While in an unfamiliar city last November I tried to capture this feeling of the body as homeliness. I wrote while at a Korean restaurant, eating all alone:
Home is my body and
clink clank of kitchen cooking is
now’s outside worldKimchi tears in my nose, mouth,
home is my body and
tears never change
This (not particularly amazing) poem to me meant a few things at the time:
There is an innate rupture when the outside world interacts with our inside world. In this case, very literally, kimchi is a bit spicy. It tingles my tongue, and wakes me up to its sharpness. I was in an internal monologue of thought, but now something else commands me: a taste in my mouth.
The poem also says: huh. There are levels of comfort in the body that, when reached, allow my internal world to expand in the best and only way necessary—to include the “home.” We go from:
world as world, house as home; to
everything else as world, myself as home.
What this means is an intense comfort in myself. In the restaurant, specifically, this looked like hearing the sounds of people doing homely, intimate things, but they linger outside of my periphery, so they feel as though they belong to the outside world. It’s this feeling you might recognize from being a child, when you fall asleep while the rest of your family is out in the kitchen or living room making noise. You feel warm and comfortable in your slumber, and their sounds outside feel worlds away.
The poem also comes from a question, I think: Where do the edges of my self and my needs begin and end? Because if home can come from my own self, what does this mean for my need to find home elsewhere? More specifically, does achieving homeliness in the concrete boundaries of my self (maybe not the body, because that is a different and oftentimes uncontrollable matter) mean that I can be satisfied wherever I go? I find that this very sense of comfort and belonging actually leads us to demand more of our surroundings, in a good way.
Reflecting on the ideas that I bundled into this short poem many months later, I realize they clearly arise from some internalization I must have done of something I read a few years ago by Audre Lorde. It’s this idea of what I’d prefer to call self-actualization, and Lorde seems to call the erotic, which happens to sound similar to my kimchi question. She writes:
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.
Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.
The idea is: once we identify for ourselves what it is that makes us feel at home, or feel, as it were, seeped in a meaningful sense of purpose (just enough, comfortable, not overreaching or overextracting), we should be able to ascribe a societal function to the practice of upholding those sources or enablers.
For Lorde, this appears to be not a self-motivated process of scrutinizing and setting high standards for how the world should serve us, but actually a sort of unavoidable turning point that any one of us may face, wherein not upholding meaningful self-actualization becomes increasingly painful. This is why Lorde uses the language of coercion and inevitability despite internal resistance (“forcing,” “risk,” “human need,” “fear”). We feel forced to hold our external environment to these standards of self-actualization because of the very human urge to express and see ourselves reflected in our surroundings.
While Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power can be read as any old “self-empowerment” manifesto, Lorde’s writing veers into the realm of Marxist theory of alienation, and therefore opens the door to questions about labor, and the right to labor that allows us to feel deeply, feel like ourselves, and align our personal and professional goals. She says: “…the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.” When people are denied or never able to discover these things, self-actualization or homeliness or whatever you want to call it becomes a political act.
My appreciation for Lorde’s ideas likely comes from my many thoughts on the challenges present in societies that expect individuals to mask themselves (to use the language of neurodiversity), to take up unfulfilling or societally useless work, and to replace vocation, trade, or slow mastery with the high-speed disposable worker central to exploitative economies of scale.
Scrutinizing our personal capacity for feeling follows the same logic as my reflection in Paris, sent back outwards. By attuning ourselves to sensations of discomfort and gentle happiness as guideposts for broader human need, we are essentially turning a corporal “home” into an external home—that is, we are expanding our notion of home to include a broader political duty to the pursuit of meaning and dignity in our community.
All in all, an interesting idea.