How I Became My Home: On Reading "The Poetics of Space" During Britain's Second Lockdown
By Bea Bacon
When Boris Johnson announced the possibility of a second nationwide lockdown, I prepared to re-familiarize myself with the great indoors. I had gone through the exact routine earlier, in March. This time, it was early November. Given the conditions, invitations to the socially distanced picnics of the summer were long forgotten.
Furloughed and mildly irritated by the blurring similarity of my days, it felt like a perfect time to delve into something a bit lofty, maybe even inspiring. How one relates to questions of space when locked in led me straight to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.
Published in 1958, The Poetics of Space captures a moment in which the phenomenological quest of extracting symbolism and imagery from architecture was on the rise. I was encouraged by Bachelard to investigate my personal associations with my home, comprehend how my identity has been influenced by the walls of mottled red, pink and cream; I learned how, through methods of topoanalysis—the study of human identity as it relates to place—our true selves are revealed.
To start, I reinvestigated the walls surrounding me and rediscovered the memories that my family and I had housed here. I began to fully exist in my “first world”—the home and the revelatory truths hidden in the drawers, shells, and corners that cast light on our inner being.
Image: Bea Bacon
Despite hearing the ongoing gurgle of news headlines that highlighted the exterior chaos, locking down felt like a denial of the moment that sounded beyond my windows. I turned off my news notifications and soon after, I read the minuscule world of my home as if it were a newspaper archive.
I sat on the same sofa I had climbed as a toddler, in the same attic in which I had watched my first horror film. I colored the space with days gone and in turn, the space reflected such musings back to me as if my past were some comforting echo. I was sheltered, protected, allowed “to dream in peace.”
What followed was a bout of nostalgia. I festered in the attic, watching the next episode of “The Crown” and eating the outcome of whatever complex culinary task I sprung on myself to fill hours upon hours of plan-less days. Constructing a future seemed like too much of a risk.
I have lived in my home for over a decade. Upon reading Bachelard’s claim that “not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are “housed,” I was reminded of my four walls and all they contain. The unexpected green sink that stood alone in my bedroom, the lingering placement of the rocking chair in the front room, the kind slope of my mother’s craft room were slowly breathing life into memories I hadn’t explored in years.
A visitor might tire of the nostalgic stories I tell about what happened in the downstairs toilet in 2008, the history of paint jobs performed in my bedroom or the instance of the rotting ceilings. If transcribed, the conversations around my kitchen table could cover the walls of my house at least ten times over, doubling back across the roof, neatly wrapping around the body of my green front door.
These were not dramatic revelations of my past, no sudden recollection of a birthday, anniversary, or the heated shouting matches of my youth. It was a gentle, lovingly mundane presence of all that had preceded this lockdown, a decade of “impalpable shadows” communing in my attic.
I was struck by Bachelard’s commentary on how “the house is not experienced from the day to day only.” I had been living in my house as if its past was largely irrelevant to my being. Now, through my consistent dwelling and dream-like recalling of moments that even stretched back to my birth house, I was retaining “the treasures of former days.”
Image: Bea Bacon
In the “remote region” of my home, memory and imagination were coalescing, “each one working for their mutual deepening.” This greater consideration of the bond between my identity and where I inhabit gave way to the realization that my house was not just some “inert box”, a meaningless geometrical structure that resisted “metaphors that welcome the human body and the human soul.” This lockdown, drenched in interiority, was not a day to day existence.
Instead, I was at the top of my staircase, walking backwards from the present moment and all the way to the closed entrance of my house—the most distanced point at which I could take in my museum of recollections. If this were any other time, I would’ve opened my front door and walked out into the day.
Never doubt the potency of inhabited, indoor spaces—a power that is decidedly different from the influence of the exterior. Bachelard asserts that “memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home”, mirrored by the notion that memories are “motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are.”
The force of a lockdown inside a space saturated with the fluid, ephemeral character of memory pulled me to embrace how my home had been holding me, along with all preceding versions of me and it was only then, in that security, that I realized this.
In the depths of my imagination, I almost forgot I could utilize my government-approved daily exercise to leave the house. My miniature cosmos felt more than enough, even when the morning light uncovered the exterior I was dismissing.
On December 2, the U.K. will slip back into some version of freedom. Many of us will return to work, to gyms, to hair salons, to all the prohibited spaces which have become “inert boxes” over this past month. The cafe I will return to work in will be once again inhabited, resurrected by the regular crowd of customers who are desperate to drink coffee somewhere that isn’t their kitchen table.
In a year where the space we can occupy is limited, Bachelard praises wherever we choose to dwell. In thanks, I will lend a thought to all the other condensed universes that inwardly glitter when we are told to truly inhabit our homes and consequently, ourselves.