On Home and the Wanderer (2012)

On Home and the Wanderer

Spring 85, Spring 2011

Spring Journal, New Orleans, LA, 2012, 352 pps.

This volume of Spring Journal tackles the rich and complex subject of home and gives it profound and varied perspectives. 

Essays range from the somewhat innocent phenomenon of tourism to the troubling story of the Roma, the gypsies who lead an itinerant lifestyle which has condemned them to persecution wherever they wander. There is also the spiritual aspect of travel in the form of pilgrimage; and there is much post-modern analysis: some chapters contain seven pages of footnotes. And there are more poetic and dreamy renditions.

The book is divided between physical readings on home and more psychological ones and some that bridge the two domains.

 In “Rediscovering Home: A Myth For Our Time,” Hendrika de Vries focuses on the animated world, the world with soul, and warns of the loss of connection to the Earth our “Natural Home,” with our increasingly technology-driven culture. She expresses a sentiment that is often heard these days: “Perhaps we will even realize that it is not so much the Earth that needs our healing but we who need Hers.” (p. 13) 

 In “Home and Self, Home as Soul: The Wisdom and Narrative of Place,” Robin van Löben Sels addresses the physical sense of place. Narratives, images, dreams and memories also play a significant part. “We can say that we start from home and we end up at home … but wandering lies inevitably between.” (p. 30)

She reminds us  of Jung’s important injunction: “When the great swing has taken an individual into the world of symbolic mysteries, nothing comes from it, nothing can come from it, unless it has been associated with the earth, unless it has happened when that individual was in the body.” (p. 32)

Landscape is a “rich companion” for Mary Oliver, with whom the author concludes her essay. “One of the perils of our so-called civilized age (is) that we do not yet acknowledge enough, or cherish enough, this connection between our soul and landscape – between our own best possibilities, and the view from our own windows. We need the world as much as it needs us and we need it in privacy, intimacy and surety.” (p. 33)

Ukrainian-Canadian Alexandra Fidyk provides a thorough, if disturbing examination of the Roma, chronicling their troubled history. She also contrasts their wandering, nomadic lifestyle with its opposite – the settled life. It might very well be the challenge that they pose to “the hegemonic ideas about the success, superiority and victory of a settled way of life” (p. 86) that drives hostility toward them. It is only by holding the tension between these two distinctly different identities, in a harried and multi-cultural world, that “each person … be at home while underway.” (p. 92)

I am reminded of a troupe of Roma called GRUBB who came to our Montreal Jazz Festival the past two summers to perform their hip-hop blend of music. Their ensemble was created by a local producer, Serge Denoncourt, who went to the Balkans to work with the young people to bring their troubled story to light. They received rave reviews for their surprisingly upbeat work and were warmly received by the local audience. Watch a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M56UJ3ZM7I8

There is an insider’s view of contemporary Russia and the plague of homelessness that has marked the post-Communist era. The same essay also contains a riff on the charming film Chocolat, about a woman who travels a gypsy-like life with her daughter, looking for a place they can call home.  

John Patrick Slattery examines Faulkner’s “The Bear” which describes the initiation of a young boy as he wonders into the woods to encounter the animal and discovers a matured sense of himself. The bear, Old Ben, is described as “archetype and architect of the natural order as well as steward of the wilderness that men filled with fear continue to gnaw into fragments in order to domesticate its mystery.” (p. 180)

In 2010 Jörg Rasche attended a conference in southern India dedicated to “Science and the Spiritual Heritage of India,” and took a side trip to retrace the steps of Jung’s visit to India in 1937-38. One reason Jung might have travelled there was to find “what India could tell us.” However, whether because of a serious illness that required an extended hospitalization, or a case of “cold feet,” Jung never visited the ashram of a holy man, Sri Ramana Maharshi. Rasche’s own life was in a transitional phase so the impact of this journey is deeply embedded in his account. The fundamental question of this essay – Who am I? – leads to a cross-cultural tour-de-l’horizon from a modern Jungian who is facing the cutting-edge dilemmas of our times.

Of peculiar interest is a travelogue that takes us back to a legendary trip to Africa that Jung made with his colleague Peter Baynes, who served as his first assistant in Zürich and translated many of Jung’s early works into English. The photo essay, from a film recorded by Baynes, shows Jung on his five-month trek from Kenya to Egypt in 1925-26. This is more the itinerary of a colonial tourist than the account of an introspective seeker of truth.

Valentina Lucia Zampieri offers the reader a sample of ethnopsychoanalysis in her study of an Egyptian woman in the depth of an analysis with all the complex cultural issues at play when a Western trained analyst works with a person from a “foreign” world. The Western assumption of individual freedom has to be considered in light of the strength of the community in such situations. Zampieri illustrates the case study with a meditation on the classic Arab story of Scheherazade from The Thousand and One Nights. After attending a seminar on that subject, the client found an affinity with the heroine that gave her added confidence to thrive within her cultural community in which she had had felt somewhat conflict.

Paul Bishop describes the themes of home and wandering in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. The wanderer is a major motif in German Romanticism. He is a central figure in Wagner’s “Siegfried,” which recently aired on PBS TV. And so the notion of heimat (homeland) looms large. It is the tension between these two forces that drives Nietzsche’s work, he argues.

Bishop argues that Nietzsche’s work was infused with Romantic ideas. “Send your ships into uncharted seas,” he wrote in The Gay Science. He believed that the loss of myth is tantamount to the loss of home, a theme addressed by Jung too. For Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s guide, homecoming was to his solitude, “the highest form of eloquence.” (p. 145). Along with Jung, who struggled with Nietzsche’s work, Bishop argues that Nietzsche was really searching for the Self: “one’s own Self is perhaps the strangest thing of all.” (p. 146)

An underlying question in this volume is “who am I?” The issue of identity is central in the accounts of the various authors. Identity usually boils down to cultural, religious and national affiliations. However as this writer celebrates the Jewish New Year, another aspect of home comes to light. Holy books and prayers, as well as psychologically sensitive texts, refer to our sense of exile, not so much from a place but from our Self. It is this motif that will likely provide a major focus of our upcoming reading seminar when we continue our life-long exploration of home.

     –Murray Shugar