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.

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Otherskies

An orange and pearl sky, from the blog red.

Nicola Griffith's world of Jeep in Ammonite is a world that swims in a sky of pearl and tangerine, whose air is tinged with an alien nutmeg warmth. And perhaps just as strange are our own worlds, our eyes that may or may not perceive the same wavelengths in the same way. Indeed, you could be wandering right now under my tangerine sky.

This is just the beginning. We are alien worlds.

Do we not approach each other with that same trepidation that beats in the heart of the anthropologist on a planet with three moons and electromagnetic disturbances? So we say: I do not know how to tread on your land. I do not know what to accept with grace and what may be an unfamiliar poison. My language may babble in an inscrutable stream. I may starve or suffocate without special protection.


And in loving, are we not also this same anthropologist? I want to touch this alien leaf, though strange creatures may bite me. I will adjust my gait to your gravity. I breathe in your nutmeg air, trusting my lungs to the pleasure. I count the stars in this tangerine sky, though the patterns are unfamiliar. Please trust and carry my weight on your earth. 

In all of this, a recognition of shared sentience, of the oneness of us. But the love is also in the unique and strange, in the inhalation of new airs, in the caressing of our cosmic bodies, cubbyholes of history, held in the minute microcosms of our navels. 

Dr. Rob Dunn, in a study on the bacteria in our navels, has found entire life stories hidden within:

The data has since led Dunn to identify the associated factors leading to such a diverse bellybutton microbiome. He tried numerous factors, such as age and gender but nothing was even remotely close. Then came another possibility that seems to Dunn as though it may be the key. He decided to get more information from the participants, including their place of birth and where they had lived as children and beyond. That's when the data almost miraculously came together revealing something that was beyond incredible.

The navel bacteria were related to where the person has lived over the course of their lifetime. The tiny anatomical vestibule was actually a museum of lifetime experiences.

© Camille Seaman, The Atlantic

Dunn wants to see more data before he is totally convinced, but the preliminary data are exciting. "Our bodies are recognizing the universe in so many amazing ways," Dunn tells me. "While the brain fumbles to understand ourselves in our own world, the body is learning to adapt and co-exist with the environment around it. What we experience stays with us like a never ending microbial diary." (more here)

We Are Nature - Multiple Exposure Portraits Vol. II, © Christoffer Relander 2012

Howard Terpning, The Storyteller. From First People.

Even our tiniest places hold so much of us. Imagine, then, what else is to be found in these creatures around us, human and otherwise. What sky monsters lie emergent in your gaze? Does your thunder rumble, swirl, or crack? 

Even in silence, and even on other worlds, we carry our histories, in our eyes and in our flesh. In the way we look to and see the heavens, and in the shape of our storm clouds. So what better way to love than to seek out the stories, or perhaps simply to gaze at someone else's navel for a little while?

Venus and Ray

Francesco Clemente, Son (1983), oil on linen

I am a day or so late on all of this, but I wanted to pay homage to the great Ray Bradbury, who passed away the day of the transit of Venus, June 5, 2012. Bradbury was the first writer who took me to other possibilities. I remember in particular the yellow, wet, miserable world of Venus he imagined for us in "The Long Rain," interesting to read as a child in the interminable downpour of Oregon.

Goodbye to this wonderful imaginer of worlds whose reach into our lives, our children's lives, our grandchildren's lives, is exponential. His website recounts a story of his decision to reach for a kind of immortality:

Coraline and her cat

"Throughout his life, Bradbury liked to recount the story of meeting a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico, in 1932. At the end of his performance Electrico reached out to the twelve-year-old Bradbury, touched the boy with his sword, and commanded, Live forever! Bradbury later said, I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard. I started writing every day. I never stopped."


He inspired, for example, Neil Gaiman, who brought us Coraline, among others. Here is a short story he wrote, called "The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury."



On this day unlike any other in our lifetimes, as Venus shows herself to the world, Bradbury's worlds endure.

Relating, refraction, and relationship

Ernst Haeckel. 1904. Kunstformen
der Natur, plate 51: Polycyttaria. 

Though my much-younger self would never had admitted to really loving anything having to do with math (though recently I have been accused of being "obsessed with numbers"), I have always loved fractals. I love them because they're pretty, sure. But I love them, honestly, for something else: they are heterogeneous and deeply connected. This is the kind of world I believe in.

In animal form, we see it clearly enough. A while back, the lovely blog subblue demonstrated the easy connection between biological forms, like this one from Heackel's early 20th-century depiction of art forms in nature, and mathematically enhanced images of biology, below.

Source: Artforms of nature

Not such a far cry from the mathematical:

So, what's so interesting? To me, refraction. The unity of what is not the same but is connected. It is like taking a step back from the universe, as if we could look from the outside. 

A tall steel cross is refracted in raindrops on a window in Joplin, Missouri, on May 7, 2012. The cross is all that was left standing of St. Mary's Catholic Church, which was destroyed by an EF-5 tornado that tore through a large swath of the city and killed 161 people nearly a year ago. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel) (In Focus)

To simplify the idea, water drops offer another example. Does each cross, each flower know that it is not alone? Looking in, we certainly know.

Macroreflection by Harald Naper

How can we, in our separate notions of identity, see the refractions that surround us?

What do we see when we look into a friend's eyes? An other, a separate being? Yes, of course. And yet, we know this is not the whole story. This relation, this refraction of something else is there, and we relate. And if we allow ourselves to feel the density of connection, in space, in time, in the mere fact of living and the miracle of loving, in looking beyond our own small drop of water, there is healing in that.

Healers are those who can connect with others. Those who see themselves clearly enough to forgive themselves, and in this, judgment falls away. This is outlandishly idealistic, such clarity, such connection. But we have dreamt of it. And I would like to think that anything we can dream of in such a way must be at least to some extent represented by the truth of human experience. I turn to Zhaan of Farscape: anecdotal evidence that conscious connection can heal.

The possibility--indeed, necessity--of connectedness and relationship make sense from a scientific viewpoint as well. In his blog Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer interviews the author of the book The Self Illusion, Bruce Hood. On the notion of self, Hood explains:

"...for most of us, we consider our self as some essential core of who we are. Most of us feel our self is at the center of our existence responding to everything around us – that notion of an integrated entity is what I am challenging, not the experience of self. Must of us, including myself have that experience but that does not make it real. For example, most us think that we see the world continuously throughout the waking day when in fact we only see a fraction of the world in front of us, and because the brain blanks out our visual experience every time we move our eyes in a process called saccadic suppression, we are effectively blind for at least 2 hrs of the day. This is why you cannot see your own eyes moving when you look in a mirror! So conscious experience is not a guarantee of what's really true."

Indeed, we form this experience of life in and through relationship:

"In the book, I argue that because we have evolved as social animals, those around us construct a large part of our mental life that we experience as our self. We can see the influence of others but often fail to recognize how we too are shaped. I am not denying the role of genes and temperaments that we inherit from our biology. After all, children raised in the same environment can end up very different but even these intrinsic properties of who we are play out in a social world which defines us. If you think about it, many of the ways we describe each other, such as helpful, kind, generous, mean, rude or selfish can only make sense in the context of others. So those around us largely define who we are. I hope this book will remind us of this obvious point that we so easily forget."

So today, I am thankful for our connections.