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Figure for the New Year*

January 23, 2022 4 Comments

I remember riding through the steam-vintage railyards of India and seeing the hopelessly sooty signs on lamp posts and station walls: Cleanliness is next to godliness.  The kind of thing Gandhi might have said at his ashram though others say John Wesley got there first.

It’s a sentiment shared around the world.  Stop for a moment at any of the bazaars and marketplaces in the global south and you’ll be thronged by hawkers selling ostrich feather dusters, whisks and traditional grass brooms, whatever the local tools for chasing dirt.  Aside from the artful cottage industry this represents, brooms are an abiding artifact of traditional culture, figuring in proverbs, poetry and adages.  A Kalahari folk song voices the taunt of a mother-in-law to a new bride:

Fiela, fiela, fiela ngwanyana,
Sweep, sweep, sweep little child, 
Fiela, ngwanyana!
Sweep, little child!
O se jele mathlakaleng.
Don’t eat surrounded by litter.

The suggestion: that fine dining, whatever the fare, goes south in a domestic mess.  The finest expression of that wisdom must be the care taken in the Japanese tea ceremony that begins with stringent cleaning.

Life begins again. In keeping with ancient counsel, the dawn calls for a fresh departure.  Here an Anuak woman in western Ethiopia sets about this iconic ritual as the world begins to stir. Her homeland, though bucolic in the picture above, has also been the scene of great suffering. The peaceable instrument she uses is a most rudimentary grass broom, but effective nonetheless. Photo credit: Eric Lafforgue   

So it is, that as dawn – most tellingly at New Year – comes to towns and villages across the globe, before households stir, before even cooking fires are lit, armies of children and domestic workers sweep courtyards and driveways, verandahs, patios and pathways, where little plumes of dust mark the gentle service they render in the half light.  Crumpled soft drink cans, bits of paper and plastic, bicycle tracks and footprints, yesterday’s ashes from the hearth, all traces of past doings are erased.  And in their place is left the feathered pattern of broom strokes, covering even the traces of the sweeper.

Written in an elegant hand upon the morning sand is the beguiling signature of new beginnings, an invitation to that finest of callings: to live freshly, earnestly, hopefully.  Proximate to godliness. 

*A version of this piece appeared in the author’s earlier collection, “Part 1:Dawn” in These Are the Footings (Pittsburgh: Roaming Pen Press. 2009), 10.

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Written by Jonathan Larson

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. wovenworks says

    January 23, 2022 at 2:39 pm

    Beautiful ♥️🙏

    Reply
  2. Mark Windsor says

    January 23, 2022 at 7:44 pm

    Very nice thoughts!

    Reply
  3. Douglas says

    January 24, 2022 at 2:14 am

    Ah wonderful, Jonathan!

    Agree that cleanliness is next to Godliness!! But I smiled to remember this poem by Louise Erdritch, whe feels that poetry might just go in the other direction:

    Advice to Myself
    by Louise Erdrich

    Leave the dishes. Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
    and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
    Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
    Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
    Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
    Don’t even sew on a button.
    Let the wind have its way, then the earth
    that invades as dust and then the dead
    foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
    Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
    Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
    or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
    who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
    matches, at all.
    Except one word to another. Or a thought.
    Pursue the authentic—decide first
    what is authentic,
    then go after it with all your heart.
    Your heart, that place
    you don’t even think of cleaning out.
    That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
    Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
    or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
    again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
    or weep over anything at all that breaks.
    Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
    in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
    and talk to the dead
    who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
    patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
    Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
    except what destroys
    the insulation between yourself and your experience
    or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
    this ruse you call necessity.

    “Advice to Myself” by Louise Erdrich from Original Fire. © Harper Collins Publishers, 2003.

    Reply
    • Jonathan Larson says

      January 24, 2022 at 2:55 pm

      Hello, Douglas! I am utterly taken by Erdrich’s lyricism, and her underlying passions. (She is also my jack pine neighbor from the north woods.). Who am I to gainsay such a celebrated voice? She has the great creation stories on her side that often begin with chaos and end with order and beauty. The occasional Bolshevik aside, I would only say that wherever the human hand, the wandering imagination makes itself felt, the result is artful, arresting, inviting. And Erdrich’s poem is exhibit ‘A’! A lovely thing to have emerged from the celery at the bottom of the fridge!

      Reply

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