1001 Nights Cast

Into the washing machine.

What a jumble.

There goes trouble.

There’s a small child painting dry cement with a one-inch wet paintbrush, making lovely marks as she re-dips the brush into her bucket and crawls around and around. Smiling, giggling, chewing the brush end.

Everything bad has the chance to come clean. In Spanish they employ the verb to describe what we would call ‘cutting’ down the jungle, or ‘clearing’ the bush—‘limpiar’—to clean. The bush or jungle is there to be cleaned. It must be cleaned. Emptied of dirt.

An anthropologist once wrote of clean and dirty as women’s sphere of influence—our daily toil of marking the line between pure and impure. I interpret this as the reason why women maintain authority over washing machines—a machine for re-instating order, reinscribing purity, a ritual for living, a bind, a pleasure, a daily rebirth, a way of dealing with uncontrollable forces.

Throw politics in, throw in industrial relations legislation, cleanse it right out, suck all the colour out, dye it purple, hang it out to dry, re-stitch the seams. Remake the garment Japanese-style. Is it an entirely new garment? Have we seen this one before? What will be left of its original shape, its form stitched slowly over one hundred years? Zig-zagging back and forth, small gains, big losses, inching forward. Excuse me—which direction is progress? Where do I turn? Where do we head? Do we go round and round? Will we drown?

Where does all that dirty water go? Who is keeping track?

A friend of mine gathered stories of washing lines, of women’s habits, the social imaginary of the washing line. Hanging clothes in colour-co-ordinated order, attaching garments strictly according to size, refusing all but blue pegs; only using pegs which matched the colour of the clothes, long lines, lines that spin around in the wind, new pull-out lines for confined spaces, small lines on balconies, makeshift lines in bathrooms in wetter, colder climates.

What can we hang out, now that the God of small things seems to be looking elsewhere, looking at New Car magazines, the share prices and the brochures for high-rise investments on the Brisbane River? Are we allowed to hang out clothing with patches? What will happen if the cloth has faded? There are some kinds of dirt my washing machine won’t shift—slow shadows falling over thoughts, niggling worries edging towards the crushed centre, perspiration marks welling from anxious moments, blood darkening as it drenches the crotch.

Throw it all in, keep it churning, operate it by hand if you have to, don’t let any of it sink, keep sight as bits rise to the surface, they have more life in them yet. Things may transform, may shape-change, but there will always be the lines, the layers, the old promises, the collective memory. A different pooling, of ideas, of memories, of imagination, of hope, of beauty. There’s a great term, which is used to describe something that can occur in a film—a ‘boundary situation’—to be aware of meaningful as against meaningless existence.’ That’s in the mix too, the daily minute details that give us small doses of daily minute meanings. Maybe the God of small things always has one eye on those particles of life, and one eye on the material world. Which one engulfs and immerses? Which offers the pleasure of thought? The pleasure of action?