This exercise is so mindless and repetitive that it actually gives me time to ponder the great mysteries of life and becomes a steaming, growling metaphor for the mysteries themselves. The mind is the machine. The thoughts are the dishes, each unique yet similar to the others, all parading in a never-ending flow of gleaming, white porcelain. I enjoyed the crude, physical experience of dish washing, and the freedom it gave me. In retrospect, I see that physical labor helped liberate me from my middle class, religious upbringing, but as I learned later on in life, work itself is not always liberating.
Work is also enslavement.
In my longing for freedom, I turned labor into a mystical experience. Stuart and I are shoveling rocks and dirt from a construction site in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He tells me all about James Joyce as we heave the clods of dirt toward the embankment. The day before we unloaded many bags of horsefeed, rubbing shoulders with the drifters, ramblers and vagrants of the Southwest. I'm living in my own beatnik fantasyland.