aggressive, and definitely do not worry about baths. The males of Thrushcross Grange, Edgar and Linton, are upper-class and refined, but also weak and decadent. Women are in a double bind. They find the rugged male attractive, as in Beauty and the Beast—but it is their task to civilize him, as Hareton is finally civilized at the end of Wuthering Heights. They may do so, ending up with a socialized and responsible spouse, only to find themselves tempted by the rough “back door man” of many blues songs, including the famous one by Willie Dixon, recording by Howlin Wolf and by the Doors on their first album. The refrain of that song is, “You men don’t know but the little girls they understand.”
Certain groups carry the stereotype of being “unclean.” One is the homeless, a term that some people feel is not merely descriptive but judgmental and therefore should be replaced with “unhoused.” People of no fixed abode are often, of course, literally unclean because they have no access to baths, showers, and laundry facilities. Some of them also have mental health issues that prevent them from “taking care of themselves,” as people say. But they are unclean figuratively because they are outcasts, outside the temenos of respectable society. They are blamed for their situation, and as a society we have “washed our hands of them,” even though it is in the sense of Pilate washing his hands of the death of Jesus. To be guilty is to be polluted, needing to be washed clean—not so easily done, as Lady Macbeth discovered. The sacrament of Baptism is a cleansing: immersion in water washes the individual clean, not just of the pollution of “original sin,” the sin of Adam and Eve that comes down upon all our souls. But what is washed away in a larger sense is the “natural self” that Paul speaks of, leaving the “spiritual self.”
Frequent bathing and clean laundry can become a fetish of the middle and upper classes. Working class people may have manual labor jobs that involve getting dirty, as opposed to, in a significant phrase, “white collar” jobs in clean offices. There used to be a particular stigma attached to coal mining, because coal miners actually go down into a pit and emerge totally blackened. But apart from the fact that working-class jobs are typically dirty and sweaty, there may be sometimes a reverse prejudice against being too fastidious, too prissy. Why isn’t a bath once a week enough? In the early 20th century, working class people were frequently immigrants, like my own grandparents, and immigrants were suspected of being “dirty” because of the unfamiliar smells of the food they cooked, the unfamiliar clothes they wore—and because of the dark color of their skin. “Dirty” is at times a racist epithet, and the thriving white supremacist sentiment of our time, evident in the vicious “great replacement theory,” worries about “racial purity,” about how the United States is being “polluted” racially. The temenos, the sacred circle, must be kept clean of the “trash” that would defile it.
Speaking of trash, societies, like individual human bodies, produce “waste,” which must then be expelled somewhere outside the boundaries of the respectable, preferably out of sight. My impression is that our fastidiousness about trash is increasing—not that we are interested in producing less of it, but we desire to see no evil. When I was young, you could go to a junkyard looking for parts for your car, in an era when people worked on their own cars. In the pioneering African-American sitcom of the 1970’s, Sanford and Son, Sanford was a junk dealer. In the early 20th century, junk men would actually travel through neighborhoods with horse-drawn carts, offering to pick up junk that they could then sell. In William Kennedy’s Ironweed, the protagonist Frances Phelan, who has lived on the streets for over 20 years, gets a temporary job with such a junk collector—who uses his itinerant lifestyle to be a back door man to various housewives. In the great comic strip Gasoline Alley, the character Joel is a junkman with a mule-drawn cart and actually lives in a shack in the junkyard. “Nice” people find trash and junk and the people associated with them distasteful, although they need the latter to dispose of what they have themselves produced. In his last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, Dickens makes the “dust bin” a symbol of a decaying, dying civilization.
There is a visual aspect to the concept of cleanliness, oddly enough, which seems to have captivated the modernist revolution in architecture in the early 20th century. In a rejection of the ornate style of Victorian architecture, modernist buildings had “clean lines,” featureless facades of glass and steel. Such buildings, which are now the norm, seem like abstract ideas. They are cold and, to me, sterile. In one of his stories, the fantasist Harlan Ellison compares living in a future utopia of this sort to living inside an autoclave. He may have been thinking of Isaac Asimov’s city of Trantor, a futuristic city that covers a whole planet and is entirely made of metal. The same minimalist style took over all design, from automobiles to easy chairs. There is a preference for the mechanical over the organic. Machines, the kind with gleaming, simple lines, are preferred over the messy profusion of nature and the complex details of the human body. Robot and cyborg bodies are often portrayed with the streamlined, gleaming perfection of the inorganic, from the female robot in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis to James Cameron’s Terminator.
Susan Sontag spoke of Illness as Metaphor in the title of a famous book. The illness that became, above all others, a metaphor for “impurity” was leprosy, a highly contagious, disfiguring skin disease for which there was no cure until the advent of modern antibiotics. As late as 1954, the newspaper comic strip Rex Morgan, M.D. featured a story about a man who, after spending five years in a sanitorium for lepers, tries to return to his community. The strip was written by a psychiatrist, Nicholas P. Dallis, and this particular storyline had a dark intensity to it almost unheard of in newspaper comics. When it is discovered that the man has had Hansen’s disease, to give it its respectable scientific name, the entire community erupts in mass panic and hatred. The man’s children are persecuted at school, rocks are thrown through the windows of his home, and the police are afraid to come investigate the rock throwing until Rex Morgan erupts in fury to the police chief over the phone. Morgan decides, with the man’s assent, to use the case as a teaching moment in the medical school, and brings him in for a lecture to nursing students, staff, and other doctors. Immediately he is called to task because parents are withdrawing their children from the nursing school. Stores will not serve the man’s wife because no one will shop at the store any longer if it becomes known that someone who could be carrying leprosy shopped there. The man is not one bit contagious: what is contagious is the mass hysteria over a person who in an earlier age would have been called “unclean.”
The binary categories of clean and unclean, pure and polluted, and the taboos that accompany them, have their origin in our ambivalence about the body. Beyond anxieties about personal hygiene, the ambivalence produces taboos in three interconnected bodily contexts: eating, excretion, and sex. Dismissing food taboos as superstitious is just ethnocentric smugness: we are as superstitious as any tribe anywhere. If you doubt it, ask yourself what you think of the idea of a cockroach sandwich (eating insects has been seriously suggested as an alternative to the environmental disruptions caused by raising livestock and agriculture). In addition to rules about which foods are acceptable and which are disgusting, there is another binary expressed in the title of a book by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. Sushi notwithstanding, to eat things raw would be a regression to the state of nature. Cooking civilizes food, so to speak: transforms it from nature into culture. Eating raw meat would be dangerous, but it would also be revoltingly “animalistic.”
There is also the question of table manners. Fastidiousness is learned, as the first-birthday photo of the child with cake icing smeared all over their face and everything else clearly shows. We have to learn to care about the mess, but once we do, we do not eat with our fingers, do not chew with our mouth open, do not burp unless we are visiting a culture in which that is the expected signal of appreciation for the meal. In short, the physicality of the act of eating is refined away as much as possible. It startles us to learn that medieval people ate with their fingers. But, just as with grooming, eating habits are vulnerable to human anxieties about order. Nothing proves this more dramatically than the children who develop an obsession with not letting various foods touch on the plate. Picky eaters have obsessive-compulsive notions about which foods are acceptable, often not so much because of taste as because of looks and texture. Eating disorders disclose that we have as much ambivalence about eating as we do about sex. There is a deep-seated feeling, perhaps in all of us, that eating is disgusting, food is disgusting, precisely because it is physical. Fasting has always been a religious ritual because it rejects our subservience to our physical appetites. Human beings should be masters of their appetites, not enslaved to them like the animals. Fasting thus represents a type of discipline and control that can become intoxicating and addictive. Anorexics always say that for them it is an issue of control. It is strange, and frightening, that starving yourself can become a power trip.
Everything about the body that emphasizes its gross physicality is distasteful. Needless to say, this is true of urine and excrement. Once again, issues of power and control enter in, which is why toilet training is such a rite of passage in raising a child. Control over bladder and bowels is not just a matter of the proper disposal of that which is “dirty.” As Freud showed with his idea of an “anal phase” of development, it becomes a question of mastery that can turn into obsessive-compulsive disorder. Anything emitted from the body becomes excremental and therefore revolting, including mucus, spit, semen, and flatulence. It is learned behavior: very small children may play happily with their own poop, and may be unconcerned by the fact that snot is running down the whole length of their face. None of it is rational, yet all of the taboos are part of an intricate logic of classification. People find it exciting to put their tongues into each other’s mouths, but to be spit upon is disgusting. Long hair, at least on women, may be beautiful, but women’s armpit, leg, and, these days, pubic hair makes a lot of people cringe. The reaction to these things is not aesthetic but visceral. Big, shaggy beards on men are barbaric—but not on Santa Claus, not to mention all those old photos of distinguished men from previous centuries. Including, um, Jesus. Why does Jesus always have both long hair and a beard, looking like a hippie who, when I was young, might be in danger of getting beaten up by a drunken tough guy?
We can speak very briefly of sex, because we all know that it is “dirty,” and so are all the words for it. The problem is that what is “dirty” about it, including smell, taste, and wetness, is part of what is exciting. The attempt to refine sex into a “pure” expression of ideal emotion, apart from the unrefined physical act, is going to fail. To say that sex is “animal” is yet another version of the nature/culture binary. The catalogue of imagery that Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello uses to characterize sex as “the beast with two backs” marshals the resources of an entire zoo. The phrase that works its way into Othello’s head is “goats and monkeys,” two proverbially lustful species. But what is repressed becomes exciting. The quick taste of salt on the lips of a sweaty lover may be erotic in its sensuality. Women spend money trying not to have any smells, but smell may be the most erotic of all the senses. Not for nothing is there a movie called Scent of a Woman. Sex that departs from garden-variety intercourse may be more than the pursuit of novelty by the bored, but rather an attempt to reclaim the parts of sexual pleasure deemed “impure,” which involves quasi-forbidden erogenous zones other than the genital: the oral, the anal, fingers, toes. The type of pornography that reinforces misogyny is destructive, but I suspect that the appeal of at least some pornography is compensatory for people seeking something that has been lost in real life.
The impulse of one kind of censorship is to purify texts of vulgarity and sexual references. In 1818, Thomas Bowdler inspired a new word, “bowdlerize,” when he attempted to clean up Shakespeare’s act—in fact, clean up all of his acts in all of his plays—by producing expurgated versions of them that would not violate the pure minds of women and children. However, literature has a whole compensatory genre, that of satire. From Aristophanes to Rabelais to Swift to James Joyce to George Carlin to Robertson Davies and Thomas Pynchon, satire has subversively reveled in the obscene, the “dirty.” It does so through humor, because jokes, as Freud showed in a pioneering work, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), are a way of coping with tabooed subjects, of releasing some pent-up repression. In recent times, satire has developed a radical form of transgressive art, which deliberately violates taboos about purity. In 1989, Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” caused a furor. It consisted of a crucifix inside a vial of urine.
Yet Blake said that if a fool persisted in his folly, he would become wise. Transgressive art risks venturing to a paradoxical margin where conventional distinctions begin to break down, including the distinction between the polluted and the holy. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King tells the story of a man who violated the two ultimate taboos of Greek society by killing his father and committing incest with his mother, including having children by her. Doubly polluted, he is driven out of the city of Thebes to become a blind and unhoused wandering outcast. But at the end of his life, Sophocles wrote a sequel play, Oedipus at Colonus, in which Oedipus, strangely, has become a sacred figure through the very intensity of his suffering. At his death, he is honored by being buried in the sacred grove of the Furies. Late in his career, Thomas Mann wrote a novel called The Holy Sinner (1951), based on a medieval German romance in which a man who is the product of brother-sister incest grows up to become one of the wisest and greatest Popes in all of history. There is a strange affinity between the sacred and the tabooed. In one of the great Romantic satires, Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake says, “I asked Ezekiel why he ate dung, and lay so long on his right and left side. He answered: ‘The desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite. This the North American tribes practice.’”
Authoritarian religion reinforces taboos, is shocked by the transgressive, and may respond with violence to what it deems “blasphemy.” Far-right Christianity is obsessed with purity: Mike Johnson, the present Speaker of the House, made his daughter take a “purity vow” in public. Project 2025, the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for what is planned under a second Trump presidency, makes clear that outlawing abortion is only a first step towards purifying a sinful society by outlawing not just birth control but “recreational sex,” returning sex to its only proper function, that of reproduction. Perhaps we need another kind of religion with a kind of baptism that washes away our neurotic attitudes. Perhaps it is the Augean stables of the mind that need cleansing. In “Among School Children,” Yeats, despite the fact that he is old, affirms that “Labour is blossoming or dancing where / Body is not bruised to pleasure soul.” Yes, the body is not dignified, and gets less dignified as one gets older. But, in the words of Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone,” “The blessed do not care what angle they are regarded from.” The only worse thing than having a body is not having one. Hooray for the sheer pleasures of the body and its senses: of eating, sleeping, sex; of walking, running, dancing; of the feel of sunlight on skin, of the smell of a woman’s hair. When Yeats’s “Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop,” the Bishop admonishes her: “Live in a heavenly mansion, / Not in some foul sty.” Jane responds:
“Fair and foul are next of kin, And fair needs foul, I cried…. A woman can be proud and stiff When on love intent, But love has pitched his mansion in The place of excrement; For nothing can be sole or whole That has not been rent.”
You have to be crazy to be as wise as that.
Reference
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge, 1992. Originally published in 1966.
I was thinking of Shakespeare's "weird sisters" in Macbeth chanting 'Fair is foul and foul is fair' while reading your newsletter, and then you ended it with something similar! Incidentally, the three witches were my favorite characters in the production I saw. Even if they manipulated Macbeth, they seemed to have a connection to the oracular language I love in literature.
As a middle school physical education teacher, I can attest to the many versions of clean and dirty. The thing that still baffles me is that the girls are often shamed for smelling, while boys still celebrate their foulness. Of course, at the elementary level, this isn't as big a deal because puberty hasn't happened yet, but societal norms are still alive and well there too.
While also listening to your podcast discussion of the Tempest, even Prospero prefers the airy spirit over the earthly fish-man. I wonder if his pushing away/hatred of the base and natural Caliban is his own repression of that in himself.
As always, I'm grateful for how you bring things to my attention that which I wouldn't otherwise contemplate.