Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Selected Reviews
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Nan Ellin, editor. 1997. Architecture of Fear. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Sharon Sloan Fiffer & Steve Fiffer, editors, 1995. Home. New York: Pantheon. W. Scott Olsen & Scott Cairns, editors, 1996. The Sacred Place. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Leroy S. Rouner, editor, 1996. The Longing for Home. Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press. |
Reviewed by Herb Childress
The four anthologies at hand, filled with their collective array of 118 essays, stories and poems, constitute four parallel explorations of particular aspects of home: home as fortress, home as place of active care, home as imagined perfection, and home as a stage for our stories. As you might imagine, these four themes don't hold up equally well under examination.
Architecture of Fear looks at home as fortress, a tenuous outpost in a hostile world. In this collection, the concept of "neighbor" is couched in personal rather than collective terms: sometimes in isolationist architecture such as bamboo plantings and gates and alarm systems, sometimes in more active deportment. In response to a machete-brandishing crack addict climbing the chain-link fence, one essayist calmly notes, "Meanwhile Dominic had gone in and slipped his forty-caliber Sig Sauer semi-automatic loaded with illegal Black Talon bullets into his belt..."
There are a few calm and reasoned essays in this collection. Editor Nan Ellin opens with an astute analysis of "retribalization and nostalgia" as elements of the Postmodern landscape. Ed Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder create a typology of defended communities and explore what each offers its inhabitants. Fred Dewey offers a careful examination of the place-diminishing characteristics of cyberspace. But more often, Ellin assembled narratives and ersatz analysis from the most paranoid and sensationalist writers she could find, substituting a lurid sensibility and edgy, labored hipness for emotional attachment or clear thinking. One of her contributors, John Chase, admits after twenty-five pages of recounting disastrous (sometimes near-lethal, as in the opening example) relationships with places and neighbors, "I think that I have been so strongly affected by paying attention to the aspects of the neighborhood that threaten me that I have poisoned my soul, and I now need to make peace with my surroundings." Indeed so, but I fear that his unyielding focus on the threats has left him poorly equipped to make such a peace.
What we should concern ourselves with may in fact not be the threats from those others, but that our own responses are so cynical. Charles Jencks describes a Los Angeles house by architect Brian Murphy in which a windowless corrugated steel façade is located behind an "ironic" white picket fence at sidewalk's edge. Irony is the response of the emotionally diminished, the expression of detachment and alienation; it is the opposite of home.
There is no room for irony in W. Scott Olsen and Scott Cairns' The Sacred Place. Subtitled "Witnessing the Holy in the Physical World," it is a collection of poems and essays that demand slow going, like good places themselves. You can't appreciate work like Kathleen Norris' "Getting to Hope" by breezing over the surface like a tourist, taking snapshots; you've got to get inside it, to dwell, to surrender. Listen to Norris' pace as she talks about her religious community in South Dakota:
Hope's people are traditional people, country people, and they know that the spirits of a place cannot be transported or replaced. They're second-, third-, and fourth-generation Americans who have lived on the land for many years, apart from the mainstream of American culture, which has become more urban with every passing year. Hope's people have become one with their place: this is not romanticism, but truth. You can hear it in the way people speak, referring to their land in the first person: "I'm so dry I'm starting to blow," or "I'm so wet now I'll be a month to seeding". . . . You're still in America in the monastery, and in Hope Church─these absurd and holy places─you're still in the modern world. But these places demand that you give up any notion of dominance or control. In these places you wait, and the places mold you. (p.166)
The editors have a clear love of writing and of wild places; their selections reward patience and care. The list of contributors down the front cover includes well-known literary names like John McPhee, Annie Dillard, Sydney Lea, Carol Bly. But co-editor W. Scott Olsen holds his own in the concluding essay on the experience of the sacred in nature:
Few things are more welcome among people than a good story, and good stories shared with others is what creates friendships, communities, security and love. But there are those other places where we have no personal history, no personal or community story to color the landscape for us in advance. And it's in those places we can regain a sense of the wild. . . . When I am at home, my sense of where I am holds years of history, years of community and people and politics and the thousand concerns of a social life. Here, looking at a mountain I've never seen before this morning, my sense of where I am holds nothing more than rock, than water, than birds and trees and bush. Here, apart from the insistence of others, I am able to catch a breath of the Other. There is no past in this place today, and no future. Just a tremendous present-filling eternity. . . .There are places on the planet that are sacred to me. Not because they have been sanctified by ritual, but because they have not. (p.337)
The third collection, The Longing for Home, is just as earnest but far less effective. Where The Sacred Place is richly detailed and emotionally resonant (as literary work tends to be), The Longing for Home is broadly conceptual and disattached from any real landscape (as analytical work tends to be). The idea of dwelling is explored at a distance, even by writers like Erazim Kohák who insist that place is always characterized by specificity:
Life seeks reality by entering into space and time in ways as tangible as the stone fences, the red-boarded barns, and the cows, the beautiful cows who know their people. To become actual, life has to commit itself to the tangible, vulnerable particularity of the moment. (p. 34)
But this particularity is only seen through the eyes of a metaphoric construct called "the ploughman, a dweller on the land and a tiller of the good earth, deeply rooted in the land of his ancestors, tending it with calloused hands and passing it on to his descendants. That is what I wanted to be." And here we come to the central difficulty of the book: home, for these essayists, is not any real place but rather a pining for homeland lost or imagined. Home is what is remembered by the uprooted after the Diaspora (whether Jewish, Indian, Native American or Palestinian); home is the New Jerusalem established by Christ after the Apocalypse; home is nostalgia for an America gone by; home is longing for an ecofeminist community yet to come. Home is not a material place, nor the human relationships and cultural meanings that make it resonant; rather, it is a shining abstraction against which our real homes can never measure up, oppressive in its vague perfection.
As an antidote, I turned to a vivid and concrete book, and was profoundly rewarded. Home: American Writers Remember Rooms of Their Own is a collection of extraordinary stories by writers who realize that home, if it important at all, is not a concept but a narrative. For Colin Harrison, the master bedroom is a liturgy of shared lives, and not just those of the current occupants:
We were in our twenties then and had been married a mere five months. We inspected the bedroom solemnly, trying to imagine ourselves sleeping and living in what was only a vacant room in a vacant house in Brooklyn, the floors dusty, the air stale. The building dated from 1883, but the old horsehair plaster was newly patched and painted around the Victorian mantel and walnut window moldings. My wife and I stood on the oak parquet, thinking of the unknowable lives lived in that room. Perhaps, in addition to babies and children and the cry of pleasure, there had also been malaise, suffering, death. It seemed only likely." (p. 91)
In this collection of rooms, real people argued and fought and learned and fitted themselves and each other into families. Home is the space that holds stories and rituals; the narrative place and the material place are each unthinkable without the other. W. Scott Olsen may claim the term "sacred" for those places without story, places that are experienced innocent of past and future; but "home" can be nothing other than the stage upon which we perform our human scripts of devotion and frailty.
In the two best of these anthologies, then, we see Relph's elements of "place:" experiences and relationships imbedded in landscapes toward which we exercise active care. In the other two, we see "placelessness" in the form of abstraction, irony, and distancing of self from surroundings. I know which pair I'll keep.
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