the cleaning
Have you ever cleaned a sofa with one of those upholstery-cleaning vacuum machines? You first have to spray down the sofa surface with a cleaning solution that loosens the accumulated dirt and dust and dead skin cells and gunk-from-under-fingernails. Suddenly the sofa looks worse than it did when you started. It is not only dirty, it is now also wet, and the dirt that was lodged deep in the layers of fabric is now rising to the surface.
After the spraying, you use a vacuum hose to suck up all the dirt that’s now mixed with the cleaning solution. That new, gray liquid you have produced, the mix of dirt-dust-skin-cells-gunk and cleaning solution, goes into a tank in the vacuum machine. It looks more abundant than you would have ever imagined the dirt-dust-skin-cells-gunk in your sofa to be. Indeed, if you were to now pour that gray liquid back onto your sofa, it would make the sofa appear dirtier than it ever seemed before. Without the concealing power of slow accumulation, all of the dirt and dust and dead skin cells and gunk-from-under-fingernails would sit on the surface of the sofa, and without the passing of time to allow the eye to practice its seemingly boundless powers of adaptation, this all-at-once stain would appear obvious, ruinous, irreparable.
Okay, so you wouldn’t pour the gray liquid back onto the sofa. No, you wouldn’t do that. If you are like me, you would take the machine to the sink, disconnect the gray-liquid tank, open the spout at its end, and pour the liquid down the drain. You would rinse the tank. You would let it dry, then put it back in its place in the machine, and then put the machine back in its place in the closet until next time the sofa gets dirty, even though you dread it a little bit. For a while during the cleaning everything looks dirtier than it was before you started.