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POOL OF MEMORIES | PAGE 2 OF 2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Kaufmann's book is filled with case studies of couples with often pathological and curious laundry problems. There's Bruno, an incorrigible slob who was tyrannized by his excessively tidy mother but who unconsciously yearns for his wife Nadia to become her. (As Neil Young put it, a man needs a maid.) There's Bernard, a long-standing bachelor so furiously passionate about ironing -- not to be confused with Isabelle, who irons everything including her socks -- that he and his wife, Geraldine, kept separate piles of his/her laundry. (When the author first interviewed the couple they were in their second week of marriage. Three months later, they were separated.) And there's Nadine, who's so ideologically opposed to the purchase of a washing machine that she and her husband still do their laundry at their respective parents' homes. (Lucky for them THEIR parents have no ideological problems with laundry.) But in his exploration of the dynamics of the couple, Kaufmann goes beyond the psychology of laundry and into another realm entirely. "Everything speaks," he says, "and everything speaks to us of the couple in different languages: the bed, the dining table, records, the dish-drying rack, the miniature plastic gondola brought back from a trip to Venice. The couple and the family construct themselves around these objects." And in this discursive of the dharma of the domicile Kaufmann is not alone. In "The Poetics of Space," French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote about the phenomenology of drawers, chests, wardrobes, nests, shells and corners, all of which come together in a room or house to create "psychological diagrams that guide us in our analysis of intimacy." Françoise Minkowsa, considered a "psychologist of houses," describes wardrobes as being "filled with the mute tumult of memories" and has written about the phenomenology of doorknobs. Is there something, in our frantic rush, that we Americans are missing? According to these philosophers of the foyer, who were writing about all this long before Vogue and other glossies brought Feng Shui to the masses, it's not just your laundry that speaks; all the objects that surround you are, in fact, signposts that chart the topology of your inner world. And you were thinking you are what you eat. On some level, laundry is indeed metaphysical. Viewed in its most exalted state, the washing machine performs a sort of ablution, removing the accumulated muck that taints our lives and going through cycles as this transformation ensues. All this reminds me of a time back in my single days when I would drop my laundry off at the cleaners. It would come back at the end of the day wrapped in thick blue craft paper, with a strangely agreeable hygienic luster. One would think that in this impersonal exchange laundry was no longer an "instrument of investigation" for delving into the complex world of the Other. Occasionally, however, the fugitive sock of a stranger would turn up in my little blue pack, a sign that my laundry had indeed co-mingled with, say, the cow-print boxers of the guy standing behind me at the checkout line and that it was, in fact, part of a great collective yet intimate process ripe with meaning. I realize now that the difference between doing my own laundry and sending it off to be done was in some ways similar to the difference between taking a jet across the country and taking a road trip. The former may be practical, but you miss the whole experience in the process. As the old saying goes, it's not the destination that counts, it's the journey.
The laundromat in Los Angeles vanished long ago, but it lives on yet in
the messy corners of my psyche. Though I have been enlightened by
Kaufmann's book, I still loathe laundry and dream of a life unfettered from
the shackles of hampers, detergent, drying racks and ironing boards. But
I'm now wise enough to know that even if we could avoid all the drudgery --
say we invented self-cleaning clothes -- that really wouldn't make a
difference. Like skeletons in the closet and excess baggage, dirty laundry
is something we take with us wherever we go.
Debra Ollivier's last story for Salon was "I'll be home for Sushi." |
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