The Idea of Home
I still own a piece of land in the place I was raised. It’s a place that has nothing to do with me and means less than nothing to me, full of the sort of people who represent the unfortunate tendencies I most despise about my country. But it’s the place that, for some unaccountable reason, my father chose as home, and though it was never home to me, it’s the only tangible thing that I still hold of him. I haven’t been there in many years, and have no desire to go, but still I can’t bring myself to sell that land.
It’s so compelling, isn’t it, this idea of home, for those of us who — perpetually restless, unsettled — have spent our lives adrift. I want to be very, very careful with my use of language here, because I’m not referring to homelessness in the traditional sense; we are not people who want for anything, we are not the desperate poor, the disenfranchised. Instead, we are the privileged, the intelligentsia, (wo)men of the world, who move between cultures and languages with ease and get along well enough in any place.
But the time comes when we weary of so much time unmoored, placeless, and we ask ourselves, “Is there no place in this world for me?” Where can we find that feeling of connection that we seek? Some of us look for it in mates who are exactly opposite, centered, planted to the extreme (C., that’s you). Still others of us can only be comfortable with the fellow placeless. But we’re slippery, aren’t we, never quite committing, keeping our options open, addicted to change, looking, always looking on, to that next possibility, the one that will be truly our place, perfect, home.
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Zoe, The diasporics and nomadics of the world share a new sense of global place and placelessness. In fact, I believe nearly everyone does today to some degree. From the “global souls” written about by Pico Iyer to the stay-at-homes who experience telepresence with their TV showing events around the world–we all now have some sense of global place and feel the new alienation of placelessness. As the world globalizes, people feel the need for a renewed sense of place: The need for rootedness to counter a global sense of space. Using the term “glocalization,” which indicates the interweaving of localities in larger economic spaces, I call the cognition of the continuum from local to global “glocal spatial cognition.”
In your case, though, you are creating cybernetic space by your blog, to afford you some of your identity. Further, your cyberspatial presence also is partly defined by your presence in “real” space in Spain (and wherever you travel). Indeed, we who have our own blogs are creating some sense of home–albeit, a cybernetic home partly influenced by real places.
(I did not intend to go on so long. Now I’ll have to post this on my blog, too!)
leedurhamstone - November 13, 2008 at 6:01 am
LDS, welcome to my virtual home, and when I went to check out yours, I was gratified to see you’d indeed been inspired to turn your very cogent comment into a posting. In my case, there’s more to come, perhaps much more, on this theme. Obama’s win is undoubtedly prompting some of these musings, but they’ve been roiling around inside me for quite some time. I’ve been “out” for 2 years now, and the question is whether the relief that we all feel at the U.S. populace having, at least partially, come to its senses, is enough to lure me back. Is the U.S. still “home”, or is home something I create inside myself? I love your idea that blogging is a way of creating home; I’d never thought of it that way, but the importance that it’s begun to assume in my life makes your idea very valid for me.
zoeleon - November 13, 2008 at 11:08 am