The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [3]
Something similar happened during the writing of my last book, which was about mourning customs. Most of the traditional customs were obsolete and considered primitive or sentimental—or both—by a world interested in “moving on” as quickly as possible. But while I worked on that book, people would tell me privately about a mourning observance that was acutely important for them, even if it didn’t seem quite right in the twenty-first century—how they wore their father’s old undershirts, for example, or had long talks with their dead wife. Now that people were confiding their washing eccentricities—usually on the side of less scrupulosity rather than more—I was amused. Is a failure to meet the standards of the Clean Police as bizarre as full-blown mourning in the modern world? The surreptitious way people revealed their deviations to me indicates how thoroughly we have been conditioned: to risk smelling like a human is a misdemeanour, and the goal is to smell like an exotic fruit (mango, papaya, passion fruit) or a cookie (vanilla, coconut, ginger). The standard we read about in magazines and see on television is a sterilized and synthetic one, “as if we’re not on this earth,” a male friend remarked, but it takes some courage to disregard it.
What could be more routine and apparently banal than taking up soap and water and washing yourself? At one level and almost by definition, personal cleanliness is superficial, since it involves only the surface. At the same time it echoes, and links us to, some of the most profound feelings and impulses we know. In almost every religion, water and cleansing are resonant symbols—of grace, of forgiveness, of regeneration. Worshippers around the world wash themselves before prayer, whether literally, as the Muslims do, or more metaphorically, as when Catholics dip their fingers in holy-water fonts at the entrance to the church.
The archetypal link between dirt and guilt, and cleanliness and innocence, is built into our language—perhaps into our psyches. We talk about dirty jokes and laundering money. When we step too close to something morally unsavoury at a business meeting or a party, we say, “I wanted to take a shower.” Pontius Pilate washed his hands after condemning Jesus to death, and Lady Macbeth claims, unconvincingly, “A little water clears us of this deed,” after persuading her husband to kill Duncan.
Baths and immersions also have a natural kinship with rites of passage, the ceremonies that mark the transition from one stage of life to the next—from being an anonymous infant to a named member of the community, from singlehood to marriage, from life to death. Being submerged in water and emerging from it is a universal way of declaring “off with the old, on with the new.” (My writer friends who finally shampoo when their projects are finished are signalling that a passage has been accomplished.) Brides, and often grooms, from ancient Greece to modern-day Africa, have been given a celebratory prenuptial bath; young women in Renaissance Germany made a “bath shirt” for their husbands-to-be, a token of this custom. The Knights of the Bath were so called because they took a ritual bath the night before their formal investiture, as do men and women in many religious orders on the night before their final vows.
One of the most widespread rites of passage involves bathing the dead, an action that