Newsletter 2011

At Home in the World: Sounds and Symmetries of Belonging

John Hill

New Orleans, LA: Spring Books, 2010, 288 pp.

Last fall, while in Halifax, I took the opportunity to visit Pier 21, a museum dedicated to the thousands of immigrants, including my family, who first set foot on Canadian soil, their new home. Exactly sixty years after my family’s arrival I find myself having to move both office and home in the span of six months. Such events compel me to explore my relationship to home and to be drawn to John Hill’s recent book on the topic, an inaugural volume in the Zurich lecture series published by Spring Journal Books.

John Hill has been researching and working on the topic of home for over twenty years and the fruits of his labours have produced a rich tapestry of thought-provoking essays on the topic. The book is beautifully written, and especially poetic in the introductory chapters where Hill writes quite personally about his early experiences. He appears attached to his home in Ireland, even though he has spent most of his adult life in self-imposed exile in Zürich. Home is linked with attachment figures and Hill suffered several losses, including the death of his father when he was only eleven years old, as well as time spent away from home in a TB hospital and at boarding school.

Hill refers us to the diverse concepts and symbols of home. Home relates to place, to belonging, as well as to culture and nation. It is connected to our basic animal instinct of marking territory and to our identity. Hill reminds us of Jung’s famous dream of the house where he found himself living in a multi-storied building; its top floor was in the nineteenth century, its ground floor in the sixteenth and deep layers of the basement rested on Roman foundations. If house is a symbol for our psyche, we may be aware of the upper stories, but what lies beneath the earth’s surface is deep in the unconscious.

Hill suggests that in order to be at home in the world, we need to first look at it. At several points in the book he laments our loss of connectedness with nature as most of us live in urban areas cemented over the earth. With our disconnection from nature comes a loss of sacred space where we can encounter the gods, the television in the living room now replacing the home altar. Our attachments have become more virtual as we interact globally through the Internet, rather than to any particular person. All this causes us to suffer a dissociation from our emotions and body.

Hill urges us to see the world through the eyes of the child with mind, heart and body, and through mythic imagination (which he calls the mother tongue), while not losing our rational perspective (our father tongue). He argues that we have become too reliant on our father tongue which has provided the enormous advances of modern science, but has caused us to become disconnected from our roots and our affinity with the unconscious, the subjective, and the biographical. The symbol-creating mind, nurtured from the child/parent relationship, tends to be more inclusive and incorporates an appreciation of the emotional and physical body. On the other hand, too much reliance on the mother tongue may constellate cultural complexes in the unconscious.

The author warns us that we can become trapped in either one of these languages and he brilliantly offers an example of how a nation can become overwhelmed by the mother tongue. His birthplace, Ireland, is a country still attached to its mythic imagination. Hill relates a twelfth-century tale, with roots in old Celtic lore, of a dying king who sends his sons to look for the water of life. After four sons refuse to lie with the old hag who offers them this water of life, the youngest finally does, and in fairy tale fashion the old hag transforms into a beautiful maiden. The king and the maiden/goddess are joined and the land is renewed, the land symbolizing not just vegetative fertility, but a connection to all the “ancestors and psychic inheritance embedded in the land” (p. 192). This tale inspired the Irish people and eventually became a political instrument, a call to sovereignty which culminated in decades of intransigent violence.

Throughout the book Hill urges us to balance our two languages or perspectives (mother and father, heart and head) with their conflicting interpretations of reality. To accomplish this balance we need to invoke the transcendant function:

The transcendant function does not give us a home to live in; it is not the kind of method that provides neat answers for regaining home and a sense of belonging ... (Its) goal is union between the unconscious and consciousness so that a new attitude is achieved. (p. 150)

This book is full of treasures: a chapter on homecoming as a metaphor for therapy; a discussion of homesickness (a topic prevalent in the songs of the nineteenth century and apparently very popular among the Swiss); an exploration of attachment and abandonment issues; an exposition on the responsibilities of citizenship.

Hill is most brilliant when he expounds on our modern times. He devotes the last few sections of the book to homelessness and the cultural shifts of our era. He distinguishes homesickness from homelessness, referring to those who have had to move for work, refugees forced to leave their homeland because of a natural disaster or war, seasonal workers, adopted children, even sex slaves. To deal with our rapidly changing, culturally diverse societies, Hill recommends that we consider Jung’s notion of multiple identities. Just as we need to encounter the stranger within, and explore the disparate aspects of our unconscious, we should also work on accepting the stranger without.

Contemporary societies should make every effort to support communication that is critical, open-ended, and inclusive, perhaps to rediscover one day the gift of hospitality, the art of greeting the stranger, which has always been an intrinsic part of civilization. (p. 227)

Acculturation – adapting to a new culture or shifting to accept the new cultures that enrich us – may take generations and can cause conflict. Hill warns us that “an approach to conflict resolution that is based solely on economic or political interests can be ineffectual in the face of older narratives, (p. 247)” and so should always include them. This book offers us a gift, an opportunity to contemplate our rich associations to home, a topic so unique and personal, yet archetypal in its scope. John Hill acts as our master storyteller and our guide.

–Mary Harsany