"Home is the place where, when
you have to go there, They have to take you in."
--Robert Frost, "The
Death of the Hired Man"
Even past the deadbolts of our homes, there are sanctums and inner sanctums, places of lesser and greater intimacy. There are the spots that are "just for show"--the parlor, the guest towels--and places of greater intimacy, of which no place is more intimate than the bedroom.
The bedroom is where we rest and romp, where we let our "wobbly bits" hang out, and so we have to craft a room that will take us in every single time we lie there, in every state, so that our bedroom becomes not just a place for scented candles, but for the crumpled tissues of sickness and soul-sickness.
If it were just about buying the right things to achieve this effect, we'd be golden, and AT would be a different kind of site. But it's an inside job.
Jack Gilbert has a poem about the insistence it takes to really get intimate:
Tear It Down
We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of racoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within the body.
-- Jack Gilbert, from The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992, 2001.
Jack Gilbert webcast from the Library of Congress
Photo credit: !_flashback
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nice post. when i am most obsessed with home improvement, most lost in the consumerism and materialism of it, it makes me a little sick. then I can tell that its really about a desire to create something sacred in a world where not much is sacred, to create a human space and pace in a difficult world. Then I can remember that its not about the color of the slipcovers, its about really resting on the couch, and knowing things are just right without my constant (and very american) drive to "improve" through material symbols of happiness. i'd love to see more posts about home, not just home improvement. in the meantime i am thinking about taking a long break from "improvement."
Who wrote the text that precedes Jack Gilbert's poem? Wonderful.
For me, particularly the past two years, home has been a huge obsession for me. Getting it right for myself, as opposed to others, has been a challenge. Not so much in a design sense, but in a heart sense. A major life change put everything at risk and home suddenly became more important than ever, a place to cocoon, to celebrate and be sad, sometimes at the same time, and to free the real person inside of me. Sometimes we just need to "be" and be satisfied instead of the endless struggle to evolve. "Flow" is a much nicer idea.
I agree with Amy...."....i'd love to see more posts about home, not just home improvement. in the meantime i am thinking about taking a long break from "improvement."
Yummy.
Last night, at a party, I placed my overcoat atop a mountain of coats in beautiful bedroom in a home filled with tableaux of antique games, comic novels, and carefully chosen photographs — a home filled with art, and colors you wanted to eat up everywhere you turned. A very Thought About home.
Then today I sat on the floor of a different kind of home, full of dark warrens, with old vinyl kitchen chairs and crumbling childrens' drawings in plastic frames in the bathroom, and a beanbag chair on the dining room floor atop a worn, forgettable rug, and had a conversation about life, imagination, books, Sweden, and dogs. An exciting conversation with a dear old friend.
And you know, I prefer the second house; it is self-forgetful, not self-conscious. (There also was a really good marzipan cake we ate with wine.)
The best sleeps aren't a function of really great pillows or high thread count, and the best bedrooms make you feel safe, whatever their design. (I say this as a designer, a fan of both excellent pillows and Egyptian cotton, and as a poet, as it happens.)
Good food for thought.
It makes me wonder why I have waited until the very last to tackle the decor of our master bedroom.
It should really be the first room in the house that gets "finished", shouldn't it?
http://www.promountainsports.com/graphics/id-southcol-bigwall.jpg
ion--no getting up on the wrong side of that bed!
no kidding...quiver....
There is so much in a bedroom. I had shared mine with a boyfriend and then he moved out. It was such a hard thing to make the apartment mine again. It wasn't until I painted the bedroom and moved the bed from one side of the room to another that I finally felt free.