Homing

Hestia, Greek goddess of home and hearth

To Hestia
by Hesiod

Hestia, you who tend the holy house of the lord Apollo,
the Far-shooter at goodly Pytho,
with soft oil dripping ever from your locks, come now into this house,
come, having one mind with Zeus the all-wise
draw near, and withal bestow grace upon my song.


This weekend I watched The House (spoilers ahead), a Korean animated film in which old, traditional homes are guarded by and are one with spirits who must face their imminent deaths as new, modern condos replace old, dilapidated buildings that are full of  mold and cracks. (See photographs documenting this process here, along with some unfortunate sexist comments.) These building spirits harbor a certain affection and intimacy with home owners, so much so that a carefully kept home will respond kindly to the rhythms of its family. This is a sad story, so skip the next three paragraphs if you don't want to know.

The film makes a clear argument for valuing the soul over the bank account, and it offers a strong, if heavy-handed critique of classism in contemporary (Korean) society, the role of the government in exacerbating poverty and dependence, and the overvaluation of all that is modern. It is understood that the new buildings will have no spirits to guard them.

In "Modernization and contemporary culture in traditional Korea," Ito Abito explains:

Traditional Korean society manifested, as Takashi Akiba long ago pointed out, a rather sharp cleavage between the life-orientation of the upper-class yangban and that of ordinary commoners. The yangban, absolutizing Confucianism, looked down on or ignored folk religion, but the coexistence of the two strata was made possible by their division into two social ranks. The new life-orientation developed in the cities in connection with the rapid social change of recent years, however, has exercised a profound influence even on agricultural village society through the Semaeull movement and other media. Members of the rural elite, quick to respond to the modernization and industrialization policy of the central government, played a leading role in abolishing or discontinuing traditional belief and practice, some in token of symbolic support for modernization, others in token of loyalty to the Semaeull movement. This resulted, on the one hand, in the diffusion of the Semaeull movement throughout the country as a new spiritual movement and, on the other, in the rapid destruction of the basis for cultural identity that existed in the traditional culture.

In the film, as the houses are torn down, the spirits go with them, leaving only keepsakes: small trinkets in which their favorite memories are stored, visible only to those who hold the marble that connects the human and spirit worlds. In the end, this delicate glass ball is smashed by a government boot in the mud, and the spirits, in their dying moments, become invisible to our heartbroken protagonist, who had happened upon the marble in a brawl with a stray cat (who is, of course, the God of Land). She who once longed to live in a shiny new condo, is dragged silently away from the falling walls.

What struck me about this surprisingly—though accurately—pessimistic tale was its lovely portrayal of what it means to have a home. At one point, the girl and her house's spirit happen upon a homeless man in a box. The girl screams, taken aback by the man. The spirit looks and also screams, taken aback not by the man, but by the idea that a person should sleep somewhere where there was no house, no spirit to protect him.

Of course it went beyond the walls and ceiling: every little bit of the house, the old wallpaper, the worn floors, was infused with a sense of belonging, of safety. That, in my view, is why home matters so much. There are places that feel like that, and they are sacred. Buck claimed that "'home' in the full range and feeling of [Modern English] home is a conception that belongs distinctively to the word home and some of its Gmc. cognates and is not covered by any single word in most of the IE [Indo-European] languages" (Online Etymology Dictionary). In Spanish, the corresponding hogar has its roots in the Latin term for fire (compare modern Spanish fuego); indeed, the hearth was the old gathering place, the center of warmth and social life (Diccionario Etimológico).



We feel that way around certain people, too—at home, safe. In her article, "The orphans among us," Sarah Johnston contemplates what it meant to her to finally find a family, as an adult, when her own parents had never provided a safe place, a refuge:

It took a year and a half before I would see their daily call and not think, “Why are they calling?” I had no idea there were people who’d call you every day.
     Eventually I did. Eventually it became the most natural thing in the world. The Bible says that orphans are placed in families; and for a long time I believed in that and mistook having a family as the end, — the prize in and of itself.
     But what I have found — and what I pray the orphans among and inside us discover —is that being a part of a family, in time, stops erasing the pain of abandonment and starts being about the power of the future. It begins with an orphan and a family, but it ends with one trajectory being propelled into another.

The desire to be where we feel we belong is strong, and we are not alone among the species. Holly the cat recently became famous for her 190-mile journey on foot back to where she belonged.

Watch More News Videos at ABC | 2012 Presidential Election | Entertainment & Celebrity News

Undesirable

My maternal grandmother's family came to New York from Poland before WWII, an orthodox Jewish family who found a new home just before it was too late. One cousin, however, cousin Benjamin, was not allowed entry into the United States. Benjamin had a hunched back, and used a cane to walk. When I was little, I saw a picture of him in my grandmother's old photo album. Yes! Someone like me. I was excited to see that I was not the first in our family to have a different kind of body. He was wearing a suit and tie, a young lad with a dark beard. I asked what happened to him. I was told that he died young. Was he sick? Yes, they said, he was sick.

A decade later, "old enough" to handle the truth, I was informed that Cousin Benjamin had been murdered by Nazis during the Holocaust. Unacceptable as an American citizen, he was returned to Hilter. The disabled were among the first to be killed, as the most obviously undesirable kind of human (image found at A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust). I was appalled that my own country (surely in its intellectual and moral infancy) had made such a mistake. Yet it appears that this same practice continues today in Canada.

While Benjamin's story will always stand out in my mind, denial of the human right of mobility through migration (especially but not only to escape violence) is only one of many ways disabled folks are "dumped." William J. Peace writes:

"Wheelchair dumping is the antithesis of inclusion. Disability rights activists coined the term inclusion over the well-known concept mainstreaming. For nearly two decades disabled people have fought to be included, their existence valued. This effort has met stiff resistance -- especially in the court and educational system. Disability rights activists have fought for inclusion because it reflects the idea that all members of society are equal and capable. In theory this idea is accepted but rarely if ever put into practice. It's easier and cheaper to ignore the rights of disabled people and "dump" all those who don't fit in. In the past we had institutions to dump people into -- most of which were closed in the 1980s, thanks to Ronald Reagan. In their place we have a host of inaccessible facilities, like my local police station, or other government facilities, many of which contain "resource rooms". The vast majority of these rooms accomplish what institutions once did -- segregate those that are not wanted. It is easier for institutions such as public schools to "dump" all children with learning disabilities into a "resource room" than include them in classrooms with other children. If the parent or child balks, they can deem the child disruptive and the district can literally force the child out of the district and into "special programs". It is up to the parent to hire experts and prove their child is not a disruption to other students. To me, this is the legacy that Reagan should be known for because he took dumping to an extreme -- especially for those with mental illnesses who were dumped on urban street corners across the country." (from "The Outrage is Misplaced: Wheelchair Dumping", 2008) 

We also have the questions of abortion, which I was lucky enough to escape because technology did not detect the shape of my body in utero, institutionalization, which was recommended for me on the day I was born (also narrowly escaped), and sterilization (which was unsuccessfully pushed upon me at the age of 12 in 1990). Just as Cousin Benjamin was worth more dead (valued at zero) than alive (negative value), I was reminded of my "selfishness" in keeping organs that I should never use. Never mind my love for writing, my talent with languages, my artwork; none of this could make up for the undesirability of my body, a reproductive catastrophe. Now a linguistics professor, I am reminded yet again that my mind is not enough to make me human: I should not think to try to build a life in another country. These phenomena are not of a distant past at all.