Notes on Home

Here is another old blog post from a while back.
I've always been interested in literature and art as a way of documenting locality and home.
Home is a concept central to the discourse of modernity and one that is often weaponised by
reactionaries. In this piece, I'm attempting to illustrate how home is really a space of mutuality,
a place where borders can be let down and new social bonds forged.

'The Peasant Wedding' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1567)

“You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.”

(From The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin)

Home is a different mode of being to travel, a different velocity of perception. Like getting off a bike and walking, you enter a different state of consciousness altogether, your thoughts seem to slow down, spread out. At home, you fill the corners of the room, memories and feelings hang about certain objects, bits of furniture. It is a way of thinking.

“The illusion strengthening as he gazed, he felt

That such unfettered liberty was his,

Such power and joy; but only for this end,

To flit from field to rock, from rock to field,

From shore to island, and from isle to shore,

From open ground to covert, from a bed

Of meadow-flowers into a tuft of wood;

From high to low, from low to high,

yet still within the bound of this huge concave; here

Must be his home, this valley be his world.”

(From Wordsworth's 'The Recluse')

Home only gains meaning contrasted with travel. It isn't the material constitution of a place, nor is it characterised by possession, it is, rather, the sense of being able to become vulnerable and open yourself up to a place.

There is also a sense of excess to home; a feedback of exuberance and luxury. Signals go out into the enclosed space, bounce off the walls, the books. There is a kind of unravelling and remaking, a rekindling. We have much literature concerning travel, journeys outwards that become journeys inwards. Travel is a toughening against the outside. At home you don’t so much as build your character as enrich it. Travel works on scarcity, an impoverishment of the self in order to confront an elsewhere. A literature of home is one of deliciousness, of feasts and well-being. To this extent, home is best when it is shared.

Home is a central theme to much of John Clare’s poetry, where it becomes entangled with remembrance of things past and the social upheavals caused by enclosure. But, more so than railing against change, he rails against the destruction of home as a shared space, a community.

“That good old fame the farmers earnd of yore

That made as equals not as slaves the poor

That good old fame did in two sparks expire

A shooting coxcomb and a hunting Squire

And their old mansions that was dignified

With things far better then the pomp of pride

At whose oak table that was plainly spread

Each guest was welcomd and the poor was fed

Were master son and serving man and clown

Without distinction daily sat them down

Were the bright rows of pewter by the wall

Se[r]ved all the pomp of kitchen or of hall

These all have vanished like a dream of good”

(From The Parish, John Clare)

Home is about change, as change is the only certainty in life. It is where the borders can be let down, and new links forged. Like all worthwhile poetic constructs, home has become a victim of the wellness industry. Like meditation repackaged as a way to re-maximise productivity. Home also finds itself misappropriated at the hands of reactionaries, turned into a militant, exclusive construct, a strengthening rather than a loosening of borders.

The best images of home are ones of plenitude, well-being and mutuality. Rather than simply being a private space it is primarily a common space. We lose this sense of common space when home becomes under threat, where we retreat into the private, shoring up one’s borders against a perceived external threat. But we also become alienated from the true conditions of home when this happens, we’ve lost half its meaning, and can no longer thrive. This perceived threat imposes conditions of scarcity, a stricter economy of the home. Any celebration of the home should see it restored as a common space, characterised by rituals of mutuality. It is a creative space. It is, rather than a linear movement in one direction (as is travel) an outward movement in all directions simultaneously.