On Displacement and ‘Home’:
… in which I find myself waiting upon the arrival of a transmission vacuum modulator
The heat has become infernal, continuing to climb later into each afternoon. The ‘canicule’ has settled in, made itself at home over the whole of France. Ascending a hill, two days ago now, my old Saab struggled to choose its gears then, descending, died completely in a Papal conclave of white smoke. Hauled off the hard shoulder, ingloriously by a relay of two tow-trucks, I am motel-marooned for a long weekend, in a Beaujolais market town. Spare parts will be tough to find. Every mechanic worthy of the name has already joined the August vacation traffic. I am more adrift than I have been in a long while; comforting myself with a set-menu Sunday lunch.
Where do feelings of being displaced, or at home, stem from? As usual, I have two authors on my reading desk. On this topic they resonate in close harmony.
The lesser known is John Moriarty. Described variously as an Irish mystic, philosopher, poet or storyteller, he was born in Ireland in1936. The other needs little introduction, John Berger was born in England in 1926, then lived for over 50 years in France - only a couple of hours away (with a working car …). I doubt that these ‘two Johns’ ever met or read each other, though their lifetimes and interests overlapped.
In a small, intense, assemblage (of essays, memoir and poetry) from 1984, titled ’… and our faces, my heart, brief as photos’, Berger claims to address ‘time’ and ‘space’. His book strikes me instead as being woven through with reflections on home, exile and the emplacement of soul. For Berger:
“In reality we are always between two times: that of the body and that of consciousness. Hence the distinction is made in all other cultures between body and soul. The soul is first, and above all, the locus of another time.”
He insists that the nature of each time-scape is fundamentally different. That of the body is linear and inescapably ‘arrowed’, bound to exhaust itself entropically. But the soul’s universe is cyclical, spiral, pivoting, ebbing and flowing. It is as if the conscious soul is a whipped-top, whirling upon a resistant field of timelessness. This ground figures itself as landscape, seasons, traditions and local practices of habit (undertaken as each year turns over).
This time of the soul is the matrix within which consciousness erupts, flows and fades. As Berger puts this:
“It is indeed the first task of any culture to propose an understanding of the time of consciousness, of the relations of past to future realised as such … an explanation whose task is to ‘explain’ the time of consciousness, treats [it as being] as passive as a geological stratum. If modern man has often become a victim of his own positivism, the process starts here with the denial or abolition of the time created by the event of consciousness.”
We must reckon instead, says Berger, with consciousness as being both within and beyond us, more than purely personal, inherently trans-generational:
“What the past, the present, and the future share is a substratum, a ground of timelessness.”
What might this tell us about how we come to feel ‘at home’ (or not)? Well, Berger argues that being uprooted, whether forced or chosen, is a key motif within modernity. Such displacement is at odds with our ancient notion of ‘home’, which formed the ontological heart of what was felt to be real. To triangulate where our home lay, says Berger, we once paid attention to a crossing-point, composed of:
- a vertical line, iterated in cyclical time, between a developing sky and the underworld of ancestors; and
- horizontal lines, available in linear time, as potential trajectories, orbits even, for individual lives.
When we came, in modernity, to let go of (or have taken from us) the vertical pole, we became destitute of had previously been felt to be real - shelterless instead in a surrounding chaos:
“Emigration does not only involve leaving behind, crossing water, living amongst strangers, but, also, undoing the very meaning of the world … to emigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments …the displacement, the ‘homelessness’, the abandonment lived by a migrant is the extreme form of a more general and widespread experience. The term ‘alienation’ confesses all.”
John Berger made an exile of himself whilst young, moving from the turmoil of post-War London to the steadily inscribed rural practices of a tiny village in the French Alps. John Moriarty likewise left his birthplace (also in Act I), for travels far and wide in Northern Canada and North America. But Moriarty came to feel, as middle-age approached, like a withering potted plant. He felt bound to return to the ‘wild soil’ of Connemara, on the West coast of Ireland - his ancestral landscape.
Moriarty realised, at secondary school in Ireland during the 1950’s, that modernity forced him to ‘fall out his story’. The tidy narratives of his Catholic upbringing were split open by paleontology, evolutionism and astronomy. His universe had to be reckoned with as infinite and indifferent:
“The story that Europeans had found shelter and meaning in had opened at the seams and was drawing sinking abyssal water … People falling out of their story, that for most human beings was the story of our times.”
“Continuously, since the sixteenth century, we [Europeans] have been disinheriting ourselves.”
Whilst Moriarty probably wouldn’t reject any of Berger’s ingredients for making ‘home’ happen, he might well have emphasised ‘myths and storytelling’ as being a vital, if mysterious, element:
“… when you come away from the lab of your mind and your eye, and you let the world come to you, it comes to you in very strange and wonderful ways … it is then a folk tale and folk stories are as much places of revelation about the universe as mathematics can be.”
Moriarty had became fascinated by ‘vision quest’ practices, amongst First Nation peoples in Northern America, and their implications for us (modern) Europeans:
“So far into it [the wilderness] must he go that he no longer sees the smoke from the campfires of his people. Here is where we find our bush soul. Our soul outside of society. The soul that mountains and rivers and rocks and stars give us. The soul evoked in us in and by the tremendous solitudes of nature.”
“But what about us? I wondered. Isn’t there a sense in which we … have an external soul? Don’t we have something of our soul in the bushes … in mountains? And isn’t it true that if we damage a river we damage ourselves? And wouldn’t that account for the very poor shape that Western humanity is in right now.”
Berger and Moriarty, had they met, on a Connemara bog or an Alpine hay meadow, would have had so much to discuss in common. The Irish mystic mourned that “the modern human condition is that of exile”. However, he also insisted that redemption might be found by returning, with humility, to contemplate in ancestral landscape the emplaced insights of old stories and myths. John Berger, the resolute Alpine exile, had no such homecoming. However, with prolonged, observant, participation in traditional practices of his adopted landscape, he nevertheless came to dwell deeply, and to feel received:
“Everything was shifting. The three pear trees, their hillock, the other side of the valley, the harvested fields, the forests. The mountains were higher, every tree and field nearer. Everything visible approached me. Rather, everything approached the place where I had been, for I was no longer in the place, I was everywhere, as much in the forest across the valley as in the dead pear tree, as much on the face of the mountain as in the field where I was raking the hay.”
The heat in Beaujolais is stiffening, despite a feint breeze stirring leaves above me. On the river, cruise boats amble past laden with tourists from Strasbourg and beyond. At my back, a large ‘recreational vehicle’ disgorges a Spanish family. Their baby is soon enjoying a makeshift paddling bath. There is so much wandering, but how much dwelling? I am keen to leave, if only this borrowed town will just provide my grail of auto parts. I am left wondering, displaced by Berger and Moriarty’s insights, if ‘home’ will be where I left it.
Blakey French
11th August 2024 - River Saône, near Belleville-en-Beaujolais, France
Sources:
John Berger (1984) ‘… and our faces, my heart, brief as photos’ Pantheon Books
Mary McGillicuddy (2018) ‘John Moriarty - Not the Whole Story’ Lilliput Press