Home Is Where My Head Is
Tuesday, July 1, 2008 "So, does Cityville feel like home now?" she asks. Her questions are always difficult and a mile deep.
"No, it doesn't," I answer.
"Where you grew up, Cosmopolis, is still your home, then," she says.
"No, it's not."
"What place is home for you?"
"I've never had that," I say. "No physical place has ever felt like home to me. I've had places I liked that came close to it, though."
"That's so sad." She looks like she is close to tears after hearing my revelation. "What do you think you have to do to create home for yourself?"
"I don't think I can do anything. I don't feel the need to."
Conversations like these make me feel more alien than I already do. This woman is a religious minister and an environmentalist. She spends her life creating safe places on earth for the human spirit to grow. I become aware of a subtle lack of equilibrium, a dimensional shift. I'm one step over.
"How can you feel safe, though? Don't you want to have a place that is yours?"
"I've never had it, so I'm not sure what that would be. I create home spaces in my head."
"What do you mean?"
"Home is where I'm deep in the middle of creating things. When I'm writing or taking photographs, I am home. Home is not out there. It's in here." I point to my head.
"Does making homes in your head fulfill you?"
"I'm not sure that I understand what you mean."
"Does your creativity, what you do with it, bring out the best fruit from your passion? Do you love it?"
I think about this for a few moments. "Yes. Yes, it does. I can't imagine any other way of being."
People with a sense of home tied to place behave as though they think I must be terribly depressed, that I am inclined to off myself, when they find out that I've never experienced an external home. What they find difficult to understand is that my home is built perpetually inside my head, and that I carry it within me everywhere.
Being a stranger, that is to say "not-feeling-at-home," is today a condition common to many, an inescapable and shared condition. So then, those who do not feel at home, in order to get a sense of orientation and to protect themselves, must turn to the "common places," or to the most general categories of the linguistic intellect; in this sense, strangers are always thinkers. As you see, I am inverting the direction of the analogy: it is not the thinkers who become strangers in the eyes of the community to which the thinkers belong, but the strangers, the multitude of those "with no home," who are absolutely obliged to attain the status of thinkers. Those "without a home" have no choice but to behave like thinkers: not in order for them to learn something about biology or advanced mathematics, but because they turn to the most essential categories of the abstract intellect in order to protect themselves from the blows of random chance, in order to take refuge from contingency and from the unforeseen.
- from Paulo Virno's "A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life"
Reader Comments (12)
Personally, I envy you for your sense of HOME as being where you are the most plugged in AT THAT MOMENT. Those of us who have that HOME/GOUNDED feeling are nailed to the floor.
I have never had that physical sense of a place being home. I don't know if anyone in my family ever has - we moved too much. My mom said a long time ago, that home for her is wherever my dad is. Home for me is where my parents are, although more and more it's becoming where AB is.
I'm still getting aquainted with Blogland and I found your Blog by just immersing myself! I'm an Australian grandmother and I have often thought about this 'home' business. I left England fifty (!) years ago but, deep down, it's still home. I go all 'feely' when I see videos of cottages, lanes and such. And yet I feel utterly at home here, in Australia and I wouldn't be anywhere else. I'm certainly not 'nailed to the floor'
Brenda Bryant (Rinkly Rimes)
Man, can I relate or what?
I have moved too much to have a home as well. I think where I am now is probably the longest I have ever lived anywhere, and we're going on 7 years now. (It is starting to feel like home though - the house, not the city or country.)
I hope my daughter gets a bit of both, though. She was born here and I hope she spends her whole childhood here, but I also hope she gets a bit of that "wherever you go, there you are" kind of a mind.
Having a sense of place is so varied from person to person and I do think it is always related to our inner space. Any way a person can stay oriented in this crazy world seems okay to me! I do know that if I am far from my designated nest fro longer than a week I don't like it. It's just an anchor so I don't totally drift away and get lost!
I have lived in the same city my whole life (22 years) and I still don't know where home is. I feel that I could make home be anywhere as long as I owned my own house on a little piece of land. But then again, I also felt like I belonged in Japan when I visited a few months ago. I could see myself making a home there. For now, home feels temporary.
I am incredibly tied to place for feeling at home and I don't think you're weird I think you're ideal! My paradox is that, though I love the city and the apartment and everything, I don't really nest. It took me over 2 years to unpack my last box from the move and I still haven't really decorated or put anything up on the walls. As a rule when I bring a personal touch to my desk at a job I'm pretty much guaranteed to lose that job within a couple of months.
It's good to carry home inside you.
Completely relatable post for me.
I spent most of my childhood moving from one place to another, never fully feeling a part of any city or home.
I lamented the fact often that I was displaced and disconnected, prodded by others who "felt sorry" for me never having roots in any one place.
It's nice to reframe in this way. I like this perspective and totally agree with it.
Me, too.
Home is where the heart (and head) is and for me it's always been inside me, never on a map. The closest I've ever come to feeling like I was 'home' was Scotland. I'd like to go back and settle there someday and I very well might. All in all, I consider myself fortunate to not be tied to any place. When your head is home, wherever you go, you're never a stranger. There's comfort in that.
You are SO right! Don't you love when people say that? The people, the furniture, the whatever doesn't make a home. It is the person and how they feel that makes it a home. And my coffee cup says (or reads) Life isn't about finding yourself, it is about creating yourself.
Wow. You're lucky that you can take home with you everywhere you go. My therapist is still helping me figure that one out.
For me, home is where my mom is.