Next to cleanliness

We are a people of paradox. There is this world in which collection and accumulation are valued to the extreme. The more, the merrier. The one who dies with the most toys wins. Yet we want ourselves and all our toys to be stripped to impeccable cleanliness. We want all that is extraneous removed. No dirt, no dust, no mold. Pure joy toy.

We are obsessed with cleaning up our act. We want a world free from pollution, free from disease, free from radioactivity, free from poverty, free from suffering. We want an airbrushed, unwrinkled world. Nothing sticky.

We want to eliminate all ragged edges, all offensive topics, all lack of skill. We cry out our moral imperatives. Make a clean sweep. Eliminate all offensive encumbrance, incompleteness, imperfection, impurity.

We want to come clean. We want our passion purified. There are dental dams and condemned condoms. Or we can have untouchable virtual sex. Pornography permits visual stimulation without unclean presence.

For unavoidable contact we can clean our bodies and deodorize our smells into the acceptable. We brush, floss, straighten, and whiten our teeth. We freshen our breath. We scrub our nails and pluck out all dirty body hair.

The outside cleaning is followed by an inside job. There are nasal rinses to clean sinus cavities and douches to clean vaginas and colonics to clean bowels. Chelation cleans out the heavy metals from our blood. Cleansing diets and fasting techniques abound.

Did you know that the average adult American colon contains ten pounds of hardened fecal matter? We are full of it.

We long to be cleanly empty.

Yet it seems to be true that cleanliness is next to impossible.

Our religions have all created ritual to resolve this dilemma. We have baptisms, sweat lodges and smudging, the churching of women, the cleansing of sacred vessels and the bodies who hold them. We have ritual fasts and prayers. We have prescribed and forbidden foods and practices.

The old German root of the word clean means delicate and dainty. From this perspective it seems to be a pink experience, light and frothy, with plenty of the undefiled. But in the pretty pink lies the madness of obsession, of unending wiping and scraping and boiling. We have gone amok. We have sterilized ourselves into an orderly ordinariness beyond escape.

This pirate suggests an escapade of emptiness.

Let's cut to the core of the meaning of clean. Let's eliminate all the dreary dross, and so achieve an ultimate clean.

How? Let's imagine that all that is non-essential is eliminated. It is, after all, the non-essential that is impure. Dirt is what is layered over pure essence. And it is the living in and for the non-essential that is dirty.

Let's do a pirate syllogism. All that is essential is clean. All that is clean is precious. All that is precious is beloved. It is the beloved that is essential.

The Christian scriptures proclaim that God is love, and our hormones proclaim that love is God.

The pure pirate truth is that cleanliness is the all that is. No periphery, no edges, no exclusivity, no elimination. True cleanliness is not next to Godliness. It is much closer.

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse who hopes to inspire profound mutiny in all those who care to read. Our Rx ma y be wearing a pir ate cloak of in visibility, but emanating fr om within this shado w is hope that readers will feel free to respond. Who kno ws: You may e ven inspir e the muse. Make contact if you dare.