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House themes and powers: living and imagining in the archetype
Each of my series of workshops this residency demonstrates a transdisciplinary way of hovering around and converging on some core topic. Their commonality is that they demonstrate the existence of these core themes, each of which constellates a whole complex of felt thoughts - the house, the network, the dragon. These complexes of felt thoughts can be called archetypal themes, and they suggest the presence in our human bodies of common structures, structures that can be active in different ways in different cultures, but that are still recognizably shared. 1. Intro Enchantment of house The house teaches us to interact with space, and comes to inform the way that human beings understand images of space. Aspects of house experience that have an archetypal luminosity:
Humans are intensely alive to house values. House is a deeply pragmatic concern: the kind of house we have determines how safe and comfortable we are. At the same time house is a realm of intense creative interest, a realm of love and fascination, even we could say a kind of eroticism. House is very much about itself. House qualities are directly, immediately psychological: the shapes, the colors, the textures, the sounds, the smells, are structuring us every minute, whether we feel them or not. A wrong house can make us hold ourselves retracted. A right house can open us so we relax into its furthest edges and beyond. Houses are forms of self-structuring. We can fill our houses with things that hold us firmly in being who we used to be, and we can fill our houses with things that shift us into new thoughts. Or both. And house is a profound symbolic theme. House ideas are ways of being about many things that are not houses. The ways we write and dream houses suggest what some of these things are. - This session is just a dipping-into this extraordinarily rich topic. There will be sections on:
And finally rounding out to some thoughts about what this rich complex of felt meanings suggests about how humans are made. 2. Dreamed houses The variety and significance of house dreams:
What are some of the ways we understand these dreams? 3. Written houses Houses in literature for example this paragraph by Louise Erdrich: There is another thing that this house does in the deep of the night. I have heard it before and now I wait for it to happen. The house releases the day's footsteps. All day we press down minutely on the wide old floorboards, moving about on regular errands, from room to room. It takes hours for the boards to readjust, to squeak back up the nails, for the old fibers of the pinewood to recover their give. As they do so, they reproduce the sound of the footsteps. In the night the maze of pathways is audibly retraced.
Colette's vivid recreation of her mother's house and garden in Sido and My mother's house. Virginia Woolf's childhood summer house by the ocean in To the lighthouse. The house when Mrs Ramsey is still alive and it is full of life and children. The intense melancholy of the house in the years when it stands empty. The house again, after the war, when Mrs Ramsey is dead and what is left of the family comes once more. What are other written houses we have been taken by? 4. House as body, house as self
- from Flicker's story in Ursula Le Guin Always coming home Story of dreaming up a floor plan with spine-hearth, an open south and action areas to left and right. Distress at what is revealed by interiors seen on house and garden shows on TV. Visible dissociation. Tech houses that are environmentally correct but strangely cold - some of the Dwell magazine houses. What kind of self do they depict? Dramas of house - acting out psychic events as house moves and renovations, or just house cleaning and housekeeping. Some house dreams seem to me to be transparently about body/self:
- Louise Erdrich's image of the floorboards relaxing at night was followed by a passage in which the woman of the story is remembering how it had been that evening: The sky was a threatful grey, yet the willows blazed in tender bud, and drifts of wild-apple blossoms floated in the cavern pines. I kept the window slightly open as I drove the back roads to the Tatro house, and breathed in the watery air. The Tatros had always been too cheap to keep up their road, and the final quarter mile was partly washed out, the gnarled bedrock exposed. Overgrown swamps and ponds lapped close to either side. As I bounced along, the frogs quieted momentarily, so that I seemed to be continuously pushing against a wall of sound. Once I stopped, the frogs began trilling again. I turned off the light and got into bed. I leave my windows open just a crack at night, even in winter. The darkness seethed with spring music, and from time to time, deep in the woods, a barred owl screamed like a woman in pain. I had copied out the passage about the house releasing the day's footprints and was considering what it was about it. I realized with pleasure that the house's release of its day's footsteps it is like a body dreaming. But then I knew I wanted to copy this passage too, about driving through a moment of spring countryside, and then at night hearing the seething of spring music through a crack of open window. What was it that was catching me in this passage? I knew it was somehow related and then I got it. It was that the woman of the story was remembering where she had been that day, releasing her day's imprints. And then I realized further: these exquisite passages are Louise Erdrich having seen and heard the real world and releasing it later in the form of these paragraphs. 5. House as mother, house as family Prenatal house template. We come into existence living in a small, wet, pulsing, sometimes red-walled room that feeds us, cleans us, touches us, infuses us with emotion and meaning. How much of the magic of house is built into us in this first one-room cabin that takes total care of us before we know there is any part of the world that won't? Trinh T. Minh-ha Naked Spaces: Living is Round, "the private interaction of people in their living spaces." And then the family house. The way a floor plan diagrams a family's structure and values. Colette's books about her mother: Sido and My mother's house. Relationship in the house, relationship to the house how people treat the house where they live together. Whether or not the house is loved and builds love. What we can see about the family when we see the house. And larger situations: Jung "A house depicts a situation in life. One is in it as one is in a situation." He noted that, when patients brought him dreams of houses, or even when he himself dreamed of them, they were always unfinished, always in need of another room, or there was always a mysterious corridor attached to one's actual residence that led to rooms that were not there in reality. 6. Jung's famous house dream I dreamed I was in a medieval house, a big, complicated house with many rooms, passages, and stairways. I came in from the street and went down into a vaulted Gothic room, and from there into a cellar. I thought to myself that now I was at the bottom, but then I found a square hole. With a lantern in my hand I peeped down this hole, and saw stairs leading further down, and down these I climbed. They were dusty stairs, very much worn, and the air was sticky, the whole atmosphere very uncanny. I came to another cellar, this one of very ancient structure, perhaps Roman, and again there was a hole through which I could look down into a tomb filled with prehistoric pottery, bones, and skulls; as the dust was undisturbed, I thought I had made a great discovery. There I woke up. The dream is in fact a short summary of my life - the life of my mind. I grew up in a house two hundred years old, our furniture consisted mostly of pieces about a hundred years old, and mentally my greatest adventure had been the study of Kant and Schopenhauer. The great news of the day was the work of Charles Darwin. Shortly before this I had been living in a still medieval world with my parents, where the world and man were still presided over by divine omnipotence and providence. My then historical interests had developed from my original preoccupation with comparative anatomy and paleontology when I worked as an assistant at the Anatomical Institute. I was fascinated by the bones of fossil man, particularly by the much discussed Neanderthalensis and the still more controversial skull of Dubois' Pithecanthropus. As a matter of fact, these were my real associations to the dream. Jung's account of the dream claims for it: a clear description of the layered psyche of [his] theories, as they developed over the following two decades. There was the "personal unconscious" with its lived-in familiarity, and layers of a cultural unconscious . Finally, at the bottom of the house, were the skulls of hominid species - one a recognizable species of Homo and the other a precursor, literally an "ape-man" (although Pithecanthropus is now classified as Homo erectus, an "archaic human" who lived more than one and a half million years ago). A layered psyche more-or-less like this one, and the lifeworld it describes, was not peculiar to himself, Jung believed, but belongs to everyone. Jung read his dream in terms of cultural history and psychic structure, but there is also a way of reading it as a description of the layout of the human brain, the lowest level being the most ancient structure, the brainstem, also called the reptilian brain; and then the next level up being the midbrain, which we share with mammals; and then the most recent structures, cortex and homotypical areas of neocortex all of which continue to work together, the function of later structure being added to rather than replacing earlier structure like a house built on earlier foundations. - Another take on storeys in houses is Bachelard's The poetics of space, which assembles house images from poetry. Gaston Bachelard is undecided about the number of floors of this archetypal house; it has either three or four floors. But the existence of an attic and a cellar are essential, because the attic is the symbolic storage place for pleasant memories that the dweller wants to return to, whereas the cellar is the hiding place for unpleasant memories; both are needed for our mental well-being. 7. The art of house: house as image of integration When my colleagues and I wrote A Pattern Language, thirty years ago, that was my first attempt to move towards a world in which all the people of the world, together, make the world beautiful. Christopher Alexander is an architect, now emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, who began in chemistry, physics and math, and was working in cognitive science and computer science at the same time as he was getting the first Harvard PhD in architecture. His writing on architecture is hugely influential all over the world although he has strenuously challenged modernist design and mainstream architects he thinks have been compromised by their relation with for-profit developers. We had quite a donnybrook at Berkeley, from about 1985 to about 1992, a first-amendment legal case between me and the Department of Architecture, which finally concluded after seven years, in the University agreeing that the new material must be permitted and must be taught. His early books, A pattern language and A timeless way of building, are the sorts of books anyone can read with pleasure and recognition. He talks about what he calls patterns in architecture, ways of building found in traditional buildings anywhere in the world, that people intuitively and immediately recognize as feeling right. An example I remember recognizing instantly is the pattern of making rooms with windows in at least two directions. Another pattern is some kind of seating, a bench or an old chair, near the front door and facing the sun. Window seats. Alcoves. Thick exterior walls so there can be deep window sills. One of Alexander's themes has always been adaptation of structures to and within other structures: rich, integrated complexity. Deep adaptation is the process whereby the landscape, or a plant, or a town, proceeds by a series of spatially organized adaptations in which each part is gradually fitted to the parts near it: and is simultaneously fitted by the whole. We have only to imagine a row of houses, in which every house helps the street; and in which every garden helps every house That is why we must start paying attention well, the house can have beautiful and perfect fit among its parts, and to its environment complex, beautiful, and sophisticated well-adapted structure in this kind of adaptation: mutual adaptation among the parts within a system. His most radical move has been to say that what he has learned about making houses should be applied to changing the way science is done. I believe we are on the threshold of a new era, when the proper understanding of the deep questions of space, as they are embodied in architecture will play a revolutionary role in the way we see the world If the house, the garden, the street, cities, landscapes, works of art, were to become normal objects of our interest, and that the creation of such things, instead of being split off as 'art' were to be given the deep affection, passion which it deserves - if, in short, the questions of science would move from analysis and hypothesis making, to a larger view, in which making were also to be included - would we not then have a more beautiful science, one which really deals with the world, one which not only helps us understand, but which also begins to encompass the wisdom of the artist, and begins to take its responsibility in healing the world which unintentionally it has so far created, and which it has, sadly, unintentionally, so far helped to destroy. What he means is this: he tests architecture by how a building makes humans feel when they see it and are in it; and he thinks science needs to recognize that humans' sense of what is and is not beautiful is information as significant as more conventional kinds of measurement. Our sense of beauty is not 'subjective' and therefore trivial; it is the objective response of bodies in the presence of something, and it tells us whether that something is good for us, as bodies: My view is that aesthetics is a mode of perceiving deep structure, a mode no less profound than the simpler forms of scientific observation and experimentation. a judgment not an opinion, and it is a judgment about reality which can be tied to the presence of definable underlying structure evaluate the degree to which a certain system, or thing, or event, or act enhances the observer's own wholeness Alexander's most recent work is a set of four large, abundantly illustrated volumes called The nature of order, in which he tries to work out what it is that makes any natural or designed thing beautiful what makes it feel right to people what makes people feel whole in its presence. His name for structures and processes that feel best to human bodies is that they are living. This material comes from new ways of thinking about the way the world unfolds. It suggests a new vocabulary of thought about living process, defines some of the main ideas, shows hundreds of examples, and discusses, patiently, carefully, all along, why and how one process destroys life, and why another process enhances life. At the end of the book there is a sixty-page section on building a single house, showing what happens when the life creating processes are in charge, and what kind of house you get: a living structure. Alexander has been very clear about what he is fighting against: We ourselves are enmeshed, deeply enmeshed, in the production of ugliness, zoning, banking, transportation, corporate America, making warplanes, destroying beautiful land by permitting and encouraging construction of freeways for our cars, and by permitting and encouraging the ravages of commercial development and strip malls. No matter how much we look down on it, and criticize it as bad, evil, and harmful - still we ourselves live off the product of this kind of America we hate. It is about the real practical processes of house building, banking, gardening, fixing your room, acting towards people you care for, earning your paycheck, what you may usefully strive towards, and what you should usefully decide to abandon (even if that comes with your paycheck and as the price of the paycheck). It is entirely down to earth, and it invites a new way of existing, in which every act, makes some, discernible, small difference to the beauty of the world immediately around us. He summarizes what he has been fighting for in architecture this way: First, that the core of the issue, the core of the architectural issue, was the extent to which people's inner feelings and desires their reality - could interact with buildings. The simple proposition that all this has to do with the extent that people feel rooted in the world, was paramount. Second, that a well place, a healing environment, a house, or a room, or a village, or a major urban street, are valuable, only to the extent that this environment is made of living centers which resemble, and remind us of the person's own self. Thus in a healthy structure, we have a structure (in a city street, say, or in a window sill) which is like the hundred million buddhas or angels, all crowding into space. This is not used as a metaphor, but as a nearly literal description of the condition in space when the density and packing of living centers in a structure is profound. This was startling, and a revelation. As I began to contemplate the coincidence of the living center, its objective geometric structure, and the presence of a resemblance to the human soul, or of the "I' shared by all human beings, began to suggest a connection between all of us: a substratum or plenum, in which people are united in their similarity (80% of the structure), and in which their belonging to the world, the nearly unattainable goal, depends on the degree to which people are able to create stuff which does resemble them, and which does contain or reflect the I. This rule is then to be applied when a window is placed in a wall; it is applied when a building is placed on a street; it is applied when a neighborhood is constructed or reconstructed in a city. In every case, what is paramount is the healing of the whole, the living wholeness of the earth, in that quarter, and the love and dedication which sustains it and preserves it and extends it. This is entirely totally different from the present conception in which each thing done lives largely for itself: in which development, stylishness, and profit, are the guiding motives. And then he summarizes what he has been working for all his life, in everything he has done. It is that there should be: * A world in which we experience, daily, our unity with the universe * A world which is made like nature and in which we are daily making nature * A world in which the daily process of making, adapting, and deepening is a vital part of our lives * A world in which there is something to believe in not a religious thing but a believable vision of [divinity] as the unity behind all things which guides us and impels us to act in certain ways. [Divinity] not conceived of as a construct of any organized religion, but as a fact of nature and its wholeness. * A social and political world which contains (and explicitly provides) the freedom for us to act in this way something we rarely have today. * A world in which we feel the cultural trace of human beings before us who made and loved every part * A world in which we value ourselves according to the beauty of the places we have carved out, and modified, and taken care of, and in which we have woven our lives together with that of other people, animals, and plants. * A world in which buildings are shaped according to these principles, and laws governing the shaping of buildings in this way, are the laws most precious to us, and those to which we give most weight. * A world in which we have an entirely new understanding of what it means for the world to be sustainable: not a technical matter, but a matter in which respect for the whole governs. * Above all, there is a world in which meaning exists. The deadly and frightening state in which we do not know why we are here, is replaced by a world in which there is a natural and accurate and truthful picture - an answer to the question 'why am I here' one that is not made up, but that stems from and accords with the true nature of things. 7. Conclusion house as archetype What this rich complex of felt meanings suggests about how humans are made - having accumulated a sense of what 'symbol' and 'archetype' may mean, what Jung meant by 'archetype.' The way many overlapping kinds of significance can be built
on lived experience of physical bodies.
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