In wars humans and animals are killed. And homes are destroyed. In the Russian invasion of Ukraine, thousands of buildings and houses have collapsed from bombs. The pain for the death of loved ones joins the suffering for the lost home.
The house or dwelling is often distinguished from the home. The house is a physical enclosure; home is an intimate, personal, or family atmosphere. The home is located in a material place, but it belongs to the spiritual fabric of memories, time and memory, a sense of privacy, of a secret and personal environment, refuge and protection from an indifferent, strange or hostile outside world. Eventually, the house is imbued with the homely, it becomes a home-home.
In its ancestral origin, the home it was the fire, the bonfire, as a meeting place for warmth, rest and sharing food. As a home, all parts of the house are permeated by the presence of one or more people; for their memories, and all the pain, loneliness or happiness experienced in the intimacy of home. The home spiritualizes the physical realm.
And each home is not differentiated by its size, by having more or fewer rooms, more or fewer comforts or deficiencies. What differentiates one home from another is the invisible network of experiences and time experienced there.
For the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), the home world is “the private surrounding world”, that of familiarity, different from the “strange world”, that of the outside, of the unknown and inhospitable (1). “Being at home” stands out as a subjective phenomenon: the memories of what was experienced at home can be preserved or transferred, eventually, to another new home environment. The home here is more linked to what is experienced and built in temporality, than to a specific material place, with the physical wrapping of a house or dwelling. If the home experience is only subjective, that experience can be transferred to another place. But nothing frees from the contemplation of one’s home destroyed, disintegrated into the parts that were previously the unit that housed and contained whoever was “at home”.
Thus, the place of the last root, of the last home, is not an interchangeable abstraction. Therefore, the loss of a home in what it had of its own is irreversible, irreparable. At most, a home can be refounded, but the lost one cannot be recovered.
And the implicit and silent spirituality of a home is what an artist writer can recreate, from the experience of his own home, or an imagined one. The latter is the case of the Argentine writer Manuel Mujica Laínez (1910-1984) in his novel Home (1954) (2). A house that narrates its past made up of the generations of people who inhabited it, who built it and shared the intimacy of home. The literary resource to express the framework of human feelings, their passions, virtues and chiaroscuro, loneliness and secrets; all that range of emotions that, combined, make the house a home.
But the existence of that home depends on the physical health of the house. The house destroyed by mortar bombs. shells, shrapnel and missiles is annihilation of the spiritual life of the homely, and of the condition of the home as shelter, protection.
The home as shelter and protection is a replica of the shelter that, in prehistory, the psyche found in caves, in Paleolithic caverns. The cave as a natural refuge; and the home-house as a replica of that cave shelter.
The home protects against physical dangers (that of the elements, natural forces, animals), or, in the old mentality, from the dreaded adverse magical forces that lurk, such as bad fortune, disease or death caused by the blow of fate, or a supernatural damage. For this reason, the home-house was sometimes thought of as a magical ring of protection. This is what the Roman house protected by the lararium.
the lararium or lararium was the small altar located in the house, the ancient Roman dwelling. There, offerings and prayers were given to the gods, or to the lares, the guardian spirits of the home. The atrium was the main courtyard of the patrician Roman houses. In that place was the lararium. In the most modest homes of humble people, it was placed in the kitchen.
There could be more than one lararium and, in all of them, the ancestors were worshiped. To enjoy their protection, each family worshiped different specific gods through daily rites and offerings. Failure to comply with this adoration, meant the lack of protection of the home in the face of various misfortunes.
Thus, the home is an intimate enclosure that offers shelter, either as a place of “bourgeois” privacy in modernity, or as a magical-ritual environment in ancient times. And if evil or the supernatural takes over the home, it becomes a cursed house, haunted, a home for demonic entities; or ghostly presences (as in the gothic novel of romantic literature).
But home is also a magnet for the nostalgia of return; the darling back home to be again. That is Ulysses’ wish at the end of the long Trojan War. Then, together with his sailors, he embarks on his adventure or odyssey through the Mediterranean Sea. So he returns, finally, to his home in Ithaca. There, his faithful wife, Penelope, and his son, Telemachus, await him.
The story of returning to the family home is the center of the Nostos, a genre of ancient Greek literature. The theme of homecoming. That return is that of the heroes, determined to recover the home, after many adventures in seas, and unknown lands and islands. The Odyssey of Homer is the first Nostos.
In modern literature, the Ulises by James Joyce also involves a long journey home for Leopold Bloom. In popular fiction, the series Star Trek: Voyager, narrates the return to Earth as a home in the cosmic immensity. The force for the return home is also manifested in the cinema, as in paris texas, by Win Wenders, or Mirrorby Andrei Tarkovsky.
And this return home is the impossible or difficult, for the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees after the Russian aggression. Thousands of houses, receptacles for homes, were destroyed in numerous bombed-out villages, towns and cities. In Mariupol 80% of the houses succumbed.
In one of the villages recaptured in eastern Ukraine by his army, a woman returned home. She then found her house semi destroyed. She first cried, and then a smile spread across her face. She thought about the possibility of rebuilding. “I’d rather be in the basement than leave our home,” she told a reporter.
The desire for home recovered. But many will only be unrecoverable homes. A misfortune that makes us realize how distant the evolution of humanity is towards the definitive overcoming of warlike destruction; and towards the consciousness of the planet as a collective dwelling, as the great home of each member of the sapiens species. The great home is ultimately related to space, to dwelling in Heideggerian terms, to residing in a place where heaven and earth, the divine and mortality converge (3). That way of existing is what is thinkable, but, at the same time, it is very distant.
What is close, unfortunately, is only the continuity of the force that, with sophisticated technology, kills people and animals.
The closest thing is the tank, at dawn, under a leaden sky, which covers the glare of the sun. The monster of tons of metal rolls and stops. Ravens fly. A dark blue paints the horizon. The cannon points. Then, the shot, the dust, the ground that shakes. And the home collapses. A mother returns days later. She finds her home destroyed. Her crying is deeper than the earth, her anguish greater than the wheat fields. She no longer has anywhere to go; at best, charity will help her. But nothing will save her, ever, from the open, stinging, virulent wound that she screams from the depths of her soul by the memories of her, the humans and the animals, buried under the rubble of her.
Grades
(1) Husserl is the creator of transcendental phenomenology, an important philosophical current dedicated to transforming philosophy into strict science, and to explain subjectivity and its perception of the world.
(2) The life of Mujica Laínez’s house is that of his self-awareness, but it is also the memories of the people who inhabited it like threads in a tapestry: “And in that I resemble Clara, in that urge to weave my memories like a tapestry, with black threads and with gold threads…”. The memories that the house weaves like a tapestry are, in the end, the intimate feelings of each one of its inhabitants, and those of the house itself.
(3) Within his philosophy, Martin Heidegger addresses the theme of dwelling, being at home, in “Build, inhabit, think”, or in his concept of quaternity, in The thingin Conferences and items, Rowan Editions.