PANDEMIC DIARY

H:O:M:E
March 5, 2022

COVID. Have five letters ever held such visceral reaction. Just about two years ago the world shut down - the daily distractions of work; kids going off to school; husbands and wives kissing spouses in a rush to catch a train; eating lunch standing at a food truck with the wind swirling; sitting at dinner with the family, each with a a day’s tale of opportunities won and lost; the usual angst, frustration, stress and disappointment of life, while none could imagine, in their wildest conjurings, a pandemic and its impact of what we once referred to as ‘normal’, that we now long for in its absence.

Of all the things living through a pandemic has altered for a worldwide population and despite the infinite varieties of stressors that uniquely define each of our experiences, the one thing we share is this: the pandemic has altered what home is and what home means to us. In thinking about this it occurred to me that the single quality of home that is almost totally subliminal but absolutely a requisite is that you can leave it. Yes, you have to be able to leave home to have a home. For it to be a home. If you cannot leave home it is a prison. There has never been a home, that one can call home, that cannot be left.

Life starts in the womb. It is home to a fetus where it is nourished and grows and prepares for what is next. And, when amply developed, the agglomeration of cells, have formed more self-sustaining being ready to leave its home. The child often has vague memories of home or, at least, diffuse feelings about the place they once occupied. But, once left, they move on. The mother’s womb is a human beings first home, which they rightfully leave when prepared and equipped. EXIT HERE.

The child is then a part of a family in a family home. The youngster may have siblings or be an only (not lonely) child. Nonetheless, after years of modeling and parenting the child is imparted tools (for better or for worse) for independent living, separate and apart from the parents…outside what has been home for that period. These memories are of a child having grown up during formative years and will represent a large chunk of one’s total life, and so, upon reflection have an enormous influence on us. Yet, it cannot be home unless we can leave it. And, we do.

Home becomes our universe. Our ‘first universe’ is the womb, an enclosure that has been, in a metaphorical sense, copied throughout history in architecture and intention - a place for safety and nurturing - the cache, the cave, circling of the wagons, shelters, walled villages - mother symbol. They were receptive enclosures like cloisters. Allegorical landscapes. And, all are temporal. We repeat the idea of home throughout our lives whenever we re-inhabit a space. Oddly, we imagine ourselves building walls that describe us and our uniqueness: not ramparts to keep people out, rather our replication of an earlier illusion of home as protection, safety, security and comfort. A place to return to…which, again, requires us the ability to leave. Here is where the pandemic has stricken us with grief. We have lost our affection for home because we have not been able to leave it. Being home has gnawed at us, trapped us, forced us to test our physical and emotional constitutions. We long for the home as it once was. When we have the ability to leave, we can choose to honor the place called home…and remain.

Thus, home is not merely nostalgia for the past as represented by a place, a house, a physical representation It is an idea. Moving from home to home is a journey that determines the direction of personal explorations and ‘pilgrimages’ throughout life. They are more than tangible rearranging; they are symbolic restructurings and in an effort to re-establish one’s relationship with home. That lost place is left behind and if correctly thought of is remembered as a launching pad. If it is more than in introduction to what’s next, that aspect of the search becomes ultimately futile. This is why we must move on.

That is why ‘home’ is as much a matter of time and experience as it is distance. “The 1960s song "Homeward Bound" by Simon and Garfunkel is really about an attempt to return to this past time of innocence. The home they sing about is really America of the 1950s. This homeward search has been a persistent theme of much American literature of the twentieth century and some of our greatest authors like Thomas Wolfe addressed this in his novel “You Can't Go Home Again”.

We are all in exile from the past. The novelist Czeslaw Milosz makes this point in his introduction to the book “Exiles” by Josef Koudelka. “…we may consider the life of every human being as an unrelenting movement from childhood on, through the phases of youth, maturity, and old age.” Time and place move us further and further away from our original home. “The past of every individual undergoes constant transformation in his or her memory, and more often than not it acquires the features of an irretrievable land made more and more strange by the flow of time.”

For the first time in contemporary history we are exiles from our homes without leaving them. We wish something of a time past without having departed. We are living concurrently in the place of our personal expansion and growth from our past and last home, while unable to live it as home as we knew it before the pandemic. One would think that since everybody shares this wrenching condition of displacement within one’s home that sympathies would bring people together. But, such is the mythology of home, that although on a metaphysical level our homes of origin are the same we each develop our own association with home that is unique and personal. Even mother’s wombs are unique.

What is left then for humans?
G-O-D?
Is God the manifestation of our most original home?
Is God a creation such that you can never forget home?
Is God a reminder that one day you will return home?
Is God the universal womb that pushed you out for a time so that you could travel in spacial circles only to reminisce on remnants of the past.

Or, maybe, you just have to move the furniture around.