what does it take to go to bed?

Categories are helpful. There is on and off, inside and outside, black and white, clean and unclean. The last of these in particular I seem to have grasped onto more than others.

I don’t know when instinct became a kind of conscientious delineation, but certainly by high school I had developed a somewhat strict spatial sense of bodily cleanness and uncleanness. To go to bed, I had to be clean. The sole mechanism to become clean when I was unclean was, in my mind, to take a shower. What made one unclean? To come into contact with unclean objects, which included, for instance, anything outside the house, and perspiration. These axioms, of course, necessitated additional consideration; above all, they introduced notions of inside versus outside the house. Well, I seem to have subconsciously decided, the inside the house consisted also of the deck. There were also certain, hidden, temporal factors. After the body was clean for two days uninterrupted, it decayed into an unclean state. During the height of summer mere existence meant contact with perspiration.

The move into university dormitories complicated these rudimentary systems. Some refitting of existing principles meant that inside consisted of the entire dorm building. But there were certain complications. Whereas the previous two-valued logic reasoned in cleanness and uncleanness, I found that a third category existed in the wild: something closer to foulness. Indeed, the floor of the communal bathroom was unquestionably foul, and although_uncleanness_ could be tolerated as long as it was cleansed before going to bed, contact with foul surfaces was to be altogether avoided. So I wore slippers to the bathroom.

But there is a problem: do not the slippers become foul by virtue of contact with the foul bathroom floor? At this point, it is interesting to note the mysteriously regulated taint property of uncleanness. An object is made unclean by way of contact with an already unclean object. This was true before: the body’s contact with unclean surfaces outside the home made it also unclean. But there seemed to be certain objects which resisted taint: somehow, an unclean body did not make a chair unclean such that a clean body sitting in it would become unclean again. Perhaps these may be taken as exceptions to the taint mechanism, though it is perhaps more elegant to understand that, even in the previous system, there were already three possible states: clean, unclean, and a sort of neutral; and unclean objects tainted only clean objects but not neutral ones. Thus furniture and floors in the home were inherently neutral. Now, if uncleanness is like its degenerate nephew foulness in this manner, we may understand slippers also to be neutral. With these middle-men between them and the foul bathroom floor, clean and unclean feet could remain as such.

But it is not quite correct to say that slippers are simply neutral; I regarded them as capable of transferring foulness from the bathroom to my room whilst leaving the body unaffected. Instead, we might do better to imagine a slipper, though physically a singular object, metaphysically as two conjoined objects: a bottom part and a neutral top part. Neutrality was, like uncleanness, a characteristic inherent to certain objects but, unlike uncleanness, did not taint.

This period saw an additional curious development. I often wore flip-flops during the warmer months, and my feet, being exposed to elements in a way they are not inside socks and shoes, picked up dirt and grime to a degree such that it would not do to consider the top part of a slipper as simply neutral. They became obviously unclean over time. Then, to wear them after showering would make the feet unclean again. I need two sets of slippers: one for clean feet and another for unclean feet. Each slipper was, then, three parts: a bottom part which was always foul (though not inherently), a top part which was either clean or unclean, and an intervening neutral layer.

There were times, of course, when I accidentally used the unclean slippers for clean feet, but it was sufficient to wash just the feet again. It seems that the body, previously taken as a whole, was refined into two parts separated by some neutral layer: the feet and the rest of the body. Washing made each clean, but the feet could become unclean without tainting the rest of the body.

But even this quaternary logic is deficient. I am prompted by the question: why are shoes worn outside not to be worn inside the house? Even supposing that they are unclean or even foul, in one way or another the supposed neutrality of the floor is not respected; somehow this makes the floor unclean, such that clean feet become unclean upon contact. One solution is to understand the bottom of shoes as foul and the floor as unclean-resistant neutral but not foul-resistant neutral. This is unsatisfying for at least two reasons. Firstly, the shoes do not make the floor foul—and therefore to be altogether avoided—but merely unclean. Secondly, the bottoms being not inherently foul, this suggests that the good, solid earth outside is like the floor of the university bathroom. The latter is rather objectionable where the former is not.

Then alongside foulness and uncleanness there is an additional category for which I struggle to find an appropriate name. It is like its cousins in that it taints, but it is unlike in that it does not respect neutrality and, when tainting, mellows out into uncleanness. But such a proliferation of additional categories with specialised taint behaviours is fraught with complexity: what happens when an object of this state contacts a foul object? Since foulness seems “worse”, surely it becomes foul. But does it then suddenly respect neutrality?

Indeed, notions of neutrality have severely complicated our understanding, breaking the simple ordering of cleanness, uncleanness, and foulness, where each may “decay” into the next via taint. Though intuitively somewhere between cleanness and uncleanness like a zero between positive one and negative one, from the perspective of taint, neutrality lies somewhere outside this ordering; it does not suffer taint and therefore does not decay, nor does it taint and cause decay.

Perhaps the simplest solution is to consider whether or not an object respects neutrality as a separate axis, say respectfulness. Respectful objects behave as previously described, but disrespectful objects override neutrality in taint. Additionally, just as unclean objects taint clean ones, disrespectful taint respectful ones. Better yet, the cleanliness categories themselves are qualified by respectfulness. The three basic cleanliness categories and two respectfulness categories give rise to six qualified cleanliness categories: respectfully clean, disrespectfully clean, respectfully unclean, disrespectfully unclean, respectfully foul, and disrespectfully foul.¹ The taint behavior of respectfulness is carried over, such that the disrespectful categories may taint their respectful counterparts: for instance, disrespectfully unclean objects make respectfully unclean ones to become disrespectfully unclean.

Thus the ground outside is disrespectfully unclean, causing shoe bottoms to become the same. Wearing those shoes indoors causes the floor to also become disrespectfully unclean. There is a problem! Shouldn’t wearing slippers with clean feet on this sullied floor still keep the feet clean? But since the floor is disrespectfully unclean, the bottom of the slipper is likewise. Since it is disrespectful, the slipper’s neutral layer—and therefore the top—is also made disrespectfully unclean! This is severe indeed.

The situation is remedied by a distinction between strong and weak neutralities. The former is stubborn and unyielding even to disrespect, but the latter puts up little resistance. Hence the weakly neutral floor is easily tainted by disrespectfully unclean things, but the slipper’s middle is strongly neutral.² It is pertinent, then, that the weakly neutral floor does not become disrespectfully unclean or foul. This rule, though only now properly formulated, has become so engrained as to provoke, at times, silent distress at the homes my friends, where shoes are worn about without much thought.

Indeed, these are the “policies” which denote the “bad situations.” That the bed must not become unclean was the original, explicit policy. Now, additional, implicit ones are coming into view. It is, in fact, a new policy which has in the first place prompted all this reflection.

I recently purchased a navy blue braided rug, which I quite like, and I find myself loath to step on it with my slippers, whose bottoms are rather blackened from soot (and categorically unclean). A new policy had already formed: the rug should remain clean. But it is rather inconvenient to take off one’s slippers before walking onto the rug and to need to return to that exact point on the perimeter to leave it. Instead, I supposed that I could make an effort to keep the entire living room clean and use slippers in only the hallway and the rest of the apartment. This is somewhat less error-prone, too, as the doorway is a signal to switch into and out of the slippers.

The astute reader will have noticed that this specific arrangement and policy are problematic for at least two reasons. Firstly, the rug policy is violated irrespective of slipper use: feet returning from the outside are respectfully unclean, and they taint the rug to become likewise respectfully unclean. Secondly, these issues cascade to the bed policy as well: clean feet which have stepped on the rug become respectfully unclean and therefore ineligible for entry into the bed. Does the problem go away if we consider the rug to be weakly neutral? Yes, but then one must wonder why respectfully unclean slipper bottoms should not be used upon it. It is insufficient to say that the rest of the apartment—and thus the slipper bottoms, too—are disrespectfully unclean, for then it would be permissible to walk around with shoes on. This situation calls for a richer set of cleanliness categories: there is some notion of soiled objects between unclean and foul ones. Even with this addition, the logic of respectfulness versus weak and strong neutralities extends in the obvious way. Therefore shoe bottoms are disrespectfully soiled, and floors may become respectfully unclean but not worse. The rest of the apartment and slipper bottoms are disrespectfully unclean, and the rug must remain weakly neutral.

After heaving a sigh of relief, one is confronted with the thought: what in the world have we spent the last 1900 words doing? There is a moment when the formalist must finally, amidst the flurry of definitions and axioms and corollaries, pause to wonder if his systems meaningfully reflect reality. Of course, there is at least some, if minimal, basis in an understanding of hygiene. But this is no logic for hygiene. I suppose it is rather a logic for the heart, which in the tumult of cares and worries latches onto firm guides. But few perhaps, if any, will sympathise fully with what has been unraveled here.