Going Home… Going Home… - …but Where? …and When?!

Introduction

	I recently completed a book of poetry dealing with the condition of homelessness. Between the lines I argued there that, although we may feel at home, underlying this happy state of affairs destiny could always creep up behind us and rob us of this sense of being-at-home-in-the-world through a loss of possessions, profession, residence, country, friends, loved ones, our very life itself. Without being so philosophically deep, in this paper let us, together, explore what being-at-home might mean (rather than this deeper anxiety of homelessness). In this task of examination let us not look at the rituals and implements of what is entailed in being in a house, but, instead, let us look at this state of affairs phenomenologically through the lens of myth and metaphor, especially the latter. Language reflects what we think, and, what we think is reflected in language. So let us explore such thinking as it is repetitively expressed in and though such language that is subjected to such re-iteration in our own speech and as it crosses the generations through myth, metaphorical currency and the distillation of allegorical wisdom as expressed through common maxims and other wise sayings…. (1)

Historical Background

	In a newspaper I read yesterday that only four percent of the Australian population is directly involved in agriculture. That means ninety-six percent of the population does not earn their livelihood from working the soil and all the other things entailed in the traditional life of the farmer. However, going back only a few centuries and these percentages would have been reversed. Just as blue-collar workers first lost their jobs in industry and then white-collar workers have lost their jobs in business, etc., so too were most of our ancestors thrown off the land either metaphorically or literally. Yet, our language is still peppered with a swarm of agricultural and rural metaphors and sayings. So, if our sense of being in the world is colored by our language then we might well be seen to be doubly disenfranchised - since our psychic sense of 'home' must also be a rural one whilst at the same time the rural experience that fleshes out the direct, living meaningfulness of such language is now absent, having been lost or marginalized (if not completely subverted by pseudo-rural endeavours like, e.g., going to the country for a drive, growing lettuces or herbs in a garden pot on our high-rise balconies, keeping a pet rabbit, looking at farmers through the widow of a train if you ever see any out there in the fields, etc?)? And we persist in using agricultural metaphor as if we were all farmers working from dawn to dusk when it is most likely that even our parents and our parent's parents… had just as much farming experience, and all that that entails, as us - practically zilch! (2)

	Of course these days we can read books about farming, watch farming documentaries on Foxtel and other stations, read the life-style segments of our very detailed newspapers and become virtual farmers! But there's no substitute for hands-on-experience! (3)

	Most of us these days work for large organization in one form or another. The same applies to the rural economy. Farms are getting larger, becoming both more industrialized and commercialized and less and less private concerns. The old-fashioned farmer, much beloved of advertising, has become an endangered species. Horse and pitchfork have a long time ago been traded in for a tractor and combine harvester! Even the modern farmer might feel alienated from their very own land sitting in the midst of one of these machines in the center of some huge field no longer demarcated with hedgerows, perhaps a skilful fence of rock, and, miscellaneous belts and copses of trees? (4)

An Exploration

	I am arguing here that our complex sense of 'home' is colored by a mix of cultural and intercultural influences that contain a considerable degree of material of a rural nature. But, as we are now highly urbanized, I am suggesting that we should also find, to some degree, whether we are aware of this or not, that this absence of direct rural experience, therein, is also alienating, unsettling and something that must diminish our sense of being-fully-at-home-in-the-world since our world, to some extent, is culturally constructed in such an absent milieu? Moreover, our sense of 'time' is also as disturbed as our mis-placed sense of place? This collective 'memory' for the mythical, metaphorical and the wisely allegorical is also rooted in a past that we can no longer visit except through memory, nostalgia, extrapolation or virtually in and through the pages of a book, or a historically re-enacted drama as seen at the movies, or as found entrenched in social rituals and customs that celebrate apparently important key-historical events, etc. Conservative social practices also often preserve a vestige of past practices, especially in articles of clothing. Am I right here or have we fully adjusted to the contemporary tensions of the urban-mindscape? Yet, if our language is still rooted to a considerable extent in a past rural landscape how could our sense of being-at-'home' be a fully satisfactory experience given that this aspect of our psyche is given, more often than not, no direct experience to replenish those types of roots? To what extent are we uprooted if at all? (5)

	Let me explore for a few moments, to what extent our language still reflects the fact that  once upon a time in the not so long ago most of us would have been peasants in a world that changed, in its habits, more often than not, only in accordance with the fixed cycles and rhythms of nature. When the word 'fashion' only meant 'to make something' (and not a political re-alignment of status as currently defined or re-defined)! (6)

	One could say that just over a few hundred years ago there was no 'Australia'. This fact of our existence is embedded in our language. Let me demonstrate this fact that our home then would have been elsewhere. (7)
	E.g., complete the following sayings:

1.	We were hoping for a ----- Xmas.					(white)
2.	Its like taking coals to --------						(Newcastle)
3.	London Bridge is falling ----						(down)
4.	A rolling stone gathers no ----	      [a wetter landscape than the Australian?] (moss)

	And sayings of an agricultural/rural flavour: 

5.	Make hay while the sun ------						(shines)
6.	Eats like a -----							(horse)
7.	As fast as a ------							(rabbit)
8.	He is a sly old ---							(fox)

	Sayings from another time:

9.	Early to bed, early to ----     [in an era before electric light-bulbs]	(rise)
10.	A stitch in time saves ----	[but who sews these days?]		(nine)
11.	Watch the pennies and the ------ will look after themselves. 		(pounds)
12.	Like the pot calling the kettle -----					(black)

	Sayings from a colonial past(?):

13.	A memory like an ---------						(elephant)
14.	As fat as a ------------						    (hippopotamus)
15.	As tall as a -------							(giraffe) 

	Sayings from a pagan past(?):

16.	He's away with the ------ and the goblins.			(fairies/pixies)
17.	Toss a ---- in a wishing well.				           (coin/a piece of metal)

	Sayings from other countries:

18.	Going off the -----							(rails/USA?)
19.	It’s a sure ----								(bet/USA?)
20.	As busy as a 			(e.g., bumble bee/UK? Or, beaver/Canada or USA)

	In the language, of course, there are many Australianisms too…but the point is that much of our inherited language is not Australian and that this must de-center our experience of being-fully-at-home? To this extent we are all 'migrants' even those whose families have been here for a number of generations? The miscellany of myths found to help us find-ourselves (in this World-of-Life) furthering this de-centered psychic sense of being-at-'home'-here-in-Australia? What do others make of this split, these sets of psychic discontinuities between the idealities of the past and the realities of the future as they intersect in the present? Or, are such myths part of the problem? (8)

	Possibly to be said in favor of current times is the fact that we really are more wealthy, a long term trend that has been continuing for most of the last century? Just look at photos of ordinary folk circa 1900, e.g. A trend that continues despite globalization if not because of it. Moreover, despite the accelerating flux of change, most people in Australia seem to find themselves still in a sense of community as citizens in one country where we continue to directly and indirectly look after each other by various means? (9)

Perhaps Our Sense of Home Can Be Repaired?

	We don't have to scuba dive to know what it's like to be underwater. Just watch those underwater documentaries continually rerun on Foxtel. Yet, the first time you do actually scuba dive the experience is quite 'unreal'. We may increasingly be living our lives in different forms of virtual space still there is no substitute for the immediacy and reality of a hands-on-experience?! Still, despite this continual deferring of 'real' experience in our virtual and hyper-real economies of being-with-others and being-with-ourselves is there some way we can repair our discontinuous psychic sense of being-at-'home'-in-the-world? A state of affairs that must be occurring given that a sense of community and common culture is continuing to develop (despite past perceptions of a multi-culturalism and current perceptions of a cultural pluralism?)? (10)

Can we do this type of re-integration by proxy, e.g., growing our vegetables and herbs in pots on the balconies of our high-rises, go for a drive in the country (if we can find it?), go across country by train, go to the beach, go for holidays overseas, discover our pagan/so-called Celtic/Christian/European roots? Just take a pride in having a place called "home" which must entail finding an enjoyment in being at-home which might include, among other things, cooking a meal for others in the home as well as eating out; going to the movies, etc., together; visiting our friends for afternoon tea; discussing the same book or play or program on television, etc? Perhaps splashing out and buying nice curtains, indulging our nostalgia and curiosity for the past through a love of antiques, the acquisition of art? Perhaps a second house in the 'country'? I am only offering some suggestions here; in the process rhetorically asking "what do you do in order to feel-at-home?" Then, with respect to the myths we find in this world-with-others, religious or otherwise, can their re-enactment help us in this task of re-adjustment? Or, again, are they part of the problem? Can such things become updated so to speak? (11)

A Provisional Conclusion

	Through an examination of language, that part of its re-iterated across the generations, it would seem, ostensively, that we are still partially located in our mother countries and many other cultures as well. Moreover, we inhabit a sense of time that stretches all the way back to a pagan pre-history (in superstitions and fairy stories we tell our children) and returning all the way back through history (what with late-Medieval codes of chivalry, 18th Century idioms, Victorian standards, post-Depression insights, etc., etc.)? May be we are 'centered' in all this in a sense of time that is perhaps mid-19th century in tenor? Perhaps it is time for us to re-discover and amplify what it might mean to be an Australian… and a Contemporary citizen of the world… in the here and now…as a happy, healthy and highly functioning person (in a humanistic sense where the idea of community is such that it sets out to ensure the maximum functioning of all its inhabitants) and from such a point of reference re-vitalize what is meant by 'welfare', the truly democratic, being appropriately religious, becoming re-centered and re-aligned with the nature of the cosmos… from the fleeting nature of atomic particles to the very immensity of the cosmos itself? But how is this grand, mystical-like narrative to be enacted/re-enacted? Or, is such talk of atunement, or at-onement, merely more fuel that feeds the lonely fires of our inescapable sense of an inevitable alienation… if only to the extent that we can never ever find ourselves being able to live fully-at-'home'? But, then, again, some people do feel-at-home so how is this linguistically-oriented sense of alienation overcome? Or, do we just live with it and harmonize the more obvious instances of its manifest discontinuity and disharmony? So, without concluding, I would like to end on this note of non-finality in the form of a set of questions (now framed by the context of this essay): Home may well be where the heart is, on the other hand, our sense of ‘home’ is centered in our construction of reality and that is reflected in our general, overall use of language… can we live with that? Can we truly and fully, existentially, enter into just the here and now (through an adequate overall transcendental suspension?)? If so, where are we and when?! Then, if we cannot ‘escape our past’ how should we balance it with our present and our future? …and that is for my reader or audience to ponder upon and to answer in their reflections on 'time' and 'place' and how we find ourselves-at-'home' in this-World-of-Life both with 'others' and our own senses of 'self'…? (12)

							           Noël Tointon, Sydney, 6.7.05.

P.S: Of course, the most important aspect of this philosophical problem has not been directly entered into, namely, why is our apparent psychic construction of reality not experienced as non-coincident with the reality of that reality which is that we no longer live in a rural environment but co-exist in an intensely developed urban landscape? Such a disparity should be experienced with a considerable degree of cognitive dissonance but the fact of the matter is that this discordance with reality is hardly present on our immediate horizon of cares and concerns, and, the center of this deeper phenomenon of an apparent non-dis-concordance needs to be appropriately approached at some time in the future, N?