The difficulty of home

How to hear a thousand blended notes, the mighty waters rolling evermore

One of the most memorable news items for me last year was not even remotely covid related. It was the news of Aleksei Navalny returning to Russia, and the video of him and his wife sitting down in their economy seats in a plane headed to Moscow, surrounded by a crowd of passengers recording them on their phones. Navalny’s returning to Russia, can you believe it! A few months prior he had survived a novichok attack and against all odds was allowed transfer to a German hospital. His German months were spent, as Daniel Roher’s excellent documentary shows, part convalescing, part working with Christo Grozev of the Bellingcat on the prank of the century: calling his attackers, pretending he is a boss at the FSB and demanding to know why their assassination attempt on Navalny did not succeed.

And when he got well enough, he returned to Russia. By all accounts, neither he nor his wife Yulia ever seriously entertained the possibility of staying abroad and being a Russian opposition activist from the relative safety of a central European country. Roher asks him this question in the documentary and Navalny says he wants to take part in the Russian political life, and that that’s quite impossible to do with any degree of seriousness from abroad. I am, he says, a Russian politician. So off they went, to Putin’s Russia where only two options awaited: immediate arrest, or another attempt on his life. And some minutes after landing, still in the passport queue, Navalny was separated from Yulia and taken away. He has recently had his conviction extended: he is to spend the next 20 years in jail. Over, essentially, freedom of speech and freedom of political association and public assembly.

Navalny preferred jail in his own country to being a stranger in a strange land. This is not an easy thing to contemplate for all of us who have prioritized personal freedom to staying on to fight for the democratization and liberalization – and the betterment, that old-fashioned word -- of our nations of origins.

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What is a home, can we build it from scratch, can we create it through a set of conscious practices and rituals? Another memorable film from the recently closed Hot Docs Festival was the low-key Shelter, a melancholy and sometimes beautifully dull doc full of shots of the moving clouds and the wind in tree crowns, filmed over five years in rural Ontario. The director Tess Girard went back to her old hometown to talk to a handful of townspeople. She spends a lot of time with the elderly couple who knew her as a child – two of the very few people still around who have witnessed her childhood. They have, for quite some time now it’s clear, tipped over to the Grey Gardens level of tidiness and cleanliness and talk to her camera surrounded by the piled up stuff, the boxes never opened, the opened boxes never put away. There’s also a dog. The man of the couple keeps an eye on an old nuclear shelter and inspects it daily. The thing is leaking water everywhere and has been used over the many decades as storage, but none of that disturbs his narrative on shelter’s importance and solidity. His wife is a little older, much more confused. I have no energy for cleaning and putting things away, she says in one segment. (Really, under all that dust, the floor is quite clean, she could have paraphrased Lydia Davis.) The two of them take the old woman out on an outing to the spot where her house used to be. It’s a flattened field with nothing for miles around, it turns out. She is soon tired and had enough and wants to go back. In another scene, the husband is thinking aloud about planning for the life after she dies. I’ll figure it out somehow, he says.

The houses are crucial in the film. The second couple that we meet is Girard’s high school friend and her husband who have returned to town after what appears to have been a financially successful stay in a bigger city. They bought a house that used to be owned by her grandfather and once had a life of a busy general store. The renovations were respectful of the house’s history. The old flooring is preserved, natural light is everywhere, the photos of former inhabitants arranged on the window sills and mantelpieces. The woman of the couple is pregnant when we first meet her. She explains how incredibly meaningful it was for her to buy and renovate this house. A bit later in the narration, the director, telling us about her own situation, says she and her husband are in the process of making their own home in a town not far away and that they are excited by what the future holds.

Another townsperson that we meet is a young undertaker. He personally digs graves for the dead. Generations of his ancestors are buried there. What motivates a young person to stay (or come back) and do this noble job for a living? He seems amiable, reasonable, not at all put off by the tasks.

Halfway through the film the director is in a car parked on the side of the road, unable to drive further. She explains she’s been prepping herself to go to her own former home, but the inner resistance is too strong. We find out that the house was sold when her parents parted ways, and had since been resold multiple times. There’s a stranger living in it now, and when she finally knocks, he is reluctant to let her in saying it’s “too much of a mess”. She leaves.

In the final minutes, amidst the images of the moody skies and the fields of grass, we learn that the elderly shelter protector had died and that his wife remains alone in the Grey Gardens house. We also learn that the director’s marriage is over. No home is to be built in the next town over. We see the baby gurgling while being carried around by her mom in the happily restored house.

I’ve recently started following Tess Girard on Instagram, where I learned that the lady of the Grey Gardens meanwhile passed away as well.

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Five new 40-storey towers have been built in the line of sight from my balcony (the right side pictured above) since I’ve moved to this fifteenth-floor flat in the Upper Jarvis area in 2017. That’s about one tower a year. Two more scheduled to sprout are currently in the deep dig phase. Many of the units are taken over before the buildings are finished; I’ve seen lit windows and furniture and human activity in condominiums in what looks like half-finished buildings. People are eager to claim their shelter.

What are their hopes and dreams, and does anyone buy a condo in Toronto believing it will be a permanent home? Are they still considered the lowest rung on the property ladder, even though they are ridiculously unaffordable and a massive investment – and effectively the only rung available to most buyers? Perhaps the trajectory now for households in Toronto with two middle-class incomes is 1) a condo, 2) a tiny house somewhere else in the GTHA. I was glad to see that there was some real talk recently in the media about the housing crisis in Canada’s largest cities, notably Stephen Punwasi’s piece on whether Canada is in any recognizable way a promised land for anybody but the wealthiest of immigrants (“why would you risk starting a business that creates jobs, when you can own a condo and sell it a few years later?” is THE question of Toronto’s economy), and Jen Gerson’s piece in The Line on why Canada intends to do exactly nothing to address its housing crisis (tl;dr: too much of its citizens’ wealth is tied to real estate for anything to be done about it; nobody who owns any patch of urban space will want any of it losing value in any way).

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Renting in a global city comes with its own set of challenges around home-making. The global-er the city, the greater the challenges? One of the writers of what I’d call the new British conservatism is the Romanian podcaster and writer Alex Kaschuta who recently moved from London to her home town with her husband and baby.

“London is rootless by design, it’s one of its main attractions. You go there to consume: places, experiences, people. Even your self is driven to be a constantly updated creation. Living in a city like London is thrilling, and there are few places in the world more suited to exploring what you want to do and who you want to be. But this consumption is not optional, it’s the point. You’re in flux, just like everyone else. Scratch most any high-flying city dweller and you find someone who longs to live in a cottage somewhere. They also have the once-a-month-lunch friends, the same mysterious neighbors and they ward off the same existential angst with Netflix binges on weeknights. In many ways, and for a while, the tradeoff is worth it. It was more than worth it for me for some time. I’ll forever be grateful to my time there, because it’s where I met my husband. We’d be a very unlikely pair as a Romanian and a Kiwi if metropolitan life wouldn’t have been attractive to us. But for both of us, the city was more of a tool than a destination. It was a means to an end, and the end had come.”

Her picture gets bleaker (they could only ever afford to rent, of course) and her depiction of her life now not far from her mother, a life of tending to her own garden, and working from home as a digital nomad is of course rosy. Somehow being able to work ‘online’ and globally from your very rooted-back existence is placed in a blind spot by these anti-global-liberalism conservatives. What we should all see is that this leaving home (and marrying a Kiwi in London, and working in a globalized industry etc. in this case) is necessary for home to be possible. There is no worse alienation than the alienation felt by someone who never had the option of leaving, who followed the well-trodden path into a marriage, a profession, a religion, a family.

It’s the thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis situation. It’s quite too late, for much of the developed and developing world, to stay and live our lives on the thesis part of the story.  We’ve been questioning our fate and communities for way too long now. We have been kicked out of that particular one, and many other paradises.

I know many still disagree. I sometimes listen to the podcast Ask a Jew, in which one of the two articulate and funny co-hosts is an Orthodox woman who grew up, married, had children, lives and will bring her children up within one clearly delineated community. She sounds happy, she sees her life as brimming with meaning.  

But I simultaneously envy and watch the lives of uncomplicated faith or ethno-national pride or stay-at-home motherhood as if it’s a diorama of a paradise lost. Of innocence before knowledge. Happiness before freedom.

Nous-autres will have to make a home in other, more conscious, un-enchanted ways.

+ finding a café (daytime) and a pub (evening) to call your own

+ finding a great organization for which to volunteer and adopting its mission (adult literacy, for instance!)

+ moving apartments only when one must

+ finding one’s calling, being faithful to it, serious about it

+ finding people with whom we are at home

+ finding ourselves in art, literature, music; our condition has been seen and understood hundreds of years before our birth; our roots spread throughout humanity, not one nation and time period solely

+ why not plant trees – hundreds of trees, like Rory Stewart did?

+ when British writer Jon Day moved with his small family to the outskirts of London and realized their house didn’t feel like a home in any way, he bought pigeons and got into pigeon racing. Pigeons, the scientists have their theories but are not entirely sure how, have an inbuilt mechanism to return where they were born from wherever you leave them. So he would drive up to Scotland, release his pigeons, get back home by the end of the day and the pigeons would already be there, greeting him back home, so to speak. Perhaps animals can tell us a thing or two about homing

+ poetry: and it’s important that it is of the land where you are. In the original. This can be a challenge for people who live in an adopted language, but it’s worth the effort. Poetry is full of the specifics of the locale, its impulses and music and sediments of history. Here’s Margaret Drabble on the isolation year of 2020 spent with her husband in Somerset:

Wordsworth too has been, as ever, a great resource. I recite him silently, endlessly, as we go on our Wordsworthian daily walk past neighbours repairing their dry-stone walls and shepherds shepherding their lambs. I hear a thousand blended notes, I hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.