Home

Although travel is exciting, home comforts are hard to beat. My daily morning ritual involves making coffee, feeding the starving cat, opening the balcony doors, sitting down to read or write a poem. The repetition of these tiny acts have brought a sense of calm and purpose to my life.

After many years of being in Spain, I’ve come to love my street: Carrer de les Carretes, redolent with Indian spice, in Raval, the ramshackle district of old town Barcelona. Although noisy, full of strange goings-on and narcopisos, it’s cheap and honest - rare these days in central Barcelona – and trouble doesn’t find you unless you look for it. It’s been my only constant home in all my adult life; everywhere else, transition, a waiting room for somewhere else, rootlessness and dispossession.

Another day is come
The streets are hazy with commotion
The mango-seller’s dim, fly-circled shack
The Arab boys that lounge about in groups,
The used fridge shops, now empty once again
A dog barking incessantly
From isolated balcony
Somebody playing music far too loud;
All this, Raval, adopted home,
Imperfect as the years,
Yet cherished nonetheless
For holding time
With hands that slip
Through seas of light.

My childhood home was different. A sprawling Tudor farmhouse in the depths of Sussex countryside, surrounded by sheep-dotted fields and leafy, deciduous forest. Its image often haunts my dreams. A sense of loss accompanies those dreams. That house where I discovered life has gone. A stranger lives there now. I can’t return.

The past has fallen from a high place, smashed, and broken into many glinting shards. We try to put them back together but we can’t. The old is gone, and other vases hold our flowers now. Building a home amid this changing world entails loss, immediate or eventual. We love these moments while we can. Our hands slip through this world as through an amber-coloured sea of light.

Ideas of home exist on diverse levels. The first, our bodies, that fleshy house of mind, the second, the roof above our heads, the walls that shelter us from wind, and rain, nature’s inclemency. The third, the earth, the fragile webs of life that give us life amid the starlit void of space; the fourth, the universe itself, and then, beyond the universe, another home, perhaps, who knows? Our feeble human eyes will never see that far.

In the Kabbalah, as in many mystic traditions, the concept of infinity is quintessential. In the 16th century, Rabbi Moshe Cordovero wrote:

…Then you wonder, astonished: Who am I? I am a mustard seed in the middle of the sphere of the moon, which itself is a mustard seed within the next sphere. So it is with that sphere and all it contains in relation to the next sphere. So it is with all the spheres — one inside the other — and all of them are a mustard seed within the further expanses. And all of these are a mustard seed within further expanses.

In modern mathematics, the same idea is expressed with the image of the fractal: an image, derived from a relatively simple formula, though infinitely complex. The mathematics behind fractals, loosely termed chaos, is also used to model natural processes, such as weather systems, starling murmurations, and the formation of coastlines. It would seem that nature – our home on earth – adores irregularity, deviation, unpredictability, an ordered disorder, so to speak, for behind the appearance of chaos lies tangible principles.

Our homes our precious to us, though sometimes we forget that everything is interconnected. Arisen from the vast ocean, our bodies, the end-result of billions of years of evolution, have come from earth and then return to earth at the moment of death. The classic Hobbesian image of the body politic suggests human societies as a whole function like bodies. Tibetan tradition infers that the inverse is also correct, that bodies function like societies, with the head as “executive”,  the heart “domestic affairs”, etc. In the Orphic cosmogony, mankind arose from the accursed ashes of the Titans, who were smote by Zeus’s lightning bolt. Unconsciously, humans seek to replicate the giants of their ancestors. Almost any modern city can be seen as a giant: money the giant’s blood; factories the giant’s lungs, markets the giant’s brain, toxic rivers the giant’s bowels. Our waste shat out to sea, forgotten, as if the giant’s also a giant baby depending on mother nature to change its nappy.

On the more intimate level, our houses double as extensions of ourselves. In his poem the “Guest House”, the Sufi master Rumi celebrates guests, even the ones that smash the crockery and break the furniture; for all of them provide valuable lessons. Carl Jung also used the structure of the house to represent the self. In his own life, he built the famous Bollingen Tower, on the shores of Lake Zurich. Inside the house, there was a room to which only he was allowed access. A second story was added in 1955, to signify “an extension of consciousness achieved in old age”.

Home, 2020. Thomas Helm

Understanding self-identification with a house is easy. Perhaps that’s also part of the problem. On the collective, organisational level, we often fail to recognise the natural world as home, deserving all the tenderness that we reserve for houses. This basic shallowness of empathy invites wholesale destruction, leading scientists to warn us we’ve now entered the sixth mass extinction phase. The last time the extinctions rates were as high the dinosaurs died out.

The capitalist propensity for turning all resources into short-term profit, without concern for the future, accelerates destruction. Unlike houses, we cannot simply build another world. Some ecosystems take millions of years to develop. Humans are making them disappear overnight.

If we keep on consuming at our current rate, soon they’ll be nothing left, and we will risk extinction, not to mention the plight of animals, the fragile webs of life out of which we have arisen, and which we have a duty to protect. Sacrificing philosophical vision before profit-driven markets is like handing lambs to the wolves for safe keeping.  We need new laws; we need them fast. Even if humans do survive, a world without its plants and animals is joyless.

The word economy derives from the Greek words oikos, meaning ‘house’ and nemein, meaning ‘manage’. The way capitalist economies work in their current form show we are terrible housekeepers. We need to treat the natural world the same way that we treat our homes; with foresight, prudence, restraint, harmony, care and discipline. It is our shared heritage. Ruin it once, it’s gone forever.