Homemaking

I have a small Persian carpet lying next to my bed that I purchased on a trip to Iran a few years ago. I bought it in one of the dozens of carpet shops lining the main path through a central, covered marketplace--a village-sized center where my Iranian colleague had recommended we could get a good deal. With my colleague’s help, the shopkeeper displayed carpet after carpet lifted from piles that rose up to our shoulders, for more than 20 minutes, until I was convinced of my choices. The carpets available ranged from those costing thousands, large enough to fill a room and sufficiently detailed, colorful, and imaginatively designed to overwhelm the senses. I was traveling with carry-on luggage for my three-day visit, and wanted only a small addition for my very small apartment.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

What I purchased probably surprised everyone. While one carpet I chose showed a traditional geometric pattern, deep blue with golden paisley teardrops, what I considered my true find of the day was a less-traditional, almost primitive-looking small red carpet no larger than a welcome mat, lacking fully straight edges (which to me helps to show its handmade origins), covered with rough depictions of regional animals--birds, a wild cat, deer, a camel, and some difficult to discern--irregularly distributed among vegetation rather than arranged symmetrically. I loved many other options, but I knew somehow that I would come to prize this curious piece. I later learned that this design had a tradition dating back to the 18th century, originating in the practice of reproducing pictorial elements found in ancient ruins.

I step barefooted onto this carpet each morning after waking, and its comfort and warmth is welcome each night as well. It also softens the creaking of the old wooden floors. I don’t always look at it directly, but it is a lot more than something soft to step on. It has become part of my home, and will travel with me to my next home. Somehow, this foreign object is now a part of me.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

This is how it goes: We move through life slowly filling our homes with the things we need and that catch our eye, not unlike birds building a nest, incorporating those that feel potentially meaningful. Some are beautiful from the outset, bursting with meaning. Then others (but certainly not all) grow even more meaningful as we encounter them repeatedly. Some we might consider to be pieces of Art, but others just pieces of life. They attach themselves to us in significant ways--slowly insinuating themselves until we begin to identify with them and would miss them badly if we lost them.They have become part of our autobiographical narrative, which we would now, without them, only stagger forward. A favorite teapot or cooking pan can feel like an old friend, reflecting memories of the thoughts and sensations arising from those pots of tea and satisfying meals, the ways we worked with them to produce a perfect brew or pasta sauce. The sight of the pan might recall the sight, sound, and smell of the olive oil sizzling at the edges of the garlic, capturing its flavor before we add the tomatoes and basil. A comfortable chair might seem to have absorbed the dreams from the naps we had sitting there, or images from the movies we watched or books we read. Hundreds of latent images can be sent floating just barely superliminal each time we sit, adding comfort to the air. Many objects will have a story behind them, like the origins of my carpet, but also stories that have grown around how they have claimed a permanent position in our home or traveled with us over time from place to place. Some will accrete meaning primarily through use, even though their stories are humble. And then some might alternatively lose significance, grow boring or even annoying. We might come to resent them, fight with them. Some wear out and have to be replaced, so we disown them. We let them go, and the process begins again with new objects. Our relationships to objects, especially those we bring into our homes, can be complex, even melodramatic (Easthope, 2004). Saito (2007) argues that people create and value a unique aesthetics of ambience, atmosphere, or mood surrounding the experience of everyday (not just exceptional) life.

Homemaking is a lot more than than adopting objects, of course. It is also the process of caring for these things and the spaces we and they occupy, cleaning and preserving, dusting and painting, and making an arrangement that is partly for efficiency, but more importantly, for beauty. This beauty might be only of the “Third Realm” (Danto, 2003, after Hegel)--third place after the “higher” forms of natural and artistic beauty because it is considered merely the adornment of something without inherent beauty, but this ranking is questionable. The homes we make, when we have the chance to do it right, accommodate our lives like a welcoming hand. We ache to leave our jobs at the end of the day to return to the comfort of home. Even after the most exotic and rewarding travels we ache for home. We can relax there, finally, because we have made it our own--it caters to us because we have catered to it. The Talking Heads sang about the modern delight to “pick the building that I want to live in” (Byrne, 1977), a home that can make it “easy to get things done,” to do important, personal things in these personal spaces because they offer convenience, including the chance to “relax with my loved ones.“ The tone is ironic, but the sentiment is not. Within our capabilities, we make our lives beautiful and convenient (not contrary concepts) by adapting our homes to us, by making them an extension of us. This is much more than decorative.

For couples and families, it might be the relationships between companions that make a home, more than the building and objects it contains. Even a small space and a few comforting objects might be enough to constitute a home for a couple, and perhaps it’s better that way--less baggage to weigh down the relationship, to drag focus from what is important. A studio or dilapidated apartment can feel secure and substantial in the right company--even an automobile or well-stocked van can offer the critical elements. This does not mean objects are not important, just that they are more flexible and acquire meaning more easily with additional people involved in the attribution. Henry David Thoreau advocated a simple lifestyle and home to allow room for a developing a relationship with the nature within and without us, and ascetics like Mahatma Ghandi did the same, even more convincingly, to support a spiritual relationship. The 1960’s hippie movement was built on such principles of simplicity as freedom, but the seventies saw a resurgence of the importance of home as a personal castle. (The Talking Heads emerged in the late 70’s.)

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Again, homemaking is a process, at times an aesthetic project, even more than the accumulation of things. The reward of homemaking comes from the making more than the having. Starting with a foreign space, perhaps an empty space, and claiming it through additions and perfections, slowly building a personal refuge that reflects one’s needs for comfort and beauty--this brings a resounding reward. The massive size of do-it-yourself emporiums, and even the size of the market I visited in Iran, are testament to the importance of homemaking. Even with less means or other priorities, homeowners and renters everywhere put in similar effort to produce an attractive home. In fact, little change has occurred during the last century in the average amount of time we spend caring for our homes, including food preparation and kitchen duties, which seems to be about 18-20 hours for single people, and probably double that for families. Level of affluence seems to make that number higher, not smaller, perhaps due to increased space and number of things owned, but also perhaps to the increased value placed on this aesthetic activity. Much of this homemaking improves the healthiness of a home, but health alone does not explain the scope of motivation, certainly not with modern conveniences.The introduction of advanced technologies that bring efficiencies to homemaking has not changed the amount of time devoted. This reinforces the notion that putting things in order and creating a state of cleanliness, as well as adding a personal stamp on our spaces, are some of the primary sources of meaning in our lives. Order brings a feeling of both beauty and security, however tenuous. The importance of this source of meaning is evident in those who have lost their homes, such as those experiencing natural disasters or in zones of human conflict.

The devastation of losing a home and the importance of building a new one are captured in Neumark’s (2013) study, Drawn to Beauty: The Practice of House-Beautification as Homemaking amongst the Forcibly Displaced. This study looks at the trauma of displacement and the often simple, yet critical, incremental steps that refugees make to recover from a loss of home that breaks their on-going autobiographical narrative. She finds that recovery from traumas like the holocaust, other genocides, and displacement due to civil wars requires not assigning blame, retaliation, nor even accepting the trauma, which can lead to strong depression, but moving on and recovering a sense of beauty, a sense of control, often using a very few possessions taken in the haste of evacuation, and “reclaiming power over the experience of displacement” through “practical and symbolic beautification.” It involves making the new environment more familiar through physical adaptations that offer an expression of agency, taking the autobiographical narrative in a newly positive direction--re-attaching oneself to a world in which one is entitled to beauty.

Home may be one of the most primal and critical components of meaning in our lives. The refugee experience studied by Neumark magnifies its importance, but we each experience it everyday. From the time we wake up and step to the floor, feeling the carpet, wood, or tile beneath our feet, to the time we crawl into bed, the aesthetics of our home ambience is at play.

References

Byrne, David (1977), Don’t worry about the government, Talking Heads: 77.
Danto, Author (2003), The abuse of beauty, Peru, Illinois, Open Court.
Hazel Easthope (2010) A place called home, Housing, Theory and Society, 21:3, 128-138, DOI: 10.1080/14036090410021360
Neumark, Devora (2013), Drawn to Beauty: The Practice of House-Beautification as Homemaking amongst the Forcibly Displaced, Housing, Theory and Society, 30:3, 237-261, DOI: 10.1080/14036096.2013.789071
Saito, Yuriko (2007) Everyday Aesthetics, Oxford University Press.