Much of emotion grapples with the transgression of boundaries, the breaking of taboos. Among the most consistent sources of this conflict is soil.
We long to feel grounded, the sense of being connected to a specific landscape of meaning. To be human is to be part of the living humus. We cherish fertile soil, especially the familiar stomping grounds of home.
On the other hand, the stuff of the rich land seems figuratively as well as literally beneath us. It’s a source of contamination that makes us feel dirty.
Good dirt provides us with food, a platform for all our activities, and a place to lay our dead. Yet, we struggle to avoid it. We live and work in gigantic containers with doors and windows shut to keep it out. We buy soaps and divert rivers to cleanse ourselves of it.
We can’t help but create dirt, though. A delicious meal inevitably leads to dirty dishes. A day of healthy exertion creates dirty laundry.
Not all dirt is physical, either. We can engage in dirty talk with a temporary thrill, though we would never want our words to be shared outside of an intimate partnership. We can feel dirty just thinking about many of our impulses, those that cross moral impulses or lead us to temporarily lose control.
This is the contradiction of feeling dirty. It thrills us and satisfies our hungers, then shames us in a cycle of attraction and repulsion. Dirt is contamination, a reminder that the tidy containers of civilized life are not as impermeable as we would like them to be. They are a reminder that, no matter how much discipline we cultivate, we cannot separate ourselves from the messy metabolism of life and death, from the smearing emotional proteins that we breed and kill, consume and dispose of, leaving a filthy trail in the path we follow desperately and deliciously from day to day.
