Home

My friend Phoebe asked me to write on this topic for research into her next album project.

The subject of "home" has always been one close to my heart, there are multiple ways to see it.  The old saying, "home is where the heart is," rings true for me.  I have a nomadic nature - wherever I go, there I am, so home for me is wherever I'm currently residing; in bardo terms, whatever Chamber currently being passed through.  At the moment, I'm on tour - home for me, as I wrote this, is room 47 in the Banfield Motel in Portland, Oregon, but only for another hour.  I'm about to upscale to a better hotel downtown, my home is packed and ready to move.

At the same time, I see home as a permanent sanctuary space that I have a vague cellular or memetic memory of having once known but can't consciously recall ever having been there.  Perhaps this partially explains the nomadic tendencies, a journey through a lifetime to return home, wherever that is.  This image evokes the archetypal journey of the Odyssey in Greek mythology, Odysseus's long, perilous journey home after the Trojan war; also the protracted wandering of the Israelites in the wilderness before reaching the Promised Land.  Dylan's paradoxical koan-like lyrics: "... no direction home, a complete unknown, like a rolling stone," speak to this feeling as do the lyrics to the Crowley-inspired Led Zeppelin song, Rock-n-Roll.

Like many adolescents, I felt alienated and disconnected from current social expectations and the conventional cultural milieu; any sense of a real kind of home becoming distant, especially after moving out of the parental pod immediately upon turning 16.  Whenever I listened to Led Zeppelin back then, and still to this day, I felt closer to being at home.  A lot of good music in general invokes the home space, the place of sanctuary.

The passage that first turned me on to Deleuze and Guattari nicely articulates the relationship between music and home.  It's the beginning of the 11th chapter in A Thousand Plateaus:

"I. A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne's thread. Or the song of Orpheus.

II. Now we are at home.But home does not preexist:it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited space...."

It seems an interesting paradox that home doesn't pre-exist, but the sense of it does. Most of us have an idea of how to create a home for ourselves; there usually seems an instinctive direction for going home.

Drawing a circle around an uncertain and fragile center is also a prime instruction in ritual magick.  In ritual magick you learn to create an inner space, a particular mood, of your choosing.  This space can be the home space.  With ritual magick you learn how to go home by creating a home. It is where? "Ritual is to the inner sciences what experiment is to the outer sciences." ( Robert Anton Wilson from a 1986 internet chat recently posted by Rawilluination.net).  Building a home, going home appears an endeavor of multiple and prolonged experimentation with perhaps many restarts. The fragile and uncertain center can get wiped out like a sand castle on the beach when the tide rolls in, but there's always lots of sand to construct another;  memory, the collection of data through personal experimentation, makes it easier and stronger next time around.

Hospitality, so important to Sufis, is the art of making the guest feel at home.

I hear the communication in the video below coming more from the guitar playing than the lyrics.