frailty

'Everything breathes again

The tablecloth is white'

 (Rene Cazelles, de terre et d'envolee, 1953 quoted in Bachelard, below) 

'It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality' 

(Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space p. 61)

round to home

"Journey does imply a movement through time and space, as though that's what a life is. And sometimes it strikes me that we live on a round planet. You can't get outside the circle of everything. Luckily....We have something that is eternally spherical....you see that you come from somewhere, that you can't possibly name.....when you look at it as a journey, it's a very disappointing journey; it ends up in a terrible place (laughter)." 

Susan Murphy, Zen Roshi, writer, filmmaker, broadcaster, speaking on ABC radio national 19/12/2009  'This is not the way home: on satellite navigation, the perfect woman, and not having a sense of direction'

'he had been told that life was beautiful'

'No! Life is round'

 

(Joe Bousquet)

is life round?

'Life is probably round'

 Van Gogh

the space of a tree

'Space, outside ourselves, invades and ravishes things:

if you want to achieve the existence of a tree,

invest it with inner space, this space

that has its being in you. Surround it with compulsions,

it knows no bounds, and only really becomes a tree

if it takes its place in the heart of your renunciation'

 

(Rilke (1924) Poeme)

the door

'At the door of the house who will come knocking?

An open door, we enter

A closed door, a den

The world pulse beats beyond my door'

 

(Pierre Albert Birot, Les Amusements Naturels)

what makes a local?

Today a child told me that locals slow their cars down for people and especially for ducks who may be crossing the road. You can tell, he said, that people who don't are not locals.

retreat

Peter Zumthor's secular retreat

out of place

"The Greenham women were metaphorically described as dirt because they were women on their own outside a heavily masculinized air force base...The use of dirt metaphors to describe Greenham women is evidence for a way of understanding these women as out of place"

Cresswell, T. (1997) Weeds, Plagues & Bodily Secretions. A Geographical Interpretation of Metaphors of Displacement. 

making an air base your home (for 19 years)

96 cruise nuclear missiles as your neighbour?

the basis of all life

"On the 5th September 1981, the Welsh group “Women for Life on Earth” arrived on Greenham Common, Berkshire, England. They marched from Cardiff with the intention of challenging, by debate, the decision to site 96 Cruise nuclear missiles there. On arrival they delivered a letter to the Base Commander which among other things stated ‘We fear for the future of all our children and for the future of the living world which is the basis of all life’"

image & quote  from a brief history of Greenham Common women's peace camp 1981-2000

on unreaching home

Hermann Hesse

"One never reaches home, but wherever friendly paths intersect the whole world looks like home for a time" 

Hermann Hesse(1919)

Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth

a whale of a home

Jonah

'Oh Jonah, he lived in de whale,

Oh Jonah, he lived in de whale,

Fo' he made his home in  Dat fish's abdomen.

Oh Jonah, he lived in de whale'.

Gershwin

what remains

"a whole history of spaces - which would be at the same time a history of powers - remains to be written, from the grand stategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat..."

Foucault. M. (1994) Dits et ecrits 1954-1988. Ed.Daniel Defert & Francois Ewald. Paris: Gallimard. vol. III, p. 192-3

on finding some words

'on the strip of cotton fabric that ties together the packet 

are the following words, written in an ink that the cloth has 

somehow blotted: It's not that we have hope - we shelter it'.

Berger, J. (2008). From A to X. Verso.

the Buddha, ready for the road

"I wandered through the rounds of countless births, Seeking but not finding the builder of this house. Sorrowful indeed is birth again and again.  Oh, house builder! You have now been seen. You shall build the house no longer. All your rafters have been broke, Your ridgepole shattered. My mind has attained to unconditional freedom. Achieved is the end of craving"

The Buddha 

(cited in Epstein, M. (1996) Thoughts without a thinker - Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective. Duckworth Press)

What an idea, that the builder, once seen (known), falls from his broken rafters, and with him, the dweller. As if having a home is a craving one might move beyond. 

And craving to wander ceaselessly, might there also be a builder of this who might fall?  

I think the Buddha is saying so. Craving itself is what is built, the object of the craving may be broken by being seen/known, the rafters might fall, and the craving end. 

I think about the differences between the concept of craving here, and the concept of desire in Lacan. How do they converse? For the object of craving to fall, to be at the end, but not to give up on one's desire. 

the place we are in at the moment

"Sitting with my gin or whisky afterwards I would often manage to get into conversation with some lonely man or other – usually an exile like myself – and the talk would be about the world, air-routes and shipping-lines, drinking-places thousands of miles away. Then I felt happy, felt I had come home, because home to people like me is not a place but all places, all places except the one we happen to be in at the moment".

Anthony Burgess, The Right to an Answer (1960) 

Soldier's Grove Bar, Kickapoo River, Wisconsin

having and remembering

Marguerite Duras 

Having a home is something that is mostly taken for granted. The Genworth Mortgage Trends Report (2009) found that 58% of Australians own a house, while 89% have or aspire to have a mortgage.

A house is a primary symbol, an early drawing, and a place that holds early relationships within its walls. It is the place from and within which we run our lives, a place we return to and store our things, a place that many use to represent something of the ego, and a place for our families to live and grow. 

For many a house represents nurturing and safety: Gaston Bachelard describes it as a cradle. Duras describes the home (along with the mother) as absolute protection against abandonment, being swept away, or being taken by surprise. It is something that, traditionally, a father provides, and a mother makes. 

A home is an intimate space, which exists in time, that is, it exists in memory. Who doesn't remember their childhood home? Some don't.

geography

"Geography is the study of earth as the home of people" - Yi-Fu Tuan, 1991

I love Yi-Fu Tuan's work. He fell in love with a place - the desert. He called it his 'geographical double'. You can read about his life and work, view panoramic images of the land he loved and watch a short video of him here.

orphan trains

for more about orphan trains

collections

I collect ideas about home and about the loss or lack of home. 

Lacan speaks somewhere about collections (& when I come across it again I'll give you the reference). He speaks about how collections are usually dull and have little to say. One day though, and I think it was just following WWII, he visits someone at their home. The host, he had made a collection of matchboxes. He had connected all the matchboxes by sliding one end open and inserting the next matchbox into the slot. 

I remember doing this when I was a child, making miniature 3d landscapes. The man had strung these around the inside of his house and Lacan says he had made something beyond a collection, or that is how I read and remember it. He had made a chain of these matchboxes that were leftovers and in a time of scarcity and rations. 

I want to collect the remnants, the small pieces and ideas about home here and I hope by doing so that I will find something beyond them. Maybe just some conversations about home and homes.

I want to post and be the poster of some questions about what homes are and how we make them and how we sometimes don't. Underlying this of course is my own wish for a home that I know in some ways I won't ever really find. But along the way, I want to build some kind of home for myself along the margins and in-between the insertions and deletions.