"you ARE home"

Our House:: by Kenneth

 “Home is a multidimensional and profoundly symbolic term that cannot be mapped as an exclusively spatial concept, but it can be depicted as one aspect of human emotional territory.” –E.V. Bunkse (via Theano S. Terkenli)

The idea of “home” is one of the most subjective concepts I can imagine. To attempt to universally define home would be an engaging, yet ultimately futile endeavor. There are the cynics, who think of “home” largely as a marketing tool for the manipulation idealistic Americans. On the other end of the spectrum are those who believe in a multi-faceted definition relating to both material and psychological means. I tend to lean toward the latter school of thought, grounded in my discovery that personally, home, after an adjustment period of undefined (brief) length, is where I am. I do not mean to say that I always feel at home, more that over the course of my life, I have found myself feeling completely at home in a Los Angeles house and apartment, a studio off of Washington Square Park, a Parisian apartment, and a townhouse in Chelsea.

Some would argue that I am operating under delusions to have found a sense of home in so many specific and varied locations. James Howard Kunstler, for one, writes in The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, that because “Americans move relentlessly, every four years on the average,” we must possess a negligible connection to any present location (148). Considering the issue he takes with so many modes of American life, through specific and types of location, he must not be too surprised at the transience of American settlement. Furthermore, he blames an American negligence in creating lasting communities on the desire to obtain “a product called a ‘home’… a neat semantic trick introduced by realtors… with all the powerful associations the word dredges up from the psyche’s nether regions” (165). Perhaps he more specifically targets suburbanites here, but his opinion of a commercially driven idea of home comes from what he treats as a universal definition. Kunstler states that what the crafty realtors aim to sell potential homeowners “was most emphatically not home. Home was where one was born and raised, a place in time called the past, gone forever. You can’t go home again” (165). Now, I have never lived in a suburb, but I tend to believe that you can go home again, especially since my idea of home, however personal, has much broader definitions in time and space than Kunstler’s.

Growing up in Los Angeles, actual houses have always maintained a stronger potential for more permanent homes in my mind. From the first time I entered my current Manhattan abode, a three-story townhouse in Chelsea, it felt like a home. It did not immediately feel like my home, but as Theano S. Terkenli suggests in “Home as a Region,” “…the sense of home varies in space: some places are conceived as more homelike than are others… [and] the strongest sense of home commonly coincides geographically with a dwelling” (324). While I agree that certain places give themselves more readily to becoming a home—a semi-furnished 150-year old row house beats the first impression of a small, new white studio—I have always felt that “home” derived from people, memories, and items coexisting under one roof. Home was and is a combination of personal and shared experiences—a comfortable, nurturing warmth. Wherever I have moved, regardless of my length of stay, I have been able to find a similar coziness when interacting with my temporary environments. Perhaps it is slightly about the stuff – I have had my Manhattan bed, love seat, dresser, and desk since September 2006. Last fall, I did not really begin to feel settled in the Chelsea townhouse until my furniture was in place, and my favorite photographs were on display, for “place exists at different scales: [such as a] favorite chair in a crowded household…” (325). Once I could cozy up in my bed or in my favorite chair, I could begin to make my new dwelling a home. Only one of my roommates was already living here, and we began to rearrange the place with furniture and art left by former tenants. The townhouse felt even more like a home when three others moved in, bringing their own possessions, personalities, and interests into the mix. Terkenli writes that, “…a lifeworld becomes a collage of overlapping and ever-transforming personal and collective geographies,” and so did the belongings and pasts and presents of five young men and women come together to form a home (324).

People are always surprised when I say I live in a three-story house in the middle of Manhattan with two lawyers, an architect, and an event planner—I barely believe it myself. Chelsea is so charming, with more of a neighborhood feeling than I am used to in the City. I have come to feel like I am walking home amongst the tree-lines row houses of west 22nd street. Every time I see the lion statue on our stoop, I have my first sign of being home. There are two living rooms with well-loved couches and chairs, so whether it’s a few of us hungrily watching Lost on a Wednesday night, or a family-style home-cooked meal for us and guests, the common areas allow for fun, thoughtful, and engaging interaction with both the space and one another. This year was the first time a group of people gathered at MY home to watch the Superbowl—I mostly only follow baseball, but there is definitely an important “social component” that contributes to a sense of home (326). The rooms contain my chair and desk, as well as furniture belonging to various roommates. The physical establishment of our shared space was a joint effort. We all come and go at different times, but we frequently come together to unwind, discuss our days, weekend plans, the financial crisis, and so on. The coffee drinkers make their morning pot to share, and the whole house, even my room on the top floor, is filled with that caffeinated aroma; our daily habits are “an essential element in the transformation of place into home” (326). I feel that such a transition from dwelling to home happens naturally, if it will at all, and our routines become mundane as they were in our previous home.

While there is a strong communal aspect to my life in the townhouse, my feeling of “home,” my rootedness, comes first and foremost from within, for “if home is where a person starts, then it must begin with the self…” (325). I begin each day enveloped in my 3-sided daybed, feeling safe and surrounded by the cracking old exposed brick walls and the furniture and photographs that are with me wherever I go. Most people occupy a space, using “symbols to transform it into place;… creatures of habit who appropriate place and context as home…” and so do these items that initially symbolize home until I feel it naturally (325). When I arrive home, heading up the few flights of stairs, I still feel the burn in my legs that signals that I am almost in my room. There is comfort, a sense of home, even in that subtle daily pattern.

I noticed in Terkenli’s article that he misleadingly conveys J.B. Jackson’s concept of home, as represented in his 1957 Landscape article “The Stranger’s Path.” Terkenli and Jackson agree that “the idea of home itself becomes a symbol” (327), although Jackson seems doubtful, or at least admittedly bitter, saying, “in the course of years of travel I have come to believe that the home, the domestic establishment, far from being a unique symbol of the local way of life, is essentially the same wherever you go” (Landscape in Sight, 20). Perhaps I somewhat relate, although I think that would have more to do with ME than a city or even the physical shell of my dwelling, for “home is clearly no longer primarily a place: it is more and more a state of being, constructed on the accumulation of personal habits, thoughts, or emotional patterns of the lifeworld” (332). In other words, I find that my symbols of home may be altered by, and therefore related to, my surrounding city, but I keep returning to a sense of home originally centered in self.

While Kunstler considers home to be but an irretrievable childhood memory, and Jackson, with locally-driven expectations, perhaps places too much responsibility on the concept, Terkenli focuses on home as a geographic region, forged as such by routine, social interaction, and a joining of items and experiences, past and present. Furthermore, he feels that the individual drives a personal sense of what home actually is. I certainly feel that home starts with the self, perhaps aided by some meaningful possessions & photographs, a cozy bed or loveseat, and becomes a place in which one finds rootedness. Maybe this is why I can feel at home in more than one house or apartment in diverse regions of the globe. Please Visit: http://web.me.com/jennypenny22/Chelsea_Jen/Welcome.html for more information and a slideshow tour!

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