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In a gathering with most excellent friends this past Saturday evening, the question of "What makes a home a home?" came up.  It is one that I have been contemplating throughout the process of packing in preparation for my move to Oklahoma.  I can make some motion towards an answer for it, using that motion then to inform my understanding of some of the other things that have been going on as my beloved wife and I make to leave the place we have lived these past four years.

Home is not simply--or only--a place where people dwell.  It is a place where they make external what they are able to perceive and re/construct of their interior selves.  It is an expression of self and in some sense an extension of self.

Certainly, this has been true of me.  So long as I have had my own space--whether a bedroom, a dorm room, an office cubicle, a corner office with a window, or an apartment shared with a wonderful wife--I have worked to create it such that it reflects my desires and needs.  In making those reflections present in the physical world, I have in effect extended my consciousness to fill my space.  It is that extension which has often allowed me to reach behind me to pull books or journals from shelves, accurately retrieving the desired volume or issue without needing to look at what I am doing.  It is that extension which has often allowed me to know at a glance or at the simple feel of the room what is in place and out of place, what belongs and what does not belong.  I know my space as well as I know myself, and if there are some things that I do not know about either, the same is true for all in large measure--and I think myself justified in saying that I know mine better than most.

Perhaps it is because I have so long made of my space an extension of myself, a mimesis of me that functions as a part of me, that I am reacting so poorly as I am to packing up and moving.  I have not necessarily handled well the stresses of putting my life into boxes so that it can be packed into containers and driven across the country by people I have never seen and will never know.  If it is the case that my space and the things with which I have filled it to make it mine and me are in fact reflections of me, functionally part of me, then in packing, I am doing something akin to amputating parts of myself from myself.  It is understandable, then, that I am reacting as I am, jerking involuntarily and seeking something with which to anaesthetize myself against what I am doing to myself.

(I confess that I feel strangely Whitmanesque in this post.  And I know that in applying the kinds of discussions I have seen in some literary theory texts, I am perhaps alienating some of those who read what I write here.  My writing, too, is an expression of me, and my training and talents are not unknown.)