is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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dirty, dog.
Two things I�m thinking today, of entirely different orders.
1.
Gus and I have housecleaners come twice a month to clean the house. It is good, because it means we will never have to argue over who was the last one to clean the bathtub. But I really can�t stand having my house cleaned by other people. It�s not that I have liberal guilt about paying someone to do my dirty work. Of course it matters what a person�s working conditions are. But we pay the people who clean our house a fair wage and we treat them well, and they advertised their services, and so on. I just think things are more complicated than the world that would render that kind of payment for service necessarily suspect, you know?
So it�s not that kind of guilt.
It�s something more complicated that I can�t quite get at. I think I feel violated when other people are pawing through my things. I know they move things around and put them in stacks because that is part of the evidence they leave that they cleaned. But in my world, the best cleaner would leave things just as they were found, but without the dust and dirt. I can�t tell if this is a bizarre form of emotional propriety around my STUFF or a more patent kind of control freakiness, or something else altogether, but I do feel it, every time. It was such relief to me to be out of town twice in a row when they came to do their handiwork last month. Of course I still found things out of place and it gave me that weird emotional-annoyance feeling. But that passes quickly, and then the bathtub is clean. All good.
But today they were here and I couldn�t be out of the house because I really needed to get some work done and couldn�t be sure that my office would be free of the computer tech who needs to fix my printer.
That I was equally worried about the computer tech guy being in my office suggests to me that I have some deeply set issues around solitude and space.
That isn�t really news. I need a lot of alone time. And it needs to be, actually, alone time, not just time spent in a different room.
This isn�t a complaint. It is just a rumination on one of my unexplained wierdnesses.
2.
There is this line in a short essay by Levinas called, �The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights.� He is describing a few aspects of life in the forced labor camp in which he resided in Germany for four years during WWII. He survived the war because he was wearing a French uniform when captured, and so was sent to a labor camp for Jewish soldiers rather than to a liquidation camp. Anyway, about the encounters with other human beings he and his compatriots had while imprisoned, he says that they tended to �strip us of our human skin,� because they were treated as subhuman, �a gang of apes.� That is nothing new, as far as narratives of the dehumanizing behavior on various sides of the war in WWII go, though nothing of its familiarity renders it less difficult to stomach.
But there was a dog in the camp for a couple of weeks. He showed up one day, and hung out for awhile, and they named him Bobby (which was, for them, an exotic name). The dog greeted them excitedly every day when they returned from forced labor, exhausted. Levinas calls Bobby �the last Kantian in Nazi Germany� because Bobby never failed to treat him like a human being.
And I never know when I read that line whether it is the funniest or the saddest thing I�ve ever read. I suppose it must be both.
(The line is also a dig at Kant, of course, since in Kant�s universe only human beings are capable of treating others with dignity. They do so because all human beings have the capacity to reason, a capacity which allows us to �treat others only as ends in themselves, never as means to an end� (don�t use people) or �Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law� (don�t do something that you wouldn�t want others to do). And yet the only Kantian left in Nazi Germany was a dog �without the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives.�)
It takes more than reason to give birth to a morality.
3:07 p.m. - March 23, 2010
Randy - 2010-03-25 00:52:44
Jill -
Look for different cleaners. You inherited your multiple stack syndrome from somebody and it was most likely me so I am familiar with the syndrome. We have had cleaners for years and they always leave every little stack exactly as they found it - same place, same order, just clean underneath. So it can be done if you just get the right crew.
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