My Filthy Sponge
Goauche and watercolor on board, JD, 2025
Natural sponges, a Google search tells me, are approximately 66 percent empty space. Imagine having a body like that, all porous potential for contraction and expansion, intake and expulsion. That capacity depends on flexibility, especially once removed from the environment in which acting as a giant filtration system provides the nutrition for growth and survival. Removed, as in dead, a natural sponge lasts quite awhile before it dries and crumbles. But a synthetic sponge, human-manufactured, has a different lifecycle entirely. It does not work like a chimney tube with that thing that the Wiki tells me is called an “osculum”—the controlled opening through which the constant exhalation passes.
No, my filthy kitchen sponge is a simulacrum of that natural object, not the real thing, though the aspirational trajectory of its production has succeeded admirably. The porous cellulose absorbs as readily as any remnant of a once living thing. But the pedigrees are radically different. Living sponges are ancient creatures and appeared about 700 million years ago, even before the Cambrian explosion, that significant burst of speciation that happened about 150 million years later. They didn’t have hard shells and didn’t need the minerals from continental erosion and runoff that came with later tectonic plate shifts and atmospheric conditions that made the oceans rich in minerals for making exoskeletons and hard shells among other evolutionary advantages.
This sponge, this one right here, has no particular identity or connection to those ancient critters. Made of cellulose in a formula developed by DuPont in the 1940s it belongs to that generation of synthetic objects that had their own population explosion in the middle of the last century—though cellulose, which is processed plant fiber, was actually discovered or invented in the 1830s, making it one of the first synthetic materials manufactured. Start reading about cellulose and you go right down a very deep rabbit hole into the structure of plant cell walls and the history of thermoplastic polymers, all highly absorbent. As to the manufacturing processes, they unfold in a narrative as highly spun as the fibers.[1] Read the site in the footnote and find out how all of those pores are made from melting sodium sulphate crystals in a mixture of hemp and wood pulp, for instance.
The relation between sponges and hygiene is an old one, says the “How Products are Made” site. Roman soldiers each carried one to use as toilet paper, which makes my filthy little sponge seem pristine by contrast. Amazing that the organic material was not devoured by hordes of bacterial invaders eager for feasts of fecal matter and “spongin” which is the main component of natural sponges. The Romans knew their technical infrastructure to be sure and also cushioned their helmets with the harvested creatures.
Now the daily rituals of cleaning require tools for mopping up the spills on the countertops and sink, and so it falls to the humble sponge to do constant service. As a good friend of mine once said, there is no lowest position for a sponge, it can always fall farther. Perhaps a good lesson to learn, though in the case of the sponge virtue rather than wickedness seems to account for the fall, through the unlimited rungs of an unnamed hierarchy.
The simple physical act by which squeezing the pores shut and then letting them open so they suck up liquid occurs is only part of the story of how they work. Cellulose is a highly absorbent fiber—but what are its mechanisms? Detailed analysis takes us immediately into the realm of organic chemistry and a specialized terminology identifying cellulose as an “unbranched homopolysaccharide” (which means it is a naturally occurring sugar-based polymer) whose ability to interact with water without dissolving into mush has been studied in great detail.[2] In fact, the plant-based substance, cellulose, is characterized as “recalcitrant” to water, a succinct description of a complex condition.
As a concept, absorption is already a topic to ponder. The rapid shift in scale from a physical action to a biochemical one is an aspect of this reflection, but so is the association with thought forms, the unique qualities that absorption has in the psyche. Are some experiences able to access the neurotransmitters in my brain in ways that bond similarly, hooking into available chains of molecular structure through energy bonds of which I am only partially, if at all, aware? Which atoms or outer electrons link to neurons or perceptrons and sustain an engagement long enough for attention to be focused, ideas or sensations to be taken up, processed, and metabolized within the physiology of awareness?
I am nowhere as absorbent as my yellow sponge, but also, therefore, not so readily contaminated with the many memes in the daily data streams or microbial organisms whose presence in the porous substance is the subject of repeated warnings. After three days of use of any actual sponge, apparently, these populations pose a dire threat to my well-being that should be countered with the severe disciplines of washing, bleaching, and other purification measures that themselves seem fraught with potential bad side effects. One source warns against over cooking sponges when using a microwave to purge them of the unicellulars who have taken up residence, noting that left too long in the oven the material will turn into a nasty mess resistant to cleaning…I am not particularly squeamish about the life-forms in my sponge, nor worried that they might invade, led by some fearless Genghis Khan of the microbial world in an assault against my immune system. But within the larger domestic economy, a policy of regular replacement has taken hold.
This means that I have a serial relation to sponges, no attachment to any one in particular. They come and go from my life in a long parade of recruits one after another. I would probably hold on to them longer than I should, my miserly impulses stronger than my hygienic ones, but in these days, I lengthen my commitment to each sponge, extend our ephemeral relationship, because the pattern of constant consumption feels unsustainable. The fragility of supply chains and global networks, sources for the raw materials, labor for their extraction, processing, and shipping, all the many factors that combine to make these products appear, pristine and slightly damp in their plastic packaging, is ever present. I can’t shake my sense of the precarity of all things and systems, so that counting on the infinite replacement seems foolish and naïve. Reliance on abundance feels like a bad habit in these times, and careful husbanding of resources a small but perhaps helpful bulwark against the vicissitudes of what may come.
And so I justify my attachment to the filthy sponge, knowing it should be jettisoned, but also holding on to it just a little longer. So many things are like that. Knowing exactly when to let go is hard.
[1] How Products are Made: Sponge. https://www.madehow.com/Volume-5/Sponge.html
[2] Anita Etale, Amaka J. Onyianta, Simon R. Turner, and Stephen J. Eichhorn, Cellulose: A Review of Water Interactions, Applications in Composites, and Water Treatment. Chemical Reviews. Vol. 123,No.5, January 9, 2023. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemrev.2c00477
Imagine an interesting sponge! Not the crook who siphons your income but the otherwise invisible object.