It’s next to Godliness

“A clean car is a happy car,” my father used to say.

He also used to say, “A clean bike is a happy bike.” Actually, anything that could conceivably be cleaned – boats, saws, countertops, iron skillets and even toilets – was, to my father, only happy when it was clean.

I called him the other day, and he was – surprise – vacuuming out the minivan.
Maybe I inherited it, but I like being clean. Last year I would (gently) move my roommate’s laundry, books and trash to his side.

He got the hint when he couldn’t walk to his desk.

This year, I requested a single. It’s not that I don’t like people. I just don’t like their stuff.

Back home, I used to vacuum the floor of my room every night before bed. It was my routine: pajamas, brush teeth, then Dirt Devil. In the dorm, unfortunately, it might bother the neighbors.

So when I saw that a play entitled “The Clean House” was playing at the Wells-Metz Theatre, I knew I had to see it.

It’s a delightful comedy by Sarah Ruhl about a doctor named Lane with a maid who gets depressed by cleaning, a sister who secretly cleans her house and a husband who falls in love with his mastectomy patient.

The set begins as a pristine apartment – white carpet, white couch, white everything. But at the end, there’s dirty tissues, rotten apples, potted plants, magazines, and a yew tree strewn all around.

The symbolic dishevelment of the “Clean House” is an inversion of the characters, who are ultimately cleansed from their toxic lives – by humor.

The final image of the play is a sacred ritual. Amid the filth of her house, Lane washes the body of her husband’s soul mate, whose cancer has literally been cleaned out by the greatest joke in the world.

Billy Collins, a former Poet Laureate, wrote in his poem “Advice to Writers” that before starting their work, writers should “clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.”

“Spotlessness,” he continues, “is the niece of inspiration. The more you clean, the more brilliant your writing will be.”

In math, there is a notion of a proof being “clean” when it is somehow free of extra baggage: extraneous assumptions, superfluous tools, clumsy arguments. A clean proof is clear and concise.

I’ll alter Dad’s favorite saying for this case: a clean proof is a pretty proof.

Traditionally, the aesthetic value of a proof depends on its tidiness, its elegance. A sloppy proof can be correct, but not beautiful.

Clean can be happy, routine, funny, inspiring or beautiful. But it’s not the most important thing.

Life is messy.

Sometimes, like Lane, we have to let go of the superficial clean to find an inner clean.
My house is never clean. But I never heard my Dad say “A clean house is a happy house.”

Instead he would say, “Only when the kids are grown up and moved out will the house be clean.

“But then – the kids will be gone.”