Homes, Haps, Habitudes
Interior of Edo period Merchant's House, Takayama. Image courtesy of Denise Riley.
Must 'home' always be enclosed in inverted commas? Sarah Nicole Prickett writes that 'home' and 'love' are supposedly hard for writers to keep, citing for her situation a couple of years ago this line by Milan Kundera: In the mind of a woman for whom no place was home, the thought of an end to all flight was unbearable.
At the recent but past time of which I am writing, a time in which tenses and pronouns became mixed-up and shifted between when and if – I would, we will, you might, not – I thought of this line for my own case. Wishful flight can only come out of having a base to leave, no matter how you did not fit into it. The open option of defining a space for oneself away from one's origin(s) depends on having experienced 'home', however disjointedly – otherwise the search goes not for mobility but stability. Departure may come out of a sense of urgency, but the active seeking of elsewhere alternatives is an assertion of know-how and life skills, of belief in the new.
I tend to identify with a similar feeling to SNP's Kundera – or, at least, that it's in a state between two cities that I feel most at home. Living in the dialogue between places, the here and the not-here: this is what writing is too. But at that point, recent but past, I felt that settlement, even if in a temporary sense, would be beneficial. I did not want to be in actual flight. The vehement feeling in my stomach was anti-upheaval, though physiologically my body was running and running, playing out a mechanism of sickening adrenalin with all the pain of an aborted marathon… though I kept finding myself lying down on the floor.
Nobody writes this,* I thought, nobody writes about finding themselves in the safest place which is side of cheek on cool floorboards, because when you, inevitably, stand up again, it's easier (better?) not to go back to the moment you were there. (I'm no longer there.)
SNP's life on the internet (our collective home) suggests that now she does have a real home – a sweet apartment in Brooklyn, a husband and two cats – and she still writes real good, lines like:
Love to me is the most conditional thing, the most precarious. I want to earn it every day, like my living, like writing.
Love, like writing, can accumulate with time, in the Romantic labour of production, laboursome love. Or of course, love can fall, its labours at any moment lost. It is more decisive and divisive than the number of years on a rental contract, which means that shared roofs are only as secure as people.
What if the idea of feeling 'at home' in 'love' is contradictory? (I'll stop using inverted commas, like qualifiers, soon.) Anon wrote: "How could a rupture like love be anything but a precarious structure built on fault lines erected out of folds and crossings?" The idea of feeling at home alongside the lover's body is so true, but finding a lasting home in love feels… rare. Masha says, ever the romantic, "Home… I think it's probably a person."
Feeling Hannah Black's 'No Girl No Gun', on "the appeal of narratives of love and commitment that structure the experiential chaos of living, and stave off despair." Thinking about the ideas that were pressed into us as girls, that if those ideals hadn't been ironed into psyches as essentials then the contemporary condition of love – it exists, whispers Jesse, in the sudden, surprising time-gap between desire, empire, and you – would be easier. In the focus on finding a stable partner, from teen crushes onwards, the fact of our own standing, up, straight, without anyone, can be overlooked. Fact is, for the generation of our parents the set-ups at hand were more regimented; like Vivian Gornick talking to her friend Leonard on this kind of Adult Narnia:
They weren’t any more grown-up than we are. It’s just that they walked into a closet called Marriage, and inside the closet was a dress and a suit. So stiff they could stand up by themselves. One was marked husband, and one was marked wife. Each one stepped into those clothes and became that thing. [And then got divorced.] We, on the other hand, are standing here naked, that’s all.
Love, as life, consists of the negotiation of transitions, the navigation of turbulence, through the tying of flexible knots and bonds. A desire to feel 'settled' is better expressed as a will to balance on a raft that keeps your feet dry and your soul from shivering, while desire… is something else entirely. Desire is that which forms the strings of the rope through which the bond is made, as well as that which tugs at the fastening, unmoors the anchor, is pulled into frays. Katherine Angel brings up Gillian Rose in this unravelling exchange – to "stay in the fray", when in love and when alone. One should never feel too comfortable / I don't want to get shut out in the storm.
For if the first definition of commitment is "a state of dedication," the second is "an engagement that restricts freedom of action." Here's Gornick again: "What if the restless, the fluid, the mercurial, within each of us is steadily undermining the very thing we think we most want? … What if the urge toward stable intimacy is perpetually threatened by an equally great, if not greater, urge towards destabilisation?"**
In Sara Ahmed I found something like an answer to this question, or a suggestion of how one could try to live to reconcile the mercurial and the enduring. (You can read, I have faith here, grace here, when I didn't at the place at which I begun.) Ahmed writes in 'Happy Objects' how the 'hap' of happiness relates to chance, to the contingency of something happening; the fact that the event could be good or bad heightens the pleasure of the 'good'. Happiness is thus not a positive state, but one that may be swayed this way or that by the contingency of the world and us in it. But Aristotle's view of happiness, Ahmed reminds, is to do with habituation, of a repetition of events that leads to a state of regular contentedness, or, I guess, stability. If the idea of happiness is better not aspired to, if one can be more 'happy' when one doesn't worry about what 'happiness' is tied to – and further if one is able to the step out of capitalism's enchainment of objects that hold the promise of making us happy*** – isn't that because these two etymologies of the word are at odds? Habit is disrupted by unexpected happenings, which may bring pleasure or throw a state of serenity off track. The only constant is temporariness, provisionality.
This balance between the 'hap' of chance and the 'hab' of habituation is the balance behind the maintenance of long-term relationships, is how love gains its precious value from its fragility. Which is not to suggest to you some form of resolution, but maybe a transition. It's better to feel the night air on naked thighs than to walk into a closet and put on an ironed dress.