From Word To Word

I have been away for a while, first on Manitoulin with some friends and then at camp, and I have returned home with a whole list of things that I need to write about but will probably not find the time to write about very soon, especially considering the new semester that is lurking only a few days away.  I would like to write something about what it means to go away together, in togetherness, as family and as friends, something about how increased wealth produces increased isolation, something about John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues, something on the idea of the call in Heidegger, something on the relationship between ideals of individuality and the experience of depression, and this is still a very partial list.

I was full of these and other things  as I drove into the driveway on Saturday, full of the need to do something about them, but coming home disrupted them with its welcome, disrupted them with the pleasantness of the home and neighbourhood.  There were tomatoes, hundred of tomatoes, ripening on the vines, the first ripe tomatoes I have ever managed to grow from seed.  There were apples, a very few apples, our first ever crop of apples, ready to be picked.  There were sunflowers, the sunflowers that my eldest son had purchased with his own allowance and planted with his own hands and watered relentlessly, and they were blooming.  There were the friends who dropped by for pancakes on Saturday night, and the friends who came by for pasta on Sunday night.  There was, in short, a fullness of those things that make the home and the garden and the neighbourhood what they should be.

You will not blame me for choosing them over writing the poor things that I might have written.

I finished Ivan Illich’s In The Vineyard Of The Text some time last fall, and I wrote about it once at that time, warning that I might write several times more because I had found so much in it that provoked me to reflection.  I never did get the chance to write what I had planned, but I was recently reminded of one of its ideas, so I will take the opportunity now to make good, at least in small part, on what I promised those several months ago.

At one point in the book, Illich describes a kind of utopian space where those who have learned to approach reading as a kind of spiritual discipline can gather in community.  “I dream,” he says, “that outside the educational system there might be something like houses of reading, where the few who discover their passion for a life centered on reading would find the necessary guidance, silence, and complicity of disciplined companionship needed for the long invitation into one or the other of several spiritualities or styles of celebrating the book.”  The kind of reader that he imagines for this place is “one who has made himself into an exile in order to concentrate his entire attention and desire on wisdom, which thus becomes the hoped-for home.”  There are thus two kinds of places being described here: the physical houses where readers might come together, and the hoped-for home of wisdom that such readers seek, and I think that these two places come to inform each other, creating between them an image of homes that are characterized by a love of wisdom and an image of wisdom that is characterized by a love of the home.

I am powerfully drawn to this utopian vision.  Though I cannot imagine the conditions under which it might be accomplished in its entirety, not for me, not at this time, not given the ways that my priorities of family and community currently constrain me, I nevertheless find it a beautiful ideal, one of many often incompatible ideals, to be sure, but no less beautiful for that reason.

Illich’s vision attracts me so strongly because it implies an approach to reading that I find myself insisting upon more and more as time goes by, one that I hope to outline more fully at some later time, one that is characterized by a threefold discipline: close and attentive reading; thoughtful and patient reflection; and learned and leisurely conversation.

What is common in these three things is time.  The text is treated, not as a task to be completed, not as an item to be checked, but as a site through which an intellectual and spiritual discipline can be exercised.  It becomes, to use the dominant metaphor of Illich’s text, a vineyard, a garden, a forest, in which the reader walks and lingers and then shares with other readers.  This approach to the text takes time.  It requires that we make a time, that we create or shape a time that is suitable and respectful of the text and of our fellow readers.

Illich’s utopian vision, therefore, is less about reserving a space for its own sake than it is about reserving a space where time can be dedicated to the needs of a convivial community of reading.  The hoped-for home, in other words, is not primarily a matter of a physical space, though certain physical spaces may be more or less conducive to it.  Rather, it is the opportunity, the time, the discipline to read well and to do so in community, to read in the pursuit of wisdom.

If this is the case, and I believe that it is, then it may be that the hoped-for home is closer to us than it first seemed.  All it would require would be readers committed enough to reading well that they would make the proper space and the proper time for their texts and for each other.  All it would require is for these readers to form intentional community with one another, to go along with one another, to spur each other along the road to reading.

This kind of community probably even exists among us already, at least in part, at least in rudimentary and provisional ways, in the times that we already reserve to reading well, though they be sporadic and uncertain, and in the times that we give our fellow readers around our tables, even if they be infrequent and unpredictable. We must begin by cherishing and nourishing these times of the hoped-for home that we have already been able to fashion in our lives.  These times, however small, however tenuous, are precious.  They must be carefully maintained.

We must then seek diligently to expand the compass of the hoped-for home, to discipline ourselves to a slow and careful reading, to a thoughtful and patient reflection, to a learned and leisurely conversation.  We must make of these things a kind of all-informing passion, a passion that comes to order the life of the mind in such a way that it opens onto worship.  I am much concerned lately with how I might begin to accomplish this in my own hoped-for home.

The garden marks the space of the cultivated between the spaces of the home and the world, between the spaces of the domestic and the natural.  This cultivated space lies beyond the home, but it is nevertheless a part of the home, an extension of the home into the world.  It is the space that marks the transition from the domestic to the natural.  It signals that the door to the home is near but has not yet been entered, that the threshold of the home is close at hand but has not yet been crossed. It bears the marks of both the domestic and the natural, and so it is less a border between them than it is a borderland, a place of transition, where they are brought into a relation.

It is the space in which the domestic orders the natural so that it might be more aesthetic or more productive, but it is also a space that is always open, by necessity, to some degree or another, to the natural.  This is true even in the most urban situations, even where the natural has been most disrupted and displaced, even where the natural has been reduced only to the weather and to whatever remnant plants and animals have learned to survive in the midst of human development.  Even in these places, so long as the home is bordered by a garden, though it be only a hanging planter or a window box, the cultivated space marks the transition between the home and whatever remains of the natural, and it comes to offer itself as a space where the natural and the domestic both might better live and grow.

The nature of the cultivated space, therefore, marks the nature of the relation between the domestic and the natural in any given place, whether it be the unrelieved concrete of an urban neighbourhood, or the vast and ordered lawns of suburbia, or the fields of the farmhouse.  In each case, the garden reveals how the domestic relates to the natural.  For this reason, the creation of a garden is more than a merely aesthetic or a merely productive act.  It is also a political and a social act, and the choices that are made in its construction are not without their political and social significance.  The choice of whether to make the garden organic or edible or native; the choice of whether to make it hospitable to whatever might enter it, whether it be human or animal or vegetable; the choice of whether to keep only carefully maintained lawns and a few well pruned shrubs or to have a whole range of plants and trees: these all become significant, because they reveal how we cultivate our relation to the natural.

I was supposed to give a weekend of talks on home and the threshold last year about this time, and I promised a reader that I would post my notes, but the talks were subsequently postponed until the fall, and then I forgot about posting them entirely. I ran across them this afternoon, however, as I was going through a completed notebook before filing it, so I thought I might still post them here, though it is now long after the fact. They are not notes in the sense of an outline for any talk or talks in particular, because I do not really speak in this way. Rather, they are the short reflections on the home that informed my thinking going into those talks. I am posting them merely as I wrote them, almost unedited.

The limits of the home are defined by the beyond of the home, by the street, by the neighbourhood, by the town or the countryside. The home is the home because of what is not the home, because it divides the space of the world into the at home and the not at home. In a significant sense, therefore, the home can only know itself as home to the degree that it knows what is not home. The home is defined by what is beyond the home.

To say this most radically, I can perhaps become at home only through my practice of being not at home.  The home is always, by definition, distinct from what is not home, but the practice of home begins when I am not a at home.  The practice of the home begins as a practice of the street and of the neighbourhood.  It is a practice of  the road.

The practice of the road is a practice of openness to encountering the other person.  It is an openness to being moved by the other person.  It does not try to manufacture an encounter through its own activity.  It maintains an active openness to what may encounter me.  It is an active passivity, an active waiting.  It maintains an availability to the approach of the other person, a kind of hospitality in advance.

The practice of the road is pedestrian.  The driver is transported and so is closed to the other person. The pedestrian is not transported.  The pedestrian is always potentially open to encounter.

The road is the image and the metaphor of what is not the home.  It leads to and from the home.  It begins and ends at the doorway of the home.  There is no home without a road, no home from which one does not depart and to which one does not return.  Without this coming and going, without this journeying to and from the home, there is no home, not of any kind.

My journeying is always in relation to the home.  I circulate around this pole, around this center.  It remains before me and behind me, an object of my longing and my nostalgia.

When I am encountered on the road, I am always encountered in relation to the home, in relation to my coming and going, in relation to my longing and nostalgia, in relation to my ground and my center.  My response to the other is grounded precisely in this relation to home.  The home determines how I turn myself toward the other, how I hold myself open to the other, how I maintain myself in anticipation of the other.

The road is the place where I encounter the other, always, without exception.  There is no other place where I am confronted by the other.  If I am confronted by the other, I am on the road, no matter where I am.

The confrontation, the encounter, brings me alongside the other, even if only for a moment.  It turns me in the same direction. It causes us me walk with the other.  The road makes us companions, fellow travelers, strangers walking in the same path.

The place of the threshold is the limit of the home and the not home.  It is the membrane.  It is the hymen.  It is the sacred curtain.

The door cannot be left open, not always.  Only the home can be always open.  If the door is always open, if anyone can enter the home at any time, the limit between the home and the road is erased.  The home ceases to exist as a home.  It ceases to be distinguishable from the road.  Its intimate space is no longer distinct from the public space of the world.

The open home is not the home that has its doors open to the other always and in every case.  It is the home that is always open to the possibility that the door might be opened to the other always and in every case.  It is the home that desires that the door might indeed be opened to the other always and in every case, though this desire always remains impossible.

The open home always anticipates the other’s approach.  It always receives the other at the threshold, even if, for whatever reason, the other cannot be invited across the threshold at this time.  It is a home that always welcomes the approach of the other, even if this welcome cannot become an invitation across the threshold.  The open home is not an absolute hospitality.

At the same time, the practice of the door expresses itself as a desire for the invitation.  The open home may not be able to extend an invitation to the other in every case, but it always desires to do so.  It is always broken-hearted when it cannot do so.  The open home is always characterized by a willingness to lay aside whatever it can in order that an invitation might be extended.  It delights to sacrifice itself in order to receive the approach of the other with an invitation.

The open home is essentially, but not absolutely, hospitible.  It does not make of one the host and of another the guest.  Its desire  is to make everyone at home, to whatever degree it is able.  It does not reserve the invitation for an occasion, because its invitation is not to an occasion.  Its invitation is to the home, as it is at that moment, as it is striving to be at that moment.

It was a cold, cloudy, sleety day today, one of those days that will consent neither to be truly nice nor to be truly horrible, settling for meteorological mediocrity, which is the worst of all weather.

I decided that the day called for nesting. The kids and I made a pact not to leave the house for anything short of an emergency. We made hot chocolate. We brought our blankets down to the livingroom and watched a movie. We made a tent around one of the radiators and read some stories. We nested.

It reminded me of what Gaston Bachelard has to say about nests in The Poetics of Space.  With nests, he says, “we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world; we receive a beginning of confidence, an urge toward cosmic confidence.”  It was just this confidence that we built today in the face of a February day in Canada: the confidence of the nest.

I have this idea.  It may or not be original, and it may or may not even be viable, but I have it, so here it is.

I want to apply the principles of microcredit to the problem of affordable housing, which is a significant issue here in Guelph, and make loans available for people to convert their basements or attics or other spaces into legal apartments that would be set aside to be affordable housing.  The loans would have no fixed repayment term, but the owner of the house would agree to rent the apartment at rates within affordable housing allowances and would also agree to have the full amount of this rent be applied to repay the loan until the full loan plus an additional amount, perhaps ten or fifteen percent, has been repaid.  This money could then be used to finance future projects.

There would also be an expectation that the owner of the house would not just provide an apartment for those in need of affordable housing but would also provide community and social support to those who are renting, in whatever form this might need to take, whether helping new immigrants negotiate the governmental and legal system, or driving the physically disabled to their medical appointments, or visiting with the elderly, or providing childcare for a single parent, or whatever.  Ideally, the owners and renters would even eat together regularly and share some of the tasks of the house.

The loans would probably be provided by a non-profit group like a church or like Habitat for Humanity, but it might also be possible to do this through private means.

I see the following benefits of this approach:

1.  It provides affordable housing outside of government housing projects that, even in the best cases, turn into ghettos.

2.  It provides people who are at financial risk with both a place to live and also the beginnings of a community and a social support network.

3.  It encourages more efficient use of existing housing rather than requiring the construction of new housing.

4.  It encourages communal and relational rather than governmental and institutional solutions to social problems.

5.  It encourages mixed income neighbourhoods, which reduces overall crime rates.

6.  It forces people to encounter and relate meaningfully to others who are not in their existing social circles.

There are probably other benefits that I am missing here, and I am probably willfully overlooking the potential difficulties, but I am interested to hear what others think about this proposal.    It is exactly the kind of intervention that I think needs most to be made in the world, but I am not sure whether it is one that will appeal to anyone else.  Any thoughts or comments that you might have would be appreciated.

As should be clear by now, the space of the home is a subject that is of great concern for me, so I was sincerely pleased to learn that my friend, whom some of you will know as TC from her comments on this site, has begun a blog of short quotations and photos and reflections on the meaning of home.  TC’s comments have often caused me to think differently and more deeply through the idea of home over the past two years or so, and two of her book recommendations, George Perec’s Species of Spaces and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, have become a significant part of my personal canon, so I will enjoy the opportunity to read her in the coming months, and I think many of you will as well.

Today is tomato sauce day.  Actually, it is the first of what will need to be two tomato sauce days, which is apparently what happens when you have the assistance of two children under five years of age.  To this point, we have been harvesting and processing the basil, the oregano, and the garlic from our garden.  Our tomatoes, the very few that we have, are still too green, so we had to buy a couple of bushels from the market on Saturday.  I hope to start making the sauce this evening.

I have always loved this process.  I love cutting the herbs and digging the garlic.  I love stripping the leaves from the plants.  I love washing and chopping the ingredients.  I love blanching and peeling the tomatoes.  I love these things, not despite the fact that they are mundane, but precisely because they are mundane and because they therefore allow me a kind of solitude to think and to reflect. I have always found that it is theses mundane tasks, those that do not require my attention but that nevertheless occupy me physically, that seem to open a space for thinking.  It is weeding and kneading bread dough and processing vegetables and cleaning cupboards that permit me a kind of solitude in the midst of everything, an intellectual clearing in which there is nothing do but reflect.

Labour of this sort, therefore, is often more restorative for me than simple relaxation, because it takes me away from myself for a time, beacuse it forces me to confront myself for a time.  I am forced, not just to do the mundane task, but to think through it.  Though I do not set out to think, though I do not even know how to go about thinking, it is in these spaces that I find myself thinking nevertheless, that I find myself unable to do anything else.

I wrote on the image of the threshold a few months ago, and I have been wanting ever since to supplement this discussion with a few passages from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.  There is much that I would like to explore in these passages, but I will not take the space and the time that I would like.  Even so, this post will be much too long.  I apologize in advance.

In a section on the image of the door, Bachelard says this: “Outside and inside are both intimate spaces; they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility. If there exists a borderline surface between such an inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides.”  Though he does not use the word ‘threshold’ explicitly here, his language of the borderline surface between the inside and the outside of the door is clearly linked to this idea, and the connotations of this passage lead me in two directions.

The first and most obvious direction is to the passage that I quoted from Heidegger in my earlier post, or, more exactly, to the passage that I was too lazy to quote in that post but eventually included as a comment at the request of one of my readers.  However, since it is a particularly significant passage for me, and since I will be referring to it very closely here, I will quote it properly this time.

The section comes from an essay called “Language”, which can be found in Poetry, Language, and Thought. In it, Heidegger is discussing a poem by Georg Trakl called “A Winter Evening”, and he is analysing the line where Trakl says, “Pain has turned the threshold to stone.”  The larger passage reads as follows:

“The threshold is the ground-beam that bears the doorway as a whole. It sustains the middle in which the two, the outside and the inside, penetrate each other. The threshold bears the between. What goes out and goes in, in the between, is joined in the between’s dependability. The dependability of the middle must never yield either way. The settling of the between needs something that can endure, and is in this sense hard. The threshold, as the settlement of the between, is hard because pain has petrified it. But the pain that became appropriated to stone did not harden into the threshold to congeal there. The pain presences unflagging in the threshold, as pain.”

The relation between this passage and Bachelard’s is in the pain that they both ascribe to the space between the inside and the outside, though their description of this pain is not identical.  Bachelard says that the pain is on both sides of the borderline surface, a pain that derives from the readiness of the inside and the outside to be reversed, from their readiness to have their hostility exchanged.  His interest is in how the inside and the outside of the doorway relate to one another as exchangeable and reversible intimacies, rather than on the between of their exchange itself.  In fact, he is not even willing to say definitively whether there is such a between.  “If,” he says, “there exists a borderline surface,” and only then, under the sign of this hesitation, does he suggest that such a surface must be “painful on both sides.”

In contrast, Heidegger insists absolutely on this space of the between, saying that its dependability is what in fact enables the outside and the inside to relate as such.  While he is like Bachelard in affirming the interchangeability of the outside and the inside, which he describes as penetrating each other, and while he is also like Bachelard in assuming the pain that this interpenetration produces, he does not share Bachelard’s hesitation to name the between of this relation precisely as the between.

Bachelard’s understanding of the between also differs from Heideggers’ in that it seems to be produced by the reversal of the inside and the outside, by the exchange of their hostilities, where Heidegger seems to say that the between precedes the relation of the inside and the outside.  His between is characterized by its dependability, by its injunction not yield in either direction, in its capacity to settle into the threshold.  This between, far from being provisional or dependant on the relation between the inside and the outside, is the dependable space that makes this relation possible.

In fact, in Heidegger’s terms, Bachelard is not describing the threshold at all, but the between which is sustained by the threshold and which settles into the threshold, because it requires the hardness and endurance that it provides.  In Heidegger’s terms, Bachelard has no threshold, only a between, which perhaps explains why Bachelard’s between remains so tentative, marked only by the pain that it suffers on both sides, because his between lacks the ground of a threshold to bear and support it.

The second direction that Bachelard’s passage leads me is to Jacques Derrida and his work on the relation between hostility and hospitality.  Derrida argues that these two things are inseparable, going so far as to join them together with the neologism ‘hostipitality’.  Derrida touches on this idea in several places, including an essay called “Hostipitality” that can be found in Acts of Religion, a chapter on absolute hospitality in The Politics of Friendship, and a short work called On Hospitality.

It is Bachelard’s phrase about the inside and the outside being always ready to exchange their hostility that reminds me of Derrida’s idea of hostipitality.  There is in his words the idea of an openness of the one to the absolutely other, of the inside to the outside, of the outside to the inside, a readiness to be reversed, to be interpenetrated, even though this exchange, this giving of the one to the other, this openness of the one to the other, this hospitality, is also, always, a hostility.  The inside and outside are ready to exchange their unavoidable hostility like the gift of hospitality, there, right there, at the door, on the threshold, in the between.

It is because of these Derridean overtones that I find Bachelard’s words to evocative, I think:  “They are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility.”  The possibility of a true hospitality finds profound expression here.

There is much more that I would like to say, but I have already written more than enough, so I will just include two further quotations from Bachelard.  Treat them as an envoi.

“How many daydreams we should have to analyze under the simple heading of doors, for the door is an entire cosmos of the half-open. In fact, it is one of its primal images, the very origin of a daydream that accumulates desires and temptations: the temptation to open up the ultimate depths of being, and the desire to conquer all reticent beings. The door schematizes two strong possibilities, which sharply classify two types of daydream. At times, it is closed, bolted, padlocked. At others, it is open, that is to say, wide open.”

“There are two beings in a door; a door awakens in us a two-way dream, that is doubly symbolical.”

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard relates an anecdote about the dramatist and poet Jean-Francois Ducis.  Apparently, at the age of seventy, having wanted a country house all of his life, Ducis decided to construct one for himself in his imagination.  He even went so far as to write poems about this place, and he is said to have taken pleasure in it as if it actually existed.

I have myself imagined houses in this way more than once, have dreamed of them also, until I could find my way through their rooms and their corridors as well as my own home.  The houses of my imagination are always stone, old stone, and they are always larger within than they are without.  When they are approached from the road, they seem the merest cottages, with small lighted windows and thatched roofs, but their doors always open onto vastness, long hallways and stretching staircases, dark corners and grand halls.  There are always gardens around them and libraries within them.  They are always warmed by fireplaces and lit by candles.  Their centre is always a broad, rough, wooden, kitchen table.

I found many of these elements in Bachelard’s description of the home, just as I have found them in other houses in other books over the years: Vane’s house in George MacDonald’s Lilith, Badger’s house in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, the professor’s house in C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the Athelny house in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, among others.  These houses resonate with the houses of my imagination.  They are the houses where I feel at home.