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F.R.R. Mallory
April 13, 2006

Home. That a single word can conjure such a host of feelings, memories, and thoughts hints at how powerfully important our concepts of home are, to who we are, how we view others, and ourselves and where we go as we venture forth in the world. Home is the position from which we venture and to which we return. Almost like the mythical ringed snake, we spend our lives eating our head.

Maya Angelou, Inaugural Poet, tells us "You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right" (Angelou). Is she right? She speaks to the union of spirit and self, of healing the philosophical wound of separation from source. Yet does this become merely a form of spiritual bypass, the avoidance of pain through distancing of self from body? Home remains tenuous and mysterious both memory and daydream, an intangible dance between spirit, self and body. We long to belong, to be folded inside a saturated acceptance where we are safe because we share the same secrets - yet this alone, isn't enough. Joan Didion in "On Going Home" calls this external search for home the classic betrayal, and it is.

We recognize the telltale markers of home in the words of an author when they tell us, ...once there I fall into their ways, which are difficult, oblique, deliberately inarticulate...in dusty houses filled with mementos quite without value...where we appear to talk exclusively about people we know who have been committed to mental hospitals...booked on drunk-driving charges... (Didion 644).

Such words are distasteful, embarrassing, and entrancing, describing the bottomless crevasses of homes hidden conversation and ways of relating, under the exposed flesh of external observation. When I read such words I hear the invitation to be, for a moment, invited inside this author's childhood. I am close I can almost feel the comfort of the worn, familiar spot that is her position in this conversation and family. Yet I feel the conversation protracted, with gaps of events and experiences distance has created, the weave of family fabric is no longer tight but now loopy and open. I long to go deeper, to the womb that surrounded her first, before separation was possible, when she was connected to the most profound home of all. I want her to remind me how it felt before birth exposed me. Didion tells me, "...we are talking in code about the things we like best" (Didion 644).

Amy Tan in "Fish Cheeks" exposes me to the trembling rawness of her home's inner sanctum by reversing Joan Didion's technique of familial acceptance, choosing instead to invite me inside through her fear of rejection. I've been here too, in my home, in my family, where my home's peculiar traits seem fodder for possible ridicule or rejection when exposed to someone whose opinion I believe I will value. "What would [he] think of our noisy Chinese Christmas...noisy Chinese relatives who lacked proper American manners?" (Tan 223). Her universal fear of rejection invites me to experience the tender fragility of the author's relationships when she attempts to expand the boundaries of home beyond the tight confines of its original form. She informs me of the dangers, the risks. She also exposes the betrayal.

Didion answers Tan when she says "My husband...is uneasy in their house. My brother refers to my husband, in his presence, as "Joan's husband." Marriage is the classic betrayal" (Didion 644). I read such essays hoping to understand through the lens of another person's experience how my expanding collection of relationships fits or doesn't fit into our collective home of origin. Where is our home? Where is my home? Do we ask too much to have all our needs met? Is it possible for all three aspects of self to be whole and robust at the same time? Is sacrifice the commodity of love? Didion suggests that her marriage and new family never fully attain the experience of home that she seeks. "...I was almost thirty years old before I could talk to my family on the telephone without crying after I hung up" (Didion 644). Husbands, children, and friends, no matter how close or how loved, cannot seem to cross completely into the secret territory that is home.

Adulthood drives us toward recreating home. We meet new people and spend endless hours telling them about our life. We share details of childhood and we look for parallels in our experiences which allow us to create the belief of deeper understanding. We want to believe our new relationship partners can be brought back into our experience of home, be introduced retroactively as if to ghost in the landscape of our childhood. In this way, we can create the idea that this new person knows us and in this intimate knowing, accepts us and in this acceptance, makes us safe. But they can't really ghost into our past no matter how similar some of our joint experiences appear to be. As our inability to fit all our pieces together becomes tangible we know we have chased a dream, a shadow of memory, unable to grasp it, no matter how we try.

Perhaps what we never accept is that gestation is nine months, our perfect home, unconditioned acceptance, and unconditioned love had a finite determination. Perhaps it was never meant to represent the ideal experience.
Angelou's concept of home appears to address the philosophical union of self and source. Didion and Tan examine the fractures being constantly mended between self and body seeing betrayals and failures when trying to bring the whole together. Oriah Mountain Dreamer asks, "...if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments" (Oriah, Opening The Invitation).

There is only one time in our life when we are granted the grace to live inside the skin of another. Perhaps it is natural to long to repeat this experience, to live inside wholeness on all levels.

Home is this unreachable place we are birthed from whose loss becomes a sorrow in the soul, a grief in the heart. It is my unaccepted longing of self as I scream...I don't want to be alone! ...and the snake eats its head.

Work Cited

Angelou, Maya, Inaugural Poet, http://www.mayaangelou.com

Didion, Joan,  Literature For Composition, Essays, Fiction,  Poetry, and Drama, 7th ed. Ed. Sylvan Barnet, William Burto, William E. Cain. New York, Pearson/Longman, 2005. 644-5

Oriah Mountain Dreamer, Opening The Invitation, Harper San Francisco, 1999, http://www.oriahmountaindreamer.com/

Tan, Amy, Literature For Composition, Essays, Fiction,  Poetry, and Drama, 7th ed. Ed. Sylvan Barnet, William Burto, William E. Cain. New York, Pearson/Longman, 2005. 223-4

Joan Didion
1934 -

Amy Tan
1952 -

Sometimes, you read writers whose words and thoughts you really understand. For me, I understood feeling uneasy in the houses of other people. I don't think I'm at all unusual in feeling awkward and uncomfortable with my understanding of how other people live. Then, when you combine that discomfort with the desire to be accepted or liked, when you are nurturing a relationship hoping it will stick, this discomfort becomes almost painful at points.

This is the memory that both Didion and Tan gave me when I read their stories. When home is a moving target that truly exists only in the soft part of memory and never really exists in the solidity of space and time - this too is familiar to me.

As a much older person, at this point in my life, I have wandered these paths so long that I have discovered that my home is within a comfort of self - a belonging in my own skin. All of my discomfort of others and other's places or ways of being ended up emerging from a disconnect between my selfness and my own body. Home is a territory of self, of personal understanding, of personal comfort of carrying self with us whereever we venture.

It is true that physical places hold familiarity but they can equally hold a familiarity altered which is almost worse when we encounter it unexpectedly. I remember the first time I returned to my home town to find myself on a street that never existed in the town I knew well from my memory. In that moment I crossed over into a foreign place where someone had stole away the town of my memory. Reality hadn't stood still as my memory had and I felt betrayed by everyone for moving on and leaving me behind a much younger and perhaps more vulnerable person. I also remember the first time I woke up and lay in my bed trying to recognize the ceiling and from that recognition remember which town, which bed, which life was I participating in at that moment.

That was disconcerting but much the same type of physical disconnect from 'home' that I feel shadows our lives from the moment we leave the familiarity of our first home or first town. What do we know of ourselves outside the walls of that familiar shape? Who are we?

Home becomes a deeper understanding of self, restlessness fades.

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