Fiona Sprott
One need not be a chamber to be haunted, one need not be a house; the brain has corridors surpassing material place
- Emily Dickinson
Home relies as much on the environment as it does on the bodily way of being in that environment. How does one re-imagine home after a traumatic un-homing event? How does one re-orient one’s body and mind to experience a feeling of being-at-home when the cultural object that symbolises and functions as ‘home’ (a house) is denied? In this piece I traverse a spectrum of theoretical and personal encounters with a loss of house-as-home. I explore a conceptual notion of both unhomeliness and non-home in which the house is a ghost that haunts my idea of at-home-ness. This idealistic house is haunted by my ghost-self conceived of as an Other that emerged from the trauma of being un-homed. Home, I argue, is ultimately where the heart is at ease, not just where the heart is, for a heart can be broken and still pump blood around the body, while standing in the ruins of a house that was once where I most felt at home.
When you think of being at home, what images or sensations do you conjure up? Collins English Dictionary suggests that “If you feel at home, you feel comfortable in the place or situation you are in.” I would add that to feel at home is to feel safe from harm. That is likely because as an introvert I liken my home to a sanctuary that offers me respite from being in the world of ‘noise’—literal and figurative. Another word one might contemplate as being directly linked to being at home is security. Security of tenancy and ownership and secure boundaries that prevent unwelcome intrusion or incursions by others, human or other. For most (well-housed) people, home is a given circumstance. And, suggest Boccagni and Nietro, “there is no dearth of critical literature on the morally and emotionally warm aura around home as a deceptively romantic construction.”
My conception of home is influenced by the cultural context of my upbringing which operates at a few levels; a national cultural narrative of home being a collective dream we all hold and work towards purchasing—fundamentally, a dwelling we own; and my own familial experiences of being in a military family where we constantly relocated from one generic house to another. Thus, home became the people and familiar possessions that travelled to each dwelling, and a period of living nomadically as a family travelling in a caravan. Home is now the people as the familiar possessions were stored away.
Homemaking is the process by which I engage with home as a verb rather than a noun in which home is not just a place, but an ongoing and reversible process of place attachment and appropriation, a lifelong work in progress. What I can say for myself at the core of my own relationship to home is the concept of sanctuary. It is where I feel safe physically and emotionally. To put it another way, Home is where my heart is at ease.
Emily Grosvenor strongly disagrees with the idea of home providing sanctuary in her blog post for The Guardian, “Stop calling your home your ‘sanctuary’.” Grosvenor argues, “I think we are delusional if we think we can have an active, engaged life—a life of purpose—whilst also retreating from public space.” Grosvenor crafts an argument against the idea that our home should ever be considered a sanctuary—but her stance assumes the position of a privileged house/home-occupier. As someone without a home to call my own, I disagree with this view, and stick with my assertion that a home, when I actually have access to one, is a sanctuary. It is a refuge, a protective space in which I am kept from harm.
I want to scream in anger at Grosvenor for what I feel is a naïve view to hold in light of what came after her blog post was published: a global pandemic leading to forced lockdowns in which home was necessarily a sanctuary for many, a prison for some, and the current housing crisis in which stable and affordable accommodation no longer exists for many, including me. I also contend the rights of introverted and solitary people to consciously and deliberately define a purposeful life beyond being actively engaged in public space is, and should be, a basic human right, alongside access to shelter.
The heart being at ease is a bodily sensation, as much as an emotional-intellectual concept. Dylan Trigg explores the experience of agoraphobia writing, “Home is not something ‘out there,’ waiting to greet us after a long day at work. It is a relation we hold to being-in-the-world.” The home space provides the refuge, literally, from a world in which one struggles to feel at ease. “The unhomeliness of agoraphobia is located in its resistance to experiencing the world as a familiar phenomenon.” Although I am not an agoraphobe, I relate to the notion of how my anxiety (bodily moods) impacts directly upon my ability to feel ‘at home’ in whatever environment I find myself.
Boccagni and Nietro noted that when writing of their work with migrant populations about what home means to a migrant, “we encountered a somewhat unanticipated development.” Instead of the interviewee migrants reimagining what home would come to be or mean for them over a period of time after a dislocation or relocation, “they tended to discard the typical meanings attached to home,” and found the question itself to be “of little or no relevance.” The authors argue those who investigate home must consider that non-home “deserves to be acknowledged as a concept and as a social condition.” Currently, this is applicable to non-migrant populations in Australia on a large-scale. Non-home is a growing social condition with no apparent solution in sight.
Our nation in 2024 is in the depths of a housing crisis so dire and entrenched people predict it will take decades to re-house the increasing number of homeless and an entire generation will unlikely be able to buy their own home. Here, we are situated at the intersection of a national housing crisis, partly wrought by the global pandemic crisis and complicated by an aged care crisis. You can see a theme emerging, can’t you? Crises piling upon crises to the point of absurd proportions. Implicated in all of these crises is the spectre of Home and the need to collectively re-imagine what it is in a post-house society. Tyson Lewis and Daniel Cho offer a provocative argument about the unhomely home as an experience of the uncanny:
… the home, which is something that should feel most comfortable and familiar, has increasingly, in late capitalism, become a space where the uncanny is experienced. The question becomes, what repressed content of capitalism itself comes to the fore in the figure of the “un-homely home”?
We are enculturated in Australia to believe that home is a dwelling, one most potently represented as a house. Houses-as-home are normative. Houses are home(s) and that is where the heart is. We know our home because when we enter the house we feel it in our hearts. Are all of us, who are without a home, by definition heartless? No, but homelessness isn’t great for anybody’s heart health. And, arguably, the national policies and economic levers that have rendered so many people homeless in this country might be labelled heartless. For those not aware, basic housing is a human right protected by a number of human rights treaties including three which Australia has signed: International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). In a paper published by the Australian Human Rights Commission in January 2008, Article 6.12 states; “Homelessness impacts on the right to freedom from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Just saying.
Let’s get supernatural. Reality is too depressing.
It began with a dish being thrown across the kitchen and landing at my feet. Nobody (visible) threw the dish at me, and that raised a lot of questions. On the one hand, how thrilling to encounter a pocket of the (Lacanian) Real in my kitchen. On the other hand, I was pretty sure it meant things were getting weird, probably in a bad way. Kristeva writes, of the abject, “There looms within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable.” Poltergeists, by their very nature are disruptive of the (known) possible—the carefully thought-out structural and cultural normative descriptors of home and, indeed, house. The kitchen sink is designed as a passive receptacle for dishes to be placed, washed, or dried. What is one to do if it suddenly begins throwing dishes? How is one to create meaning from this moment in time, space, and place where meaning collapses?
The kitchen is, of course, laden with cultural symbolism of a patriarchal society in which this space is designated for women’s work, their duties more particularly. This might be relevant, because the uncanniness of my poltergeist experience is directly linked to male aggression targeted at me. My demented elderly male neighbour had begun his drawn-out, increasingly intensifying harassment of me. Because of the then-current lockdown protocols in place for Covid-19 and the aged care crisis, my neighbour and I were bound together in this shared environment of side-by-side housing. A lot of his behaviour was gendered—he targeted my femaleness as a perceived or presumed sympathetic vessel into which he poured his neediness and demands for help. He used terms like ‘love’ and ‘be a dear’ and all the while physically pushing himself upon me, and into my private space. I hated him. He became loathsome to me.
I suspect the poltergeist which developed is the culmination and comingling of powerful emotionality pouring forth from us both. Monstrous, destructive, and, perhaps, a little political. Have I conjured a dish-throwing poltergeist by refusing to be a woman kept in her place? I cannot understand what I have witnessed, but I am aware that somehow, this poltergeist is from me, yet how can this flying dish be of my doing? Am I, in fact, hallucinating? Or am I standing in the Real?
Heideggerian philosophy, suggests Christos Hadjioannu, “does not regard an unqualified embracing of anxiety as the end of the story. Rather, it holds that an experience of joy and being at home in the midst of anxiety is possible and desirable.” But this is a modern model of stoic mindfulness that I am unable to fully adopt. My heart is not at ease. My home is being wrenched from me. At the very least, I am now co-habiting the space with this Other, this unseen entity. I can’t be stoic. I just can’t.
There is at the heart of this exploration the tension of desire for homeliness versus the fallibility of architecture, and technology to ultimately address the psychological needs that underpin the very physical attempts to create the house as the fantasmatic object of home. There is an irreconcilable gap between the fantasy and the physical realities, and our attempts to traverse this gap by subjecting our houses to renovation and accessorising ultimately fail to manifest the impossible home of our desire. There is always some thing which brings to fore, this gap. In my gap appeared a poltergeist.
It wasn’t just the dish. Repeated random banging in the walls. (Plumbing, surely?) Lights, turning on and off. (Electrical faults, has to be.) My personal favourite was the television turning itself on, and selecting a recorded movie to play, from the point last viewed. For this to happen, two remote controls, and several different buttons needed to be engaged or pressed. Scrolling, too, through four pages of a menu to even find the listing of the movie. (No explanation for what happened here, just a growing sense of uncanniness.) So, now I was literally (re)living the 1982 horror movie, Poltergeist, in which the entities began their communication with the child of the household, through the television set. Therein began the demise of my home as both a literal physical space in which I could reside, and as an otherworldly concept. Desire crumbles to dust. ‘I’ hanging together by a thread, about to break.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was developing PTSD. Tiffany D Neiheiser suggests:
Most people know that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a result of trauma, but unless you’ve lived with it, it’s hard to really understand what it’s like. Everyday experiences and objects become terrifying. Having PTSD is like living in a haunted house, but the ghosts are your trauma and they follow you everywhere.
My neighbour’s increasingly violent incursions into my former sanctuary radically altered my physical experience of being in the space. Did I believe I actually had a poltergeist? No. But I was certainly in the throes of intense anxiety, constantly—leading to a feeling of unhomeliness. What had once been a lovely little home-space was now a site of uncanniness. My body was a site of constant grinding anxiety. Did I mention I was feeling enraged? Trevor K Bell writes:
Ghosts and hauntings […] urge us to move beyond thinking in terms of static locations in the manner of the ancient notion of genus loci, or spirit of place, to engage with disordering eruptions, intersections, or infusions of supernatural possibility into the mundane environment.
Police intervention was eventually required. Paolo Boccagni and Alejandro Miranda Nietro ask, “What is the opposite of home?” I suspect it looks something like me crouching behind a couch calling the police to come and restrain my neighbour, who was clamouring to remove the barricade of bins I’d built (theoretically) preventing access to my front door (bins stand in for the ocean in this figurative notion of island-home):
If someone has no home or does not feel at home, this is typically seen as a consequence of some biographical disruption, after unsettling circumstances: eviction, forced migration, social marginalization or the experience of one’s domestic space as unhomely, that is, inhospitable, oppressive or violent.
In a former life, I spent a lot of time studying the Lacanian Real – that which exists before, and beyond the Imaginary and Symbolic orders, crafted by our languages that create the worlds in which and to which we are enculturated. The psyche is described in spatial terms; what topology offers, thus, is a way of modelling the constitutive interconnection of the registers and how the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary are defined only according to its position relative to each. Imagine then, a spatial arrangement whereby we predominately see, and can explore the Symbolic Order and the Imaginary, but the Real is hidden from view, until something, a bad experience, for example, brings it into awareness. Tom Eyers writes, “the subject advances towards the Real as something external and encounters it nonetheless as an internal limit, a limit that, further, seems to imply a beyond that cannot … be reached.”
The poltergeist phenomenon introduced the Real into the space of my home environment. It erupted at the Kantian boundary where the knowable collides with the unknowable. I stand physically apart from the phenomenon, but the phenomenon is a physical (symbolic) representation of my experience. Or has my enraged mood conjured an actual, external entity which is not-I?
Shall we delve into some horror now?
I left that apartment which was the only rental property in the metropolitan and semi-rural regions of South Australia that was affordable for me. I mean that literally. There was no other property anywhere in the state renting for the amount I had been paying for the past few years. They doubled the rent the moment I vacated. That moment meant that apartment became a quaint relic of a bygone era: an affordable rental property. Leaving this property was not done lightly but the dwelling had become unhomely in the extreme. My island was sinking under water. I was cast adrift on my raft seeking new shores, some new sanctuary, fragmented and fragile.
Since leaving, sanctuary has become scraps of quiet solitude I grasp for between eruptions of chaos and upheaval as I transform into a ghost haunting the homes of others. Putting ‘I’ into a suitcase, for safe keeping as I perform a kind of Otherness to a script written by the occupants and owners of the spaces I now inhabit. I am sheltered, yes, but still homeless. There’s a distinction here. I have lost something essential, something of deep and meaningful significance to me.
A dear friend of mine was on the brink of homelessness unless he could find someone to share the rental property in which he lived. (The rent had been raised significantly.) It made sense for me to move in, but the house in question was poorly built. It was also haunted in a more palpable way. A heaviness and dark feeling emanated from the very walls and I learned that the house had a history of violent spousal abuse and violent sexual assault. I have experienced that spaces hold the memories of such events, and capture the emotional energy of previous inhabitants. This is what I mean by haunted, the sense of lingering pain and uneasiness. A section of the house had been built by an alcoholic, convinced they were skilled in building and construction (they were not). As a result, a family of possums got trapped within the walls, running through gaps and into the ducted air conditioning system, which was no longer in use, screaming in panic every night for several weeks, until they passed away. We could do nothing to help them. The landlord did nothing either.
In writing about the haunted house of the horror movie genre, Beth Carroll suggests, “we are but custodians of domestic spaces; spaces that have their own histories, stories and memories, many of which would rather not be disturbed, and that ultimately assault our sense of self.” I feel the truth of this acutely, after the two experiences, of which I am still narrating for you the second, of unhomeliness. It is Carroll’s exploration of the role of sound that particularly interests me here, as the fortnight of listening to the screaming, dying entrapped co-inhabitants of our domestic space is the cue of the horror beginning. Caroll writes:
Sounds clearly demonstrate that the walls we build around us and call a home are permeable; they let sounds in, but make it hard for them to leave again. Houses are brought to life through the entrapped sounds; the house is no longer some inanimate object, but a living, breathing entity in its own right which resists ownership and possession … by the living.”
The deathly silence (literally, silence arrived at by death) brought an uncomfortable relief that lasted for a moment. The corpses were irretrievable. A new assault on the senses would soon begin. The persistent and intense waves of the stench of death that soaked into all porous surfaces forced both my then-housemate and me out of the house. The pong was so powerful it rendered the house unlivable. This was predicted to last for up to four months. The building was literally evicting us. And it would strip us both of the majority of material possessions we’d brought into the house. Home was being deconstructed for me, again, quite violently.
From this unfortunate tragedy came the necessary loss of all things of relevance to life lived within houses-as-homes. I mean that literally. A huge stinking pile of material items ranging from mattresses and bedding to cutlery, lamps, yoga mats, clothing, furniture. All of it. Had. To. Go. To. Landfill. Situated precariously on the driveway, fifty feet from a building that was once a home but is now uninhabitable (by the living). It sits empty. Doors and windows wide open. Strange calico bags filled with something mysterious hanging from the ceiling intended to soak up the smell, but failing to do so. This now-monstrous building looming over us, with its fetid tendrils of the scent of decomposition assaulting our nasal passages. Perhaps, we said to ourselves, this is how one disposes of emotional baggage most efficiently, in an act of an absolute and violent purge. All ties to the past were irrevocably cut, including a past of living in houses-as-home. From here, I was homeless. We both were.
Homelessness is an experience of being ghosted by mainstream society. It is a great way to be rendered invisible in the sense of Esther Pereen’s construction of living ghosts where she writes “the ghost is a metaphor certain people (are made to) live as, the conceptual and cognitive framework through which they are made sense of and come to make sense of themselves.” No longer being bothered by ghosts, I have now become the ghost. Without access to a house to call your own, you are rendered ‘homeless’ by definition in society but for those of us who experience homelessness (by that definition), a heart still seeks to be at ease, and the body-mind still attempts to feel at home in the world. The challenge becomes to learn how to function as a living ghost, and reconfigure a relationship to home that transcends the requirement of a house (or other similar dwelling).
For five months I slept in a spare room and camped in a vehicle. This spare room was in an old house, one that I had once occupied with my mother. These were the early days of her dementia coming on. The beginning of a long road of slow degradation of spirit, soul, memory, and ultimately our relationship. Dementia was itself like a thief in the night, a ghost that came into the house and slowly began taking away my mother and leaving a body carrying an unknown woman behind. Before we were at this tragic phase, I had noticed odd things in this house like doors that would tug as I tried to open them, a strange grey shape that would stalk the hallways now and then, an overall sense of being watched. I awoke one night and just for a moment I was terrified by a glimpse of a transparent figure suspended above me, hovering on the ceiling. In the morning, I jokingly commented to my mother, “I sometimes think this house is haunted.” I had anticipated her reply to bring me back to the realm of pragmatic realism. She said instead, “Yes. I think so, too. That’s why I lock my door at night. So, it can’t get in.” I sometimes reflect on this conversation, even years after her passing. Returning to stay in the house, years later, (with other family members), there was no sensation of haunting. No lucid dreaming, or night terrors, such as had gripped me when I’d shared the house with my mother.
Trauma is not only evoked by singular, radical disruptions to normality or serenity, or the body. Trauma can creep in the back door, and start a slow and steady erosion of your sensibilities. It can be a kind of death by a thousand small cuts. It can be a house you once tried to turn into a home, but failed to do so because of the presence of pain, illness, and anxiety. In returning to this familiar house, a site of trauma, blended with fond memories, I am carrying the past with me, my body retains memory of habituated movements and being-here-ness of this place. Still, it is no longer my place. I am a visitor. The ghosts here are only my ghosts. Or rather, I am the ghost in this scenario as the dynamic persistence of an event that continues in spite of the absence of its original containment. I am conceding to the power of place as I content with a haunted undercurrent. I am merely treading water while searching the horizon for an island (sanctuary) upon which to wash up.
Being homeless in the literal-physical sense forced me to create a sense of being-at-home within. To imagine myself embodying a secret sanctuary, a figurative spatial internality within my literal physical body, invisible to others where I was safe and sound while the noise and drama of lives being lived carried on. I was forced to try and create an island sanctuary within my own mind, one I can visit at any time I need. My ghostly self is where she needs to be, even as my physical self, enacts being here for the entertainment of others. This method is a work in progress.
I have landed in (yet) another house that is not and cannot ever be my home. Still, it provides shelter. This current house is haunted by the long-embedded smell of large dogs. No amount of washing or replacing carpets seems to erase the reek which gathers and occasionally pounces upon me. These smells behave much like the dogs might have when they were here. They are ghost dogs now. At least this appearance of ghosts is consistent to the theme of uncanniness woven throughout my experiences of unhomeliness. Places gather traces if the inhabitants stay long enough. Chances are, you will never know I was in any of these houses I have mentioned.