Steve_Bamlett_blog

Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.

I am obsessed with Freud’s idea of the Heimlich I think. Being at home is a feeling of safety and security that doesn’t always correlate with a physical place and time in space. We can travel many miles and for many hours and carry such feelings with us. If this were not the case , psychologists could not have developed the theory of attachment, which plots the ability to adventure against a ‘secure base’. In Bowlby’s classic theory, that base is a caregiver whose presence involves a mutual sense of unshakeable bonds.

In attachment theory as further developed by Mary Ainsworth and others, the distance between secure base and the potentially insecure can be measured in terms of mutual subjective feelings and sensations and be correlated with physical distance. That is one meaning of the ‘strange situation ‘ experience, where the caregiver moves away from a child, eventually behind a door, to be substituted for by a ‘stranger’.

In this experiment, the child feels disorientated, insecure and unstable, not ‘at home’ in themselves, precisely until the bond is recreated physically. At least this is, the theorists said, for the norm, where attachment bonds are not threatened by the personal psychological instability or remoteness of child, caregiver or both.

As the child develops the secure base becomes an internal schema rather than a physical reality, a core belief in the safety that will allow the growing person, no longer physically dependent, to travel distances both externally and internally from the secure base knowing the latter is always there. To not do so becomes an index of a fundamental sense of insecurity and alienation from comfort and trust in attachments in the classic theory.

Hence to ask how far I have travelled from home, the furthest ‘distance’ is not a question measurable only in continua of space and time, unless we include subjective versions of those variables in dreams, stories and imagined scenarios or abstracted ideas and feelings. When there is an image it helps. Hence the advent of genres of sea and land adventure: space-time travel in personal fantasy as well as public literatures – and not only those by famous archetypes of adventure like Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne And H. G. Wells.

Whole nations and cultures have equivalent fantasies – ones that can be realised by some and have to be so by others: like the space of the ‘Outback’ in Australia and once the West of the pioneers in Whitman’s, and Willa Cather’s, USA. Now the facticity of some spaces has passed into uncertain literary signs like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. But the spaces exist -always larger in the inside than outside – in the castles of Gothic and horror fiction, and the strange vehicles of time-space travel, of which Dr. Who’s TARDIS is a fine example.

I would say that the furthest people travel from home is when the touch on that liminal space between what makes them secure and the thrill or eustress (a term invented to denote positive stress though it’s symptoms are similar to distress – see https://www.verywellmind.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-eustress-3145109 for more on it) that makes them also feel alive, independent, free and worthwhile as an individual.

They register the distance more when they are in distress of course and classic images of abandonment are in fantasy images of being in a desert (deserted) which is either a Sahara hot or cold Antarctic, or alone on a ‘wide, wide sea’ in The Ballad of the Ancient Mariner. In extremes, as in Edgar Allan Poe, it is an enclosed space, even a tomb. Other alternatives are alien ‘civilisations’ with uncanny mores, the best examples being in Margaret Atwood.

When I travel, home-sickness does set in under adversity and stress (that isn’t obviously eustress) but when is there not stress, at least eventually. Those might be minor stresses like delays or separation from familiar objects labelled as luggage or ‘ baggage’. It is amazing how we need those physical ‘transitional objects’ representing our inner securities. But I haven’t ever felt I could be Patrick Leigh-Fermor or Bruce Chatwin, abandoning myself to nomadic life, other than imaginatively. It may be that those men only travelled imaginatively too since each had numerous places they called ‘home’, though it is uncertain whether Chatwin ever realised such feelings, always adventuring in every way, emotionally and sexually and usually in the secret places conducive to his narcissistic impulses.

So my personal story is a dull one. Recently, I have discovered that my links to home can be less exclusive than I once felt possible. That is a healthy adult development, though it took till my 60s in years of age to experience it. Opening your joint home to other people or venturing outside it is a risky business still however. If that were not so, of course, we would never develop as people; never reach that sense that if family is necessary, chosen families are miles better than imposed or biological ones, unless they too become chosen in time.

I have discovered then from this dull story that maybe traveling distances need not be distance FROM home but rather extending one’ sense of ‘home’, building into it distance in space and time, imagining a newer more friendly internal adventure that still takes place ‘at home’ whatever the measures in miles and hours from a particular space conventionally labelled thus.

However, to be serious before I end, this question looks trivial placed next to the experiences of displaced migrations likely to happen in the future under the uneven spread of global warming and the relative socioeconomic disadvantage of East and South in the global domain compared to Western and Southern cultures. For those latter cultures have the power to exclude, and if unable to exclude to detain under poor conditions. Such distances from home are unimaginable and fearful because for some they are happening already. Yet people accept that Suella Braverman has a ‘point of view ‘ in such debate rather than being the progenitor of widespread insecurity for the many in the interests of the very few.

There ends this rambling but heartfelt contribution, heartfelt particularly at the end when the reality of a cruel divisive world sets in and makes no question trivial.

With love

Steve