on books and clean houses

The House of Many Ways.
Through the Looking Glass.
The Princess and the Goblin.

I read these children's books long ago, but I'm rereading them now. And suddenly I realized what they have in common: all of these works feature houses with mysterious entryways that open into passageways somehow never noticed by their inhabitants. There are other, similar books that I could mention--L. M. Boston's River of Green Knowe, for instance, or C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew--that also feature secret portals into other worlds or landscapes. But these don't make use of the building/house metaphor in quite the same way as the first set.

It's that house image--the house or building as a metaphor for the mind and its creativity--that I mentioned earlier as being the keystone of many Miyazaki movies. And I think it's significant, too, that Miyazaki designed the Ghibli House--his "museum" in Tokyo--along the same lines. The Ghibli house is a not a museum but a dwelling, with secret passageways, lots of open-air stairways, and nooky-type library rooms stuffed with books, papers, drawings, and notes. It's a wonderful place--the kind of place that makes your mind start buzzing with all the different possibilities. It's the kind of place that makes you think and that makes you want to do things--that makes you want to do everything. Preferably right now, and all at once.

Miyazaki movies (and the original Diana Wynne Jones books, on which Howl's Moving Castle is based) also prominently feature the metaphor of cleaning. Cleaning is the central theme in Spirited Away, which takes place in a magical bathhouse for the animistic spirits that populate Miyazaki's worlds. In one of the most gripping scenes, a river spirit who has somehow gotten a thorn wedged deeply inside him has become polluted with meters of detritus that must all be dragged out before he can be purified. It takes the empathy and compassion of Chihiro, the child-protagonist of Spirited Away, to recognize the injury and to brave the challenge of healing it.

It's a metaphor that works for me, because cleaning away the layers of clutter and dirt seem symbolic to me of keeping the mind's energy flowing and clear. And so I've been cleaning voraciously. It rather helps that got a new vacuum cleaner for Christmas--a Dyson! (no worries--it was what I really wanted)--and I'm going to say exactly the same thing that everyone else says about these vacuums: it has changed my life. Just like that. This thing is lightweight and easy and fun, if it's even possible for vacuuming to be fun. And between yesterday and today I've been cleaning up years and years of dirt with it. I can't believe how much dirt there was, all filtered down into the lowest layers of carpet. And it's not like I wasn't cleaning before. Of course I had another vacuum cleaner--a nice cheap upright vacuum from Target--and I used it regularly, dragging it up and down the stairs and otherwise doing my best to ruin my back.

But it couldn't do what this thing does. This thing cleans and purifies, and as it does that it makes you feel compelled to organize and discard.

Once we lived in a house that was sort of oddly shaped in one corner. There was a very acute angle in one side--it was kind of a parallelogram of a house--and from a simple calmness of mind perspective it was really a problem. Once an architect-friend visited us and pronounced that what we had going there was "a feng-shui vertex."

A vertex!

Well, of course it was. But the thing is, these vertexes can exist in a lot of places, and they aren't always as immediately recognizable as our acute-angled corner. They can sneak up on you if you let them. And now I have sucked all the shadow, the cobwebs, the dust, and the distraction out of my own home, and exposed what was underneath there all the time. I can see stuff again--stuff that, in many cases, I thought was lost. And when I see it I remember it, and I remember what I wanted to do with it to begin with.

It's all coming back now, and it feels like finding myself again.

And I think that's why that cleaning theme emerges so regularly these novels. Diana Wynne Jones' heroine in Howl's Moving Castle and its sequel, the House of Many Ways, spends days cleaning and organizing. Part of what she's doing is taking control over her environment; cleaning is a way of getting getting reacquainted with your own personal space and making it work for you. But cleaning is also a way of exploring. And if houses are metaphors for the mind, then cleaning out also signifies reacquainting yourself with yourself--your priorities, your forgotten interests, your original plans. It's all still there, once we give ourselves the chance to brush away all that unimportant stuff that somehow nonetheless becomes our priority.

It's good to know the original me is still there.