Clean Up Your Room

Watershed Books
305 N. Main St.
Lakeport, California

June 2, 2006
Friday 3-5 p.m.

Listen to this phrase with your poet’s ears: “Clean up your room.” Memories come up, no? Since we are in Northern California, metaphysical correspondences come up too, no doubt. What is cleaning? Which room? The room of our house? Of our body? Of our lives? When we struggle with domestic order and sorting in our outer environment, it has inside benefits, too.

Glenn Wallis in his commentary on the Dhammapada: Verses on The Way—A New Translation of the Teachings of the Buddha says, “An important dimension of religion is a multi-layered system of ritual practices to assure purity and cleanliness” (p. 166). He cites:

Initiation rites, such as baptism, sprinkle water or fully immerse the body in water.
The water itself is ritually purified by saying special words over it—prayers or mantras—while making special gestures—the sign of the cross or mudras.
The initiate cleanses her body according to dietary rules of the community.
In many traditions, ablutions of some sort must be performed before daily ritual obligations can be fulfilled.
Ritual utensils, icons, and clothing are carefully washed.
The places where rituals are practiced—whether home altars or specially designated buildings—must be kept meticulously purified of both actual dirt and intrusive invisible forces.

As you listen to the poems from Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary I’m reading and commenting on today, I’d like you to keep in the back of your mind this question. Again, I pose it to you at the poetic, metaphorical level: Where are the places where your rituals are practiced? I mean this in the broader sense. What you do every day. The counter in your kitchen. Your desk at work. Where you make love at night. At what home altars and specially designated buildings are your rituals practiced? Are they kept meticulously purified? How do you need to clean up your room? What do you need to sort and clear out to make room for the new in your life?

For me, writing Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary became a way to clean up my room and move with the flow of sickness, old age and death that came into the forefront of my life in the summer of 2004.

“Clean up your room!” These words are enough to strike terror into the heart of most well-trained children. At least in my generation, raised in the 1950s when TV first came into being and waxing vinyl floors became all the rage.
TV aside, my childhood was somewhat anachronistic—I think of it as sharing characteristics of Victorian childhoods. I grew up on top of the bluffs above the Mississippi River in Southwestern Illinois on our homeplace, Evergreen Heights, pioneered by my great grandfather in the 1860s.

Before you can clean up your room, you have to have a room of your own to clean. Up until the time I went into school, I shared a room and a bed with my older sister, Julia, in the White Cottage. But, when our great aunties died, we moved a stone’s throw down to the Big Brown House where my father was raised and started a several-decades-long process of making it our own.

I want to credit my father for the quotation in this poem from my younger self. In the draft version I showed my father, the line read, “Daddy, doesn’t it make you sick that we have to start all over again?” When I read this to Pop, he said, [drop voice] “You’re misquoting yourself. I remember what you said exactly, because I thought at the time it was a large word for a little girl.” I also credit him for remembering the exact spot in the house where this conversation between us took place.

In “My Girl’s Life in My Pink Room” I tell you everything you really need to know to lay a vinyl floor—step by step instructions. We could probably publish it as a How-To article in Home Projects Magazine. When I was a child, I was inseparable from my father and followed him about everywhere he worked—always his little helper—sitting on the board to steady it while he sawed, or fishing electrical wiring. Because I was his side-kick, always trailing behind him, he gave me the nickname “Trailer.”

“My Girl’s Life in My Pink Room” also tells how to create and tend altars. This must have been the beginning of my connection to shrines. As an adult I became affectionately known as Shrine Mama for five years as I worked on Tibetan Buddhist shrines in California and in France. “My Girl’s Life in My Pink Room” was also the beginning of my life as an installation artist.

My girlhood room gave me my first sense of what, in Virginia Woolf’s phrase, it meant to have a room of my own—and, what creative acts I might perform within its walls.

MY GIRL’S LIFE IN MY PINK ROOM
We’d fixed up the White Cottage really nice.
When I had the mumps, Daddy stayed home,
read to me and put in an indoor bathroom.

Our family moved a few paces down to the Big Brown House
from the White Cottage when the Great-Aunties died.

When we first moved in, he and I sat on one of the floors together.
Daddy, isn’t it disgusting that we have to start all over again?
Slowly each of the fourteen rooms, five porches, and eight rooms in the basement
bent to fit our family of five.

Among Big Brown House mysteries
was a $100 bill in a safe in Gary’s Cowboy Room closet.
Play money? No. Real enough.
We turned it in. . . for his college education.

The 1950s.
How do you spell “modernity”?
V-I-N-Y-L
Vinyl floors.
With his seven-year-old apprentice,
he set about transforming the Big Brown House.
By the time we came to the room that would be mine,
I knew how to do it by heart.
Nail down a plywood sub floor.
Strip the joints where the plywood comes together.
Spread black goop.
Roll-out tarpaper with its silver ghost markings.
Nail it down. Watch though!
That black goop easily sticks to skin and under nails.
It only comes off with an oily spirit.

We set up lines of string, using plumb line.
Anchored the string with small nails to make straight rows.
Then spread tan goop with a serrated-toothed trowel.
Finally, the pink-and-grey colored tiles laid in our own pattern.

We began in one corner and worked outward.
Checked the get-away path.
Tamped-down the finished floor with a heavy metal roller, my favorite part.
The roller creaked and little bubbles pressed out.

Modern floors to sport the antiques mother refinished.
I was crazy about pink then, as little girls are.
Pop didn’t care much for pink.
Okay, he hated pink.
But, he did care for me, and so pink it was.
Even the wallpaper bloomed little pink flowers.

I slept underneath a double wedding-ring quilt, part of my trousseau.
The carved walnut headboard loomed above my head.
Marble-topped dressers and, in the middle,
a round table of the sort heroines in the old-fashioned books
I read might have taken tea.
Against one wall, a white china pitcher
and washbasin on a dresser with a false top and secret drawer.

The weekly ritual of changing the tabletop tableaus.
I took ribbons from funeral biers from the potting shed
and twisted these into little nests
filled with wee baskets and figurines
I scoured the house for.

Treasure abounded in our house.
Scraps of lace.
A wasps nests.
Birds eggs.
Butterfly wings.
Tiny vases filled with lilies of the valley.

Altars I tended as devoted handmaiden.
Arranging tiny worlds that I controlled.
Door closed as I worked,
brow furrowed in fierce concentration.
Hummed hymns of my girl’s life in a pink room.

Where do all these things come from that we bring into our rooms once we have one? My family to a person collects things. Some of these things are valuable and some are in the trash to treasure category. We are all skilled scavengers and fixers and rescuers of things others discard. My mother was the queen of collectors and loved to give gifts, even things most other people would never even think of as giving. “Mama’s Suitcase” tells about my mother’s relationship with things—both cultural and natural objects.

MAMA’S SUITCASE
When I grew up and moved away,
Mama’s talent for finding treasures
amplified to transporting treasures.
She showed up on my doorstep,
slipped inside,
and opened her suitcase.
The great unveiling.
Ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Art opening.
My Mama’s suitcase, a magician’s trunk.
She peeled back the brown tweed flap of her suitcase
as carefully as a bandage off a skinned knee.
Instead of the yelp of pain, a moment of startled pleasure.
Spring.
Still-damp iris newly dug from the ground.
On top of a pantry’s worth of dishes:
thick blue glasses,
blue mugs with woodpecker handles,
and tiny Delftware saucers.

Summer.
Square-dance dresses cushioned just-ripe tomatoes
that peeked up from gingham ruffles.

Fall.
A ready-to-put-in-the-oven
Thanksgiving dinner.
Complete with frozen goose.

Christmas.
A Christmas tree from our woods
with sap still on it.
A collection of heirloom ornaments.

Treasure left behind
left room for taking treasure back.
Dimpled rocks, cuttings from plants.
Old-fashioned quilts
from roadside stands,
regional recipe books.
Tourist pamphlets
with exact history of each place she visited.

Get those details right for the trip reports to follow—
There will be a quiz.

Some of our trash to treasure projects never made it to treasure. After my sister died and I started to spend so much time again in the big brown house taking care of my mother, I discovered that many of the treasures she had collected all over the world had devolved into trash.

KNICK-KNACKS
“Knick-knack, paddy-wack give-a-dog-a-bone.
This old man came rolling home.”

The house is filled with them.
Knick-Knacks.
They are driving me crazy.
Why didn’t Mom know that the more stuff
crammed into the room, the less you see?

Wherever they roamed, they collected them.
As soon as she came home, she hung them,
stacked them, and packed them.

The house is decorated in late Victorian revival.
All over the house, I find them.
Covered in dust and mold.
Eaten by mice and moths and weevils.
My favorite things ruined.

This morning, I’ve had enough!
I declare this a Knick-Knack Free Zone!

I share many characteristics and habits of my mother’s. Collecting articles from magazines and newspapers for redistribution is one of them. After all the clearing I did at my parents’ home in Evergreen Heights in Illinois, I could see clearly what I needed to do in my own home. Last summer I cleared out my studio and donated about 16 car-loads to the crisis center and other places. Here’s a maxim: To make space for your life, make space for yourself in your space. And here’s a definition of clutter—anything unfinished, unused, unresolved, tolerated, or disorganized. “Paper” is another poetry how-to article. Maybe we need to start a new kind of magazine? A poet how-to journal, perhaps?