Cleaning the Floor

On an exercise from Marina Abramović's Method Deck

Tuesday, when I woke to write the sky was dark. It usually is when I’m up to work. As the morning brightened an orange extraterrestrial glow bathed my home. Flooded the upstairs hallway. I wondered throughout the day about wildfires, yet no one mentioned them. Wednesday fires composed much of the small talk I shared with other people when I went to work. Here’s the sky as I saw it:

There’s smoke you smell before it finds you. Or the light shifts and everything becomes clear. You recognize you have passed a brink and perhaps the kindest thing to do for yourself then is to pause the work of sifting rupture from growth from transformation, trying to interpret the moment as it happens, and instead focus on surviving. Put another way: ask yourself what you will save. This is as much about routine and mindset as it is about objects.

When this house was purchased, the realtor reassured me many times that this is a good house. She made no mention of bones, but did indeed mention the not-tilted floors. The charming bungalow style. The pass-through pantry. The off-street parking.

Though the floors aren’t tilted, the finish of the downstairs hardwoods was gone long before the deed was passed along, or the finish was mostly gone, and how to care for these floors has always been something of a mystery to me. This is a home with pets and people and mischief. Fur and hair and spilled drinks and watercolor rinse water, crumbled cookies and chips, dropped pretzels, occasional pet vomit, garden debris like bits of leaves and dirt, cat whiskers, the curly paper bits from torn-out spiral notebook pages.

Staying ahead of these bits accumulating finds me washing the floors intensely once a week.

I was gifted Marina Abramović’s Method Deck some time ago. This spring, I decided to give it a try. I’ve written before here about keeping as simple a writing practice as possible because I find too much ceremony disruptive to my work. In addition to writing each morning, I take other creative detours. I run a small press and online journal. I bake, play music, dance, sing, garden, paint. Sometimes traveling in another creative lane talks back to the writing, solves a problem or opens a new pathway in a story, but the broader point, and joy, for me is the meaning I find in creativity. It’s just fun to live like this.

So earlier this summer, I dug out the Method Deck, which is made up of thirty cards, each instructing on a different endurance exercise: “Step on the ground first thing in the morning” or “Open and close a door.” You could try a different card every day for a month “to reboot your life” as the box suggests. Or you could try the exercises as you fancy, journal about your experiences. This summer I’ve committed to performing one exercise a week: “Clean the floor on your knees.”

The conditions and circumstances vary: I clean my floors after I’ve written and exercised and had breakfast. I clean my floors after work, after running to the grocery store. I clean my floors while my hair sets for the four days between a wash and my next DIY blowout. The longest I’ve cleaned the floors is forty-three minutes. By the end of the year I want to reach an hour and a half. Gloves keep my jewelry from snagging on the gaps between the floorboards, the rubber protects the skin on my hands from the hot water. I’ve taken self-portraits doing this work, but I have not filmed myself. A rag beneath my hands, my skin sweating in the gloves. A flow state sets in. A cat pats by the puddle I scrub, tiptoeing little pawprints, the wide metacarpal crowned in toe beans. I discover a tumbleweed of dog fur and as if she knows I am picking up her separate presences my dog trots over to inspect my work. The task is physical and the first few times I found it arduous, my knees sore by the time I stripped off the gloves and carried the bucket to the basement utility sink.

The more times I clean the floor, it isn’t that my endurance grows or my knees hurt less, not that I become used to the pain or barrel through the work. I stretch time longer and stretch out, yoga poses shifting my form, adapting to go longer than the week before. My mind clears and fills, swells of thought rush in to fill the space of what I was just thinking. Or thought gets wrung out in the bucket, my worry twisted out to dripping, joy or excitement rubbed into the wood in small circles, then bigger circles. I make patterns and shapes. I challenge myself to go board by board, in a straight line.

I think of hosting guests. Am I washing away the memories or etching them deeper into the wood? If the finish is gone, am I ruining the wood? Perhaps this is the best, work with what’s before you. Adapt. Flex. Transform. My home is an anchor in my life. Her quirks and strange magic are familiar to me. Safe, even when technically not. The outlets with reversed polarity. The shower spigot that needs to be positioned just so to shut off the water. The weird crack I patched behind the bathroom mirror before hanging another. This is my home, but it’s also a work of art. A shapeshifting vessel where the light changing season to season casts each room anew.

A 2004 photo of Marina Abramović titled Cleaning the Floor shows the artist in a dark floor-length gown, her hands gloved, a bucket before her on a white tile floor.

If you do something long enough, you’ll supposedly transcend. Isn’t that the underlying mechanism of TM? Say your mantra, repeat it, and you’ll feel that plunge into a different consciousness. You’ll access some part of you otherwise inaccessible.

If a woman washes a floor on her knees for long enough, pressing deeper into the domestic sphere she’s been socialized to inhabit, will she transform the act? Will her sore knees transform her? Will anyone ever care as much as she does that the floors are clean?

Sometimes I think of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.” You know the words: “You do not have to be good…” But what if I love the home, the clean floors, the made bed, the folded laundry, the sanctuary I have created. What if I love the moment after the floors have dried, when I put on music and move. Or, having rushed home from work and cared for my pets, I change into a leotard, close the curtains, and dance. Ballet is its own endurance exercise, a spell cast between rooms, between the air and the floor. A test of how far I can bend and stretch, breath catching in my chest on the smoky days, sweat damping the wood on the hot ones. Lying flat on my back after I’ve exhausted myself. The wings of my shoulder blades leaving their mark when I get up.

Fem Tyler Durden core

X