Place language: the significance of memory, space, and home
How shifting space shapes our foundations of home and memory
“Words act as compass; place-speech serves literally to en-chant the land – to sing it back into being, and to sing one’s being back into it.”
— Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks
The foundations of memories
A relationship exists between what we say and where we say it. We use language to anchor place, while place can affect the meaning of language. We often think of home as the space which grounds us. However, ideas of what home means to us, and how we are able to convey this through language, seems to be shifting every year. An ever-increasing globalisation and the current migration crisis is confusing our need for a personal identity, social culture, and heritage.
Home, to many, is associated with a warm, happy place, where you are free to live, laugh and learn. It’s a space where you are loved, respected, and cared for. From the outside though, a home is just a house. It is what lies within the walls which transforms the material into emotions.
Many argue a home is in fact a feeling, not just a place. But for many of us, the house we grew up in remains sacred in our hearts.
For some of us, no matter our age, or how many miles away we live, returning to our parent’s house still feels like home. Over our lifetime, we have the ability to feel at home in a number of different places, but quite often only a few, perhaps even just one place, genuinely makes us feel we’re home.
A strong reason for this is our home is so intrinsically linked to our memories. A home is where your memories lie. Home is where I first learned to ride a bike. Home is where I fell and scarred my nose. I remember counting down to Christmases with my brother, nursing broken hearts, and rescuing our kitten from up a tree. Our memories, both good and bad, shape the person we are today. Without these personal memories we would be totally different people. They are the foundations we grow on.
The poetics of space
Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher who made contributions in the fields of poetics and the philosophy of science. He influenced many subsequent French philosophers, among them Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida.
In Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, released in 1958, he applied the method of phenomenology – the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness – to architecture, basing his analysis not on purported origins, but on lived experience of space and place.
Our house is built on verticality and a planned, organised structure. It is built upwards, from the foundations, which grounds us, to the roof, which shelters us.
The cellar, or equivalent, is the darkest part of the house, where the monsters may reside – it’s the unconscious, in psychoanalysis terms. While the attic, although a similar functioning space, is closer to the sun and to God, and where mice run and birds nest.
When we approach the attic, because we hear a certain type of noise, we are given a warning, and when we open the loft hatch, these sounds will cease, as the critters scuttle into the shadows.
We are less keen to walk down the steps into the groans and creaks of the cellar. Unlike the attic, our rational thoughts are reduced and we begin to imagine what might be down there, rather than knowing what is up there beneath the rafters.
In the attic, usually we have a notion of daylight. But within the cellar, how often is there a clear separation between day and night? Even with torchlight, we see shadows jiggle and crawl.
The cellar is our dark unconsciousness, physically built underground to contain and withstand. Although we are able to take a torch down there with us, do we dare, for fear of the monsters which may lurk in the gloom?
A space to daydream
Based on these thoughts of Bachelard’s, we are able to describe our house as usually a safe place to shelter our daydreams – a conduit for channels to the past and possible futures. Our house is a protector, allowing us to dream, sheltered from the otherness of outside.
Our ‘home’, whether one literal home, or an amalgamation of many, is where a great deal of our memories are homed, packed away inside rooms and drawers, attics and cellars, nooks and hallways. We are able to revisit and unpack these memories, sometimes with the ability to even transform them, within our daydreams.
When we think back to our childhood home, our language used, likely transforms as we tumble back through time. Certain words become wrapped up in thoughts of this version of home, and only rain down when reminiscing:
monkey puzzle tree, ding-a-linga, Columbus, peddle boats, parties, hat tricks, Gloria Estefan, timber, notes, and snuggles.
Words of arbitrary meaning to a stranger, but deeply personal and transformative of place and space for me.
Our daydreams have the ability to transpose space, topography, and experiences of the physical world, into an emotional and flexible framing of repeated relived memories.
An endearing watercolour of our childhood home, may look like the same building and rekindle feelings of that particular time. But it can also conceal the lived-in intimacy of that space, and bend memories of said house into altered events.
In the past, a particular kitchen may have seemed too small, suffocating even, with floors too cold and one lacking sufficient storage. Now, however, that same kitchen recycled and re-photographed through daydreams, could be viewed as one of warmth, one of a point of anchoring, of nurture and growth.
Memories of our childhood home cannot properly lend themselves to description. When we try, this description retells a history that is often scratched, or embellished, in often ways invisible to us.
To do so, sells a warped guided tour to an audience. They could perhaps be able to picture a version of home in the present, but be unable to feel anything of the past.
The past becomes a pocket of time which is very hard to pull out again in the same shape it first emerged from.
A private space, our comfort zone
Our house, in numerous ways, retains a shadow across our dreams. A shadow which can protect, or entrap us, from the emotions and feelings of existing in that certain space, in that time.
To openly share our descriptions of our own current house sells out the intimacy of our own stored memories. It’s akin to inviting a colleague over to peep into our open drawers and unlocked wardrobes. Inviting them into your library, giving them opportunity to ‘read’ your house. This might intrigue for a moment, before triggering a daydream of their own, where they re-read a chapter from their own house, their own memories, while leaving your own home open and diluted.
Home is where we make and store our private memories. It is also where our hopes and dreams exist. As a child, we dream of what we will be when we grow up. Becoming a footballer, a pilot, an artist.
Our home, much like our parents, serve as a double function of having to ground us to reality and ensuring we are secure enough to dream freely.
There of course, eventually, comes a time when we have to leave our first home. To break free of this comfort zone and enter the beautiful and dangerous world independently.
The first time many of us get to experience this is when we head off to college or university. It is a time in our life where we really begin to learn about who we are and who we want to be.
Are you there yet?
We become a maturing tree with developing branches, where each one holds multiple leaves coated with unique DNA, mirroring our language, which grows and adapts, too.
On this next part of our journey we begin to form new memories from new experiences.
We repeat this, and repeat this again.
Memories stack on top of memories, but our home never fills up. There is always room. Some may get misplaced, get dusty in a nook, dropped on the floor and broken into lots of pieces, but our mind usually has the uncanny ability to heal them, if we choose to.
Our language grows with us.
Every space we inhabit helps us to describe the world around us. Enables us to dream. And inside our daydreams we can always find home if we try hard, wherever it is, or was, in the world. You just have to shut your eyes and be still.
Can you see it?
Are you there yet?
