I am intent on becoming a house. Because, as a healer I work with explained to me earlier today, you can’t stab a house! You can toss a knife in its general direction, but it will only appear flimsy and ineffectual. Any weapon, verbal or sentimental, will bounce off the sturdy defenses of a structure that stands centered, assured in its foundations.
We might picture a strong house, a fortified container, as being made from concrete or metal. There is a question of whether it should be windowed or closed-off like a camera obscura—but as long as there is outer definition, inner vision will follow. Anyway, I, for one, would rather be a Lina Bo Bardi aperture than a Peter Eisenman living tomb.
We know from Bachelard that houses are entities, deeply particularistic and also thoughtlessly everyday. We would do well to be careful about them. We can think of our souls as resting inside a temporarily, "this life" sited Self. In facing those drawn to us like karmic pilgrims, we have an opportunity to learn who or what we wish to invite into the sanctity of dwelling.
Have you seen our house?
The 80s Britpop classic,
Our House, by MADNESS, has been on my mind for months. Only now do I feel like I have a decent understanding as to why it has surfaced: because I have been moving between houses both "ours" and "mine", surveying their contents, attempting to cement clean borders between my individual essence and that of the pulsating "ley lines" that trail across my outer world. Essence can mean more or less receptivity to such pulsations, for in the process of summoning and honing an inner authority, the young person begins to rework, or else totally clean out, their identity's many possible residences, re-establishing its tiers and bounds, converting given into chosen terms.
This is a regular maintenance job (part of what some call "energetic hygiene") that has, for me, signified a leap into adulthood. Such reflections often involve a sense of exhaustion or overwhelm in unwilling exchanges with others; further awareness brings lightness and release, as in the old "it could be worse" folktale about an overcrowded farmstead. Left open to anyone, the psychic abode can be quickly filled with busied projections of activity—the shadow puppets of external desires—that remind me of Diller Scofidio + Renfro's exhibition design for a Pierre Chareau furniture retrospective some years ago, animating tables and lamps with silhouettes of imaginary human users. Their aim was to make Chareau's furniture "come alive", as if in museal stasis it is otherwise deadened. Yet in static, is there not also prudent grace? In the end, the levitating images can always withdraw from orbit. We alone are core.
There are several ways to approach solidification. I very much like that of Clarissa Pinkola Estés,
telling the story of Vasalisa and Baba Yaga—with her infamously avian house—in
Women Who Run with the Wolves (1989). Or how, in the
"grounding" tab of her saved Instagram Stories, the Breathwork practitioner Erin Telford shares what her mobile, "digital nomad" lifestyle has taught her: that she is her own ultimate home...Corny, but at least she is
certain. It is not necessarily easy to merge hovering spirit with the soma of being-house—it sometimes feels like taking an overly curious child who wandered off in the park back to their panicking mother. So this subject is one I am constantly revisiting—the child must be "found" and "returned"—and will probably discuss again later on.
In the interim, some more visual references:
the esoteric "Magic Square" teachings of Katonah Yoga (Nevine Michaan) the encyclopedic particularity of Sir John Soane Museum, London, where I used to go to feel less bizarre myself
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