- HOME
- GALLERIES
- Imagining Italy
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- Unhoused Atlanta
- Globalized Atlanta
- Racialized Atlanta
- Greenwashed Atlanta
- Georgia Timescapes
- Mississippi Timescapes
- New Mexico Timescapes
- Florida Beachscapes
- California Waterscapes
- Yankee Landscapes
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- New York Streetscapes
- Southern Roadscapes
- Branding Jacksonville
- Crafting the Quarter
- CONTACT
HOME SWEET HOME
In order to grasp dialectically how the halves and quarters of the circle in the diagram intermesh to form a single spatial whole, let's consider the place of all places, the ur-place. I am speaking of home, of course. Just about everyone who has thought seriously or not so seriously about the significance of place uses home as their basic reference point, for where else is the spatial linkage of materiality and meaning so dramatically played out?
On the not-so-seriously end of the spectrum we have Mötley Crüe, the glam metal band whose 1985 hit "Home Sweet Home" proves that even God-awful lyricists can draw creative inspiration from home:
I'm on my way
I'm on my way
Home sweet home
Yeah, I'm on my way
Just set me free
Home sweet home
In my opinion, the band could have used some help from Irish wordsmith John Banville who writes in one of his novels that the function of home is "to still the self's unanswerable questionings." Those of you who are familiar with Banville's dark humor won't be surprised to learn that the unreliable narrator who makes this observation spends the entire novel searching in a vain for meaning and home.
No less a philosopher than Martin Heidegger invokes the home in support of his contention that place "is the locale of the truth of being." Lauded by one scholarly authority as the philosopher who "provides us with perhaps the most important sustained inquiry into place to be found in the history of Western thought," Heidegger is clearly not a figure to be trifled with, even if you find, as I do, that his prose at times comes close to gibberish.
I'll make an exception for Heidegger's description of a Black Forest farmhouse, which is a lovely paean to successive generations dwelling harmoniously in space, time and nature:
“Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and sky, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things ordered the house. It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope, looking south, among the meadows close to the spring. It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and that, reaching deep down, shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter nights. It did not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the “tree of the dead”— for that is what they call a coffin there; the Totenbaum—and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time.”
Allyson and I don't live in a Black Forest farmhouse. We live in a ranch house located in what's left of the Piedmont Forest of metro Atlanta.
Are you ready for a house tour?
Our home is a 3-bedroom, 2-bath ranch house built in 1956, the kind of housing constructed for millions of aspirant middle-class families eager to pursue their American Dreams after World War II and the Korean War. We bought it in 1992, two years after moving to Atlanta.
We spend a lot of time in the kitchen, which anchors both the material and meaningful dimensions of our home. The material side underwent a facelift about twenty years ago, when we removed a wall separating the kitchen from the dining area. We weren’t looking to open up more space for entertaining; not much of that goes on in our home. Rather, the wall came down because the choreography of cooking, eating and cleanup in our household requires lots of elbow room.
Allyson and I each have specific duties to perform, and they go a long way toward defining us as a couple. She handles grocery shopping, meal planning, food prep and cooking; I set the table, clear the dishes, load the dishwasher, put the dishes up when they're clean and dry, wipe down the kitchen countertop and pour the chef her well-deserved, after-dinner limoncello. I'll leave it for you to judge whether or not this is a fair and equitable arrangement.
I don't think either of us were aware of it at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight it seems to me now that the remodeling project sought to bring materiality into alignment with meaning. We were trying to create a material space suitable for the heteronormative division of household labor that governs our kitchen routine. A domestic commons, so to speak. Or to put it another way, we wanted to create a material safe zone for the round-the-clock negotiations that, for the most part, have facilitated our work routine and kept the peace during a marriage which is going on forty-three years as I write.
The main thing Allyson and I do in our safe zone is talk, and not just about neuroscience. We share old memories, make new ones and entertain a select few pain-in-the-ass house guests who never leave, no matter how many times we glance hopefully at our watches. (The guests I am referring to are the memories we have of our younger selves.)
I just read an interview with a prominent neuroscientist who said that a common mistake is to think of memories as photographs. Marcel Proust may have been able to retrieve his childhood memories in photo-realist detail after tasting a madeleine, but most of us get by with messier, and less reliable recollections. Memories, according to this expert, are akin to unfinished paintings stacked up in the artist's studio. Those of us who carry these works in progress around in our heads are like the perpetually unsatisfied painter who doesn't know when to put the brush down and call it quits. We are forever touching up, reworking, even painting over our mental canvases to satisfy whatever emotional needs we have in the present.
The brain is a veritable museum of such paintings―the Met, MOMA, Guggenheim and Whitney packed into a single viewing space between our ears. But unlike these well-known institutions that keep regular business hours, the brain is open around the clock, allowing exhibiting artists to come and go as they please, day and night, so that they can continue editing their works in progress.
There are many ways of materializing memories at home. A long bookshelf in our kitchen holds my late mother's cookbooks. These mean a lot to Allyson, who learned much of what she knows about the culinary arts from her mother-in-law. These books are also a testament to Allyson's many friendships with other women in her life, friendships that are cemented by a shared interest in food and cooking.
On the walls of our kitchen hangs artwork done by a couple of friends. Sadly, we've lost touch with one of them. The other, Theresa, is a former student of mine who lives in Oxford, Mississippi, where she teaches and helps run the university's Women's and Gender Studies Center. Years ago, she gave us one of her clay sculptures that is proudly displayed next to the door leading down to the basement. Her husband Jack gets my vote for the funniest writer east of the Mississippi River. A number of his signed books can be found in our living-room bookcases. We don't see Theresa and Jack as often as we would like to. But this doesn't matter. What does matter is that Allyson and I feel their friendship and presence through the material objects they made and gifted to us.
Every meaningful space is filled with such mementos.
From our kitchen we have a clear view of the backyard through a sliding-glass door. When I'm in the kitchen, I often find myself gazing out the glass door and reminiscing about how the backyard used to look, before I planted three Japanese maples, my pride and joy, which I have watched grow from saplings into mature trees. I also put up birdfeeders in the backyard, where cardinals, titmice, chickadees and the occasional rose-breasted grosbeak would feast on black sunflower seeds until the squirrels chased them away. Now, the birdfeeders are in the front yard, a safe distance from the neighborhood bullies.
Not far from the maples are the final resting places of our two pets, Sugar Cat (named after Sugar Creek in western Kentucky, where we found her wandering in the woods) and Clay Dog (named after Cassius Clay before he morphed into Muhammad Ali). On cold winter mornings, there would be a lot of hissing and barking as our pets staked their claims to the toasty pocket of air that formed in front of the main heating vent. (Clay never made it past the early rounds, despite his name and weight advantage.) Their backyard graves are marked by a concrete tablet of the Ten Commandments that we bought at a roadside junk shop in south Georgia and repurposed as a tombstone, along the lines of Heidegger's sacred Totenbaum.
From the kitchen I also watched our son shoot hoops in the backyard and grow from a boy into a man. He now lives in Jacksonville, Florida, with his wife and daughter, a beautiful baby girl named Alice Alma who will soon be paying her first visit to the place where her dad grew up.
So the backyard appears as another composite space when viewed through our conceptual View-Master. The material side is demarcated by a chain-link fence and a wooden gate which establish a clear boundary line between our property and the neighbors'. The meaningful side is interwoven with emotional attachments, past, present and future. If you were to ask Allyson or me where the materiality of our home begins and the meaning ends, we wouldn't know what to say.