Abstract
There was a place in my life where I had the time and space to reflect more deeply on the intricacies of home. Here my sense of where I was shifted and stirred, along with my relationship with some of the ‘things’ that made up my home. The washing machine that seemingly existed as a complete, discrete ‘thing’ prior to arriving in my home transgressed into my washing machine. It became, as I describe below, co-produced within my home life – a co-production constituted through a myriad of near and far relationalities. This ‘thing’ lost its place as a machine conveniently located within the kitchen and became places.
There was a place in my life where I had the time and space to reflect more deeply on the intricacies of home. 1 I had had a baby and having just started a PhD with an interest in deep ecology, domestic relations were taking precedence over connections with wilderness. I began pondering the holism espoused by deep ecologists and where suburban life fitted in. 2 There seemed to be room (not to mention some practical necessity) for focusing my scholarly attention on where I was at, rather than where I might want to be.
With a ‘pram in the hallway’, 3 backpack and tent were cupboarded in favour of baby-circumscribed writing time.
My sense of place stirred and shifted, in conjunction with my relationships with some of the things that made up my home. The washing machine that seemingly existed upon purchase as a complete discrete ‘thing’ transgressed into my washing machine. It became, as I describe below, co-produced within my home life – a co-production constituted through a myriad of near and far relationalities. This ‘thing’ lost its place as a machine conveniently located within the kitchen and became places. 4
The washing machine arrives under the burden of necessity. Years of quiet, deliberate handwashing succumb to the threat of soiled nappies and are given away. Purr, whiz, whir replaces slosh, splash, slop.
The 2005 machine fits nicely into its 1963 designed spot, as if it is meant to be. The kitchen feels balanced; fridge block white and tall down one end, and the washing machine white and squat down the other. Next to the new addition, the laundry sink loses status and becomes drain – a repository for excess suds, grimy gushes and spun-off trickles.
The number of dials and buttons on the washing machine announce a prowess, a complexity of being, that surpasses that of the fridge. One dial is all there is to fridge – less cool, mild, cooler, coolest. Washing machine, on the other hand has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, A, B, C, D. Spin speed, temperature. Start delay, eco, rapid, intensive rinse, rinse hold, easy ironing. And ON/OFF. The fridge is always ON, washing machine chooses its moment; enough to fill the ‘tub’, detergent in, taps open – this is its time.
I listen to the gurgling of water through pipes, watch spinning colours through the rounded glass, hear the murmuring of well-engineered mechanics, and the smart computerised ‘click’ as the switch is made from wash to rinse. The sounds my machine makes are reassuring. My machine purrs – gently warmly round and round caressing fabric, gathering garments. It whizzes – in an instant, no delay, it will be done! And whirs – this is my purpose, I am here for no other reason.
It is happy, I am happy. The damp washing is spotless and as I hang it out in a prayer-flag line, my toes nestled in grass and my face to the sun, a sense of profound well-being swells up, through and around my pregnant belly.
The first loads are exciting. Bedding is stripped, covers torn off, and spreads unfurled. Everything washable and perhaps a little dirty is gleaned. As I load I squat, face to face with washing and heart to heart with machine. As the tumbling of clothes begins vibrations shimmer from machine through floorboard, penetrating the soles of my feet, stimulating skin, bone and muscle; nudging and snuggling in one continuous thrilling movement. Travelling on up, embedding within calf, skirting knee, wrapping thigh, these vibrations come to rest finally, nestling deep and certain within my womb.
I breeze about my springtime home. I tell my friends about my machine; about this new presence in my life. As they push through fly beading into my kitchen, I introduce them to it. I throw my head back laughing as they acknowledge me and my machine with the self-consciousness of unintentional voyeurs.
The vacant lot on top of the machine rapidly becomes colonised. Seeds to be sown, tools, uncertain socks, bags, odd bits and stray pieces jostle and joust. Like lichen on concrete these colonisers do the initial works of homemaking before the hard blank substrate begins to soften and yield.
Washing machine presents space for its own affiliation. It announces its beingness through rhythmic undulations of sound and movement that resonate through me and the timbered stirrings of my home. My machine emerges from its factory finish, the cool monotony of the showroom floor, into the haphazard warmth and kitchen clutter of family life.
A friend tells me that my machine is a water guzzler. The four and a half stars tacked on its front are four and a half stars for outdated efficiency and an industry rigged rating system. I return home bothered and confront my machine.
There is a seismic shift in understanding between myself and my machine. Its strangeness I find overwhelming; the mess of litter on its top annoying, and now interlaced with grime and garbage; its noise too loud, jarring with the buzz and hum of the summer’s day. Anything other than a No. 5 wash forces me to rummage through the machine manual of mistranslation.
My friend tells me that there are machines – water-friendly and rating-wise – about to enter the market. And that they provide the perfect upgrade opportunity for my machine!
My machine now whines on the spin cycle. A ceaseless eeeeeeeeeee rounds the corner, echos down the hall, steals under my newborn’s door and shimmies through the cot bars. The whine becomes a wail.
Waking baby, wasting water, obsolete and out of step. The washing is clean, true, but I’m being tugged and towed away from my machine towards a newer one, a better one; one with more responsibility in regard to water; one that doesn’t gather grime and garbage as it takes its place within my home; one that perhaps sings and sings sweetly to my unsettled child. What is my old machine to me now, in the face of this?
I know what this machine is now! Flayed fingers fiddling knobs from plastic moulding; an open cut mine 10 rings deep and falling daily; shadows fleeting across a cinder floor; the sun-burned sienna through oil-hung smoke. The once-was-water river lancing the arid-creeper plain; the missionised slumber of no-place people; underground chess in a far eastern pit; carrion on corpse of carrion past.
I ken threads connecting far flung places and absolute strangers, threads that run taut, crossing, tangling, entwining and bunching in a global webwork of progress and development. And all leading across ocean, over hill, through air to my home, to my kitchen and my machine.
My machine – a hub of the careless chaos of extraction, production, competition and consumption. This thing in my home! How can I live with this, be with this thing now I know what it is?
To acknowledge it is pain. When it captures my eye, as I touch it as I must – pressing, turning, sliding and stuffing – I attempt to hold it apart from me. I attempt to leave this machine to its own devices; to let it be within its own machinations, but the monstrosity of it subsumes me. Mixed with some ghostly vestiges of pain, guilt and despair I now attempt to contain my knowledge of this machine, but the booming dynamic complexity of it all ricochets throughout. A mass of nausea tattles and tolls in my throat, and I reach for my machine with flu-ache arms, touching it with reluctance once, maybe twice a week. The matting of insipid threads that is my machine holds tight around my neck.
Its presence puts my kitchen on an uneven keel. It gouges, sinking lino into water-soft boards; wave upon wave of hammering pounds strut and beam to breaking point. Stoved debris shifts, falling over board, marooned within a whirlpool of dust, awash between wall and machine. T-shirt underarms retain the stench of stressed out sweat; seams unravel around the cut and thrust of wash and rinse; and there is no shifting stains seeping, straining deep within warp and weft.
Gasping why, how, another way, get rid of it, hand wash, someone else, something else take responsibility for this thing!
I fill it with nappies that have cradled the bottom of my eating, growing, thriving little boy. Week upon week this machine takes the clothes that rub up against me, caressing my nakedness and speaking my name. It dwells within my home as part of me, and it can be nothing but my responsibility.
So I grieve.
My machine becomes the locus of lament for how the world is. I grieve the futility of my society that necessitates subjugation and subsumption as a means of handling a bit of baby poo. I grieve the systems, beings and things, the waterways, hillsides, caves, ice, wind and fire that are my machine. I grieve also the slaughter, mayhem and madness that are my machine. And I grieve me – a loss of strength as weakness of arms steals through torso and clambers up neck; a loss of certainty in the choices I make for living right within this world. Who am I and how should I be within a home, a community and culture that are bound to the earth through machine?
There are no pathways out of here, no cairns marking an old trail, the land too dry for mossy-trunk guidance. A westerly billows with bytes of eco-info, but here these speak only of dislocation and disassociation. As my machine cycles and autumn stirs, I sit in my kitchen, toes curled off the cooling lino and dry lips drawing dampening air, helpless.
Options for escapism present themselves – rationalism, computerism, sensationalism, and televism – but all are temporal and all are conceited in their denial. To opt-out, drop-out the most futile and craven form of abdication.
While this grief is not all consuming, it surprises me as put-aside pains and spliced longings come to join my feelings for my machine. I do not grieve my machine in isolation but as part of the fabric of my life, the fabric of world. The interconnected, interrelated world is bound within my sadness for me and my machine.
Calling it a machine, a mere contraption of cause and effect, now seems absurd. This entity is the rough and raw of how we are within the world, and the manifestation of who we perceive ourselves to be. It is the interrelations of us, earth and all the happenings, things and beings that these entail.
There is no need and, indeed, no possibility of hiding from this entity and the grief it evokes. I can’t hide from world! Instead my grief lies across my chest, heavy, perpetual and wide awake. The insipid necklace has unfurled and fallen; now blanketing my ribs as a capillary shawl. It is warm, emanating a power potent with certainty.
I load with purpose; the very act of washing has become a mark of a different way of being. As I sense this entity through touch, smell, sight, sound and motion I experience the wonder and the crudity of this world, and I affirm my place within it all.
The places within my machine speak of relationships bound and unbound, of change wrought through love and violence. Eventually, slowly, painfully, my sense of place settled. Although I still feel the pull of wilderness, ‘sense of place’ is no longer something to be pursued and connected with. It is entangled within the taken-for-granted meshwork, 5 knotted through machine, home, work and play, and popping up occasionally in wonderful and surprising ‘minor experiences’. 6
