"House" and "Home"

It has occurred to me, as we are beginning to look for another house to call "home", that there is probably an unconscious "blank slate" fallacy at work in the modern understanding of housing.

Let me 'splain... I think that the modern, materialist mindset holds that things are meaningless in themselves, and that we only bring meaning to them, or project meaning onto them, or lay meaning over them in a kind of grid.

People, for instance, are viewed as blank slates from birth, and the belief is that everything is learned... morality, gender roles... everything. Life in the world means nothing, except what we decide it means.

So, for further instance, sex is neutral and meaningless, and whatever meaning there is in the sex act is extrinsic to it, is something we bring into it from outside. From this perspective, the only possible answer to the question "what does sex mean?" is "Whatever it means to you".

And I believe this perspective - this materialist, blank slate mindset, has spilled over into the realm of the built environment. That is, a house, a building, has no meaning except what we bring to it. So, houses more and more come to resemble each other, and on the interior come to be only an assembly of white boxes... variations on the white box theme. They are mass produced and laid out with all the poetry and soul of an egg crate.

The assumption is, of course, that people will move into the space and "make it their own" by populating it with objects, by painting it and living in it, and this is true to an extent, but the mistake is in thinking that this is only a one-way interaction. The house is presumed to be mute, but no created thing is mute. We speak through everything we do and make. What do our modern buildings and suburban houses say about us?

If I wake up in, work in, and return home every day to a dull, prosaic, box, will I not over time begin to feel the world is dull and prosaic? Will I not tend to think in predictable boxes and right angles? If I become more and more acclimated to an indoor, artificially lit, air-conditioned life, will I begin to see nature only as something alien, inconvenient and uncomfortable... and maybe dangerous?

We are increasingly cut off from the poetry of nature by our manufactured environment. If we don't bring some of that poetry into our homes, we will find ourselves spiritually starved even as we are physically overfed. In the words of Douglas Adams, "There is another theory which states that this has already happened.".

There are houses, and there are homes. The job of "homemaker" has been denigrated and dismissed, and we have all suffered as a result. Bringing humanity and harmony and art to the home is, in our time, an extremely important and yet neglected work.

Comments

[Foxfier]

In a way, the "paper cuttout" houses have already had a profound effect on people-- almost everyone under 40 grew up in houses where the power and water were safe and nearly always working, where the walls were solid and windows made of glass.

The highly predictable houses tend to be cheap-- and that means they can be plentiful.

From where I stand, that might have a connection to why people are so willing to take what they have for granted-- what is more basic than a safe place to sleep?

The flip side of this is that individualization costs in time and money-- I grew up in ranch houses, with uneven floors, drafty windows, and large numbers of small mammals. ^.^ I also got to spend a lot of time in a cow camp in NV-- Coyote Camp near Nut Mountain, if anyone remembers it?-- so I know what the classic two-room boxes without power or water were like, as well.

It is hard to take pride in the apartment my husband and I share-- there's flowers in the window, but that's about as much as you'd see for individuality on the outside.

Inside is different. Not as different as it will be, someday when we have more money and a lease that allows repainting, but it is totally different from the apartments above, below, to my right, back and front. (left being thin air.....)

Some of those apartments, I know, are the empty boxes evoked by the look of the complex-- especially if it's recently snowed, so that you see no grass, the trees are just reddish sticks, and all the windows are shut tight.

Many more, though, are full of life, warmth, and folks who know the soul needs to be fed.

It may boil down to being a matter of how you look at it-- the white boxes may be ice trays of human storage lockers, or they may be inexpensive pallets for people to practice their life-painting.

[Foxfier]

That was a lot shorter in my head.....

[e.]

"If I become more and more acclimated to an indoor, artificially lit, air-conditioned life, will I begin to see nature only as something alien, inconvenient and uncomfortable... and maybe dangerous?"

I don't really agree with this.

For example, I would think a prisoner kept in a concrete prison cell would feel supernaturally awakened once that prisoner is released from his prison and into the outside world.

I can't recall the actual name of the film at this moment, but I remember a scene in a motion picture where even just a view to the outside world, a view that from his prison cell featured a scene of nature that could only fill him with not only relief but anxious anticipation.

In other words, instead of nature becoming 'alien', I should think that such a person confined in such a cell would be starved for nature, among many other things, rather than as the negative sentiments expressed above.

[Paul]

e,

Not if the prison offers constant distractions and high octane comforts - to the point of manufacturing an illusory world.

[jim janknegt]

I have never been able to leave any place I've lived in alone. I tear out walls, build archways, rip out carpet, put down tile , build strange cabinets and bookcases add rooms and porchesand pergolas, fountains and ponds and on and on...

One doesn't have to settle. Damn the resale value, full speed ahead!