What does your ideal home look like?
The appearance of order and the reflection of what we would like to think of as our ideal image is relatively new historically and relates to the aesthetic of interior design. Nevertheless, it is there in van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage picture as much as any edition of Ideal Home (Jan van Eyck | The Arnolfini Portrait | NG186 | National Gallery, London https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/jan-van-eyck-the-arnolfini-portrait). At least the great Masters however, up to and including Hockney, don’t pretend that this two dimensional and fabricated idealism is in any way real or other than a projection of very thin value systems. Presumably this is the reason for the infinite regression of the image in the van Eyck picture in the strange distorting mirrors in front of and behind those bourgeois hopefuls, the Arnolfini’s.
Yet some people still dedicate themselves to such looks, a kind of socialised narcissism. And often too it is a pretence of control over self that is no more than skin deep. For me a ‘home’ is what feels familiar, comfortable and welcoming and really is so. The trend to minimalism and style is so often a fear of depth in oneself or others, a distancing of people from one’s inner core, an illusion of total self-control. To get involved with someone like that can be a scary experience.
But in German the homely or Heimlich is very ambiguous and Freud capitalised on this in his essay known in English as ‘On the Uncanny’. We have this title because ‘homely’ in English does not suggest the opposite, the unhomely or unfamiliar, the doppelganger of our perceived surface reality as das Heimlich / unheimlich do.
For Freud, this was evidence of the deep cultural ambivalence related to the notions of home, familiarity and, of course, family. What looks familiar often carries a penumbra of strangeness, of the alien and the fearful. I think the same applies to the use of the term ‘canny’ in the North East of England, although such readings are resisted, this is another sign of their truth to Freud, since truth operates under conditions of repression for him.
Hence, I would add that an ideal home cannot be judged by looks at all. It must encompass paradigms of feeling and proxemics in relation to other bodies. It must be distant from the repressions necessitated by unchosen companionship, the biological family, but nearer to those of chosen families, for they are chosen for a reason.
Of course, our choices can go wrong. A man my husband and I invited into our life was obsessed by appearance, in physical looks of bodies or spaces. Pretending this was a version of Bauhaus aesthetics, as he did, did not wash. This was about control of detail that avoided commitment in proximity, that valorised spatial boundary of some thickness and distance, despite appearance of the opposite (which clearly was enacted for the benefit of appearances as they might seem for those he knew he must control though illusions of giving a damn).
It wasn’t though cold and calculating I think but governed by repressed content, transference and counter-transference from earlier trauma and a disordered early family life, and duplicitous sex life played out in secret as a young adult. That was sometimes fearfully brought to the surface but as often repressed in the form of denial. I loved that man – his looks were my canny and that was true for others too, all of which he encouraged to send direct messages privately on Twitter. Many did. However, his reality was nearer the experience of confronting the uncanny in himself, a fearsome overturning of every source of feelings of safety and well-being we associate with the canny. It has the same effect if you fall in love with him I found.
So, maybe the look of an ideal home is not and never will be my goal. Nevertheless, the temptation will survive, and old Satan still looks as delicious and beautiful as he did to Eve, and ‘Carbuncle his eyes’ still, as Milton found. I wish you all wisdom that perhaps I do not possess. Coming up to 69, I think the likelihood of wisdom, for me, is remote. And maybe a chance would be a fine thing. I think it is true that it is ‘better to have loved and lost than never to have loved’ that man at all. He was and is a good man. The life of narcissist is not an easy one and he deserves a break. I hope he gets one. Xxxx
Love Steve
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