Home as Narrative
There’s narrative, and there’s metanarrative. There are little stories, and there are big stories. And bigger stories still. One long story we are, a story of promise made glorious, a story of challenge won and journey found, a tale of joy and wonder. Aren’t we here?
It’s too facile, I suppose, to call home a narrative. Of course it is. Indeed, home is story. Home marks beginning, the beginning of our narrative, the place and time where our stories commence. It’s a fount of adventure, a wellspring of dream, a spring of existence in all its remarkable, and always unfathomable, heartaches and pathways of truth, insight, and meaning. Whatever forms or paths our narratives take, in, out, up, or down, we cannot dismiss the fact of where they began: home.
Whether home is a mansion, manger, carriage, war zone, hut, or toilet stall, it will always be, forever and ever, distance and memory notwithstanding, the beginning, the start of our narrative, our story, our story of life. Moreover, whatever this home may—or may not—be, home as beginning and home as end, it is ours. It is ours to own, ours to live out, ours to end. It’s a book waiting to be opened, a painting to paint, a puzzle to decipher and unravel: a song of ourselves, a song of life. And regardless of the permutations, metamorphoses, and conjurings our home may take, its song, to borrow a phrase from Robert Page and Jimmy Plant, “remains the same.” It’s home.
A number of years ago, when my daughter was not quite two years old, Carol and I took her to California, to camp and hike in the Tuolumne Meadows region of Yosemite National Park. Fifty miles by automobile from and 5,000 feet higher than the Valley, Tuolumne Meadows is a welcome respite from the frenetic activity that often characterizes its lower, and far more visited, counterpart. Surely one of the most beautiful places in all of the Sierra, an astonishingly verdant and heavily flowered undulating expanse stretching across several miles of a glacial basin set beneath a ring of peaks, peaks with names like Lemert, Unicorn, and Cathedral, Tuolumne is a jewel of jewels to behold. I’ve been there more times than I can count.
A couple of hours after we arrived at the campground and set up camp, we were joined by my mother and youngest sister Kathleen. Even at sixty-seven, Mom was still willing to sleep in a tent in one of her favorite mountain haunts! As the four of us reconnoitered about our campsite, talking, looking, Megan trailing beside us, we paused for a moment to look at our tent. A North Face VE-25, a tent built to withstand every possible obstacle weather could throw at us, winter or summer, it stood resplendent, a gold and white geodesic dome (thank you, Buckminster Fuller) in the afternoon sun.
Megan, however, understood our tent differently. And it had nothing to do with functionality or aesthetics. Lifting up her pudgy little hand, her blonde hair sparkling in the light, she pointed at the tent, and said, “Nite, nite.” We were very far from Megan’s “home” in Chicago, very far from everything else she had, to this point, known. Camping in high mountains was a narrative entirely new to her.
Somehow, however, Megan knew she was home. Somehow she knew, knew in the center of her little but growing rapidly mind, that our tent was her home. She knew that our tent was her refuge, her place to go when the stars came out, the place out of which she would emerge the next morning, ready to begin another day, another day of story, narrative, and song.
On Megan’s dresser, she keeps a photo that Carol took of her and me as we watched the Lyell River, the river that flows into Tuolumne Meadow, a few days later. There we sit, side by side, basking in the sun, with Megan placing her arm around my waist, pals forever. It’s a touching photograph. As she had with our tent, Megan was acknowledging, in her little way, that she was home. Her and Daddy. And her narrative would continue.
As Martin Heidegger would have it, we are “thrown” into this world, our beingness a random happenstance and blip, a plop on a canvas of billions of other plops. We mean very little. Most religions would say the opposite, that we are designed and created with love and purpose, that we have unique and special meaning. No matter. Though there may well be a “what” or “why” to further ponder, what is most at stake at this point is that, regardless of how we got here, we’re here. And we are narratives; we are narratives that, foremost, begin at home. The consummate story.
In the many years I’ve lived, I have lived countless numbers of stories. I’ve had many homes, too, some physical, some intellectual, some of spirit and heart. I haven’t loved them all; some have been bitter and rife with pain. As I look back, however, I appreciate them all. I appreciate the narratives they grounded, the tales they sparked, the return and recovery they presented to me. I love the life they have given me, I treasure how they have molded my days on the planet. I would not trade one among them.
As an old friend of mine once told me when she was on the cusp of fifty, “There’s so much I still want to do. I’m not ready to pack my life up.” Who would? Sherrill had many more homes, many more homes to find, many more narratives to create. And now, at the age of sixty-three, she continues to do so. As should we. We can rejoice in ourselves, we can sing our stories. We can rejoice in being creatures of narrative and value and, consciously or not, deliberative and rational sentient beings. We can love our homes. All of them.
Yet do we know anything else? Not really. It’s hard to see through a mirror. I do know, however, that when I try to unpack the exchanges between my narratives and my homes, the many upon many stories that have birthed and made me, I am overwhelmed. How can I measure my narrative, its form, its ways, its value, its place? Will I ever really be home?
As I was driving to work one day some years ago, I picked up a hitchhiker. His long hair and lengthy beard reminded me of me many years before. Why not help him out? He seemed harmless enough.
And he was. But he was odd. He said very little in the ten minutes we rode together (I picked him up on a ramp going onto the interstate, then dropped him off at my exit ramp). Just stroked his yellow brown beard. And looked at me. When he got out of the car, he turned to me and said, “You don’t know me, you don’t know you. You only know you are you. But you are never you.”
Well. Where did this leave me? As I continued driving and eventually pulled into the parking lot of the school at which I was teaching at the time, I thought about his words. If I am just a narrative, just one more narrative or, as the slave holding father-in-law told his idealistic abolitionist son-in-law in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, “Just another drop in a vast and endless sea,” then yes: I probably do not know my “you.” How could I?
Is there really a point?
Home is a narrative, sure, a collection of stories around which we build our lives. But it’s also a metanarrative, a master narrative, a narrative in which other narratives, all the other narratives of our lives, are collected, subsumed, and find substance, place, and end. Even if our home is nothing more than ourselves, it comprises. It comprehends. It births meaning. Even if home is a place and time in which we don’t know our “you,” it still absorbs who we are (whoever this is), it still takes up who we become. Though as a youth I traveled far and wide, rarely visiting my parents’ home, I knew that even if that home vanished without a trace, the locus it gave my narratives would remain. My home, my warm and inviting childhood home, is a metanarrative that will be with me all my days. I walk in it every moment. I fall into its patterns, lapse into its ways. Unconsciously, I breathe and express it, constantly touching and breathing it, never knowing how or why.
Just like the song, the metanarrative remains. Do you like rainbows? I love them. Biblical and Irish allusions aside, I see a rainbow as a sign of hope and potential, of new light and vision. I see it as a series of arcs, curving and sublimating into things greater, seen and not. A door to more. Wrapped in a rainbow, I travel, voyaging through the planets of my life, tapping into ellipses of point and trajectory, riding the waves of destiny. I make a story, I write a poem. Though it is not always a poem I know and understand, it is a poem that inhabits and fills my life, a poem that makes my life. Even if, as Ecclesiastes would have it, “there is no remembrance,” and even if, as many a cosmologist would insist, one day there will be nothing but nothingness, this poem, this poem of home will always be my “you.”
My metanarrative of home.
After all, a never home is a home, too, a story that cannot help but begin, and a story that, as life is, cannot help but end. It’s not dark matter, it’s not anti-energy, it’s not quantum fluctuation. It’s home.
And all that we, narrative upon narrative, need.
Christmas 1983. Four months before, my wife and I had left the glitter of north Dallas for the concrete jungles of Chicago. But Carol missed her parents terribly. She wanted to be home. She wanted to return to where she had begun, her father’s farm on the levees of the Red River in southern Arkansas, and the house in town in which she had been born, the house in which her stories and narrative had commenced and found space and form. She wanted more than a random moment, more than a disjointed poem. She wanted home. Where we were in Chicago was a very minor narrative in her master, a very short thread in her larger metanarrative of life and home. At this point, she needed the beginning far more than the end. She needed the creative—and regenerative—soil of home.
Some years ago, I wrote a book, a book in which I described my spiritual journey. I talked about how after growing up in the Catholic Church and one day deciding it had nothing for me, I began to wander, spiritually, intellectually, and politically. I roamed for many years, roamed through my mind, spirit, and heart. I was looking for something, looking for something I wasn’t finding in the quotidian affairs of everyday existence. Although I eventually found it, eventually came upon an insight into God that would change my life forever, that’s not the point. Writing my story made me reflect, reflect deeply on my narrative, reflect on all the homes I had established and left, all the homes I had found and later let go. All the homes of my metanarrative.
And I realized that like cairns on a mountain trail, every one of these homes remain, landmarks, signal points and demarcations along my life path. Nothing ever really goes away forever.
In my stories of home, I learned the story of home.
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