Essay

Home. Archeology and psychoanalysis

Essay

Home.

Archaeology and psychoanalysis

Text : Vintilă MIHĂILESCU
Photo : Daniela PUIA

I was born and grew up in my grandfather's house, a four-room apartment in an old block on Tatra Mountains Street, near Victoriei Square. My grandmother died when I was 3 and I don't remember anything about her. So I lived with my grandfather, my parents and my brother for three generations in a space compartmentalized only by glasvanders. The house has remained virtually untouched since my grandmother's time, my mother daring to make only minor functional changes. It remained the same after my grandfather died and my brother and I each left for other destinations. It was also unchanged when it was sold, so that my parents could move into a house that my mother had bought long ago and had been remodeling for years.
When I got married, we obviously left home to build a home of our own, independent of the home that had now remained solely my parents'. After they died, we had to return to their house and rebuild our own home. What followed could be interpreted by any beginning psychoanalyst as a kind of symbolic parricide. They may be somewhat right: although it was nothing premeditated or even conscious, it is true that each new object and each re-arrangement of old objects were all mute subversions of the parental order on the way to a new domestic order: our own. The home, as you raise it, so you have yourself....

*
Tent

Was the house in the Tatras a home for me? It's hard to say, because at that time I simply didn't ask myself such questions, and anyway, I don't think I had the necessary apparatus to perceive such nuances yet. I remember, of course, the rooms of the house, the 'modern' furniture of the inter-war petit bourgeoisie, more solid and functional than elegant (my childhood wardrobe, for example, a black, glossy parallelepiped, became my children's wardrobe until they, in despair at its unpleasant color, asked us to at least paint it a more cheerful color; it is still alive, untouched by age). But I realized some time ago that my only 'intimate' memories, the only spaces where I felt 'at home' were the bedside bed and a sort of alcove between the semicircular legs of the massive dining room table, where I used to take shelter and do 'stuff', I can't remember what. I was rather attached to the four-person tent that my parents and I used to take to the mountains every summer for at least a month, which I can still see and feel now. It was more a part of my childhood than the house in the Tatras. It was - now I realize! - my first home since the time when I did not know and did not bother to make any distinction between home and house: a home with which I left home seasonally, like the traveling birds (really - it occurs to me as I write this - where is home for the traveling birds, there or here?).

Open house

When I got married - and because I got married - I bought an old, shabby house, but it was ours. I bought it with a good friend in the same situation and we set about getting it up and running with another friend who was even more enthusiastic than we were. Under his pressure, our ground floor and first floor house was given a spacious attic, which housed the offices and library of the 'intellectuals', and a generous cellar, which was occupied much more often than the attic. Also under his pressure - but also with our amused participation - our property in Teleajen Street was enclosed with a high brick fence, holes were dug for two 15-ton diesel tanks, a sort of mega-cellar was ordered to hold 10 ordinary cylinders, and 5-6 tractor batteries were connected in series, which had to be charged all the time. It was supposed to be a only vaguely ironic retort to the "Golden Age": if Ceausescu wanted the country's autonomy, we were building our own (illusory, but romanticized) autonomy with stolen materials and workers hijacked from the People's House construction site. But when our friend wanted to dig a well in the garden, we thought enough was enough and ducked out. The work had already been going on for 12 years...
Was Teleajen a home? Certainly yes, but, looking back again, a special one. First of all, it was a male home, the entire structure and compartmentalization of the house being the work of three enthusiastic males. Secondly, the building was designed as a kind of phalanster, with osmotic spaces and numerous passageways that left little room for privacy. Finally, the fact that the building site lasted so long and that something was always being added or changed as a result, made it impossible for my wife to really tame and care for our apartment. Even the small living room, paneled from top to bottom and now the "warmest" space in the house, was designed by... our boyfriend. As for the rest, we got a nice but commonplace piece of furniture, which my wife, Ana, tried to arrange as pleasantly as possible, adding those typically feminine "touches" that make a piece of furniture a domestic object. But there wasn't much room to maneuver... So it's no wonder that Ana was more at home in the Teleajen than in the Teleajen.

Yet it was a kind of home, as I said. A diffuse home, with no precise boundaries: when I entered Teleajen Street, it was clear to me that I was no longer in Bucharest and that I had already arrived 'at home'. This "us" included some of my neighbors, the shopkeepers from the shop on the left corner and the waiters from the neighborhood pub on the right. It was a feeling somewhat similar to that of the peasants, for whom home is not the house, but the place, the household with all its belongings, and even the village 'where you are from'; in my case, it was a kind of urban proximity invested with affection, a kind of sentimental and elective neighborhood: I was not 'from here' in Teleajen, but I often spoke of 'us, on Teleajen'.

But this "we" that we talked about included, first and foremost, our friends and especially our students, with whom we even held classes downstairs, in the cellar. My God, how many parties that cellar has seen all this time! This "home" was therefore rather a space of sociability, the scene of the APP (Association of Professional Partygoers, which brought us together at least monthly until the fall of communism) and of the staging of communion with the students. Instead of a warm intimacy, rather a warm intimacy; instead of "let's go home", more frequently "hey, come over!". An open home, a place of hospitality rather than intimacy. A space of (on)passage...

House museum

My father would never have thought of his social status in terms of 'middle class' or 'bourgeoisie'. He was, however, a third generation "teacher" in Bucharest, which placed him (in his eyes) in a kind of aristocracy of the spirit, of which he was very proud, considering it his duty to preserve and pass on his "rank". But the materialization of this "intellectual condition" was always and always my mother's task, not his: in this symbolic universe it was, in fact, quite natural for women to be the keepers and caretakers of rank - and my mother did far more than my father would ever have asked her to. But I believe more and more that my father did not have himself in mind in these demands, but that his attitude stemmed from his true worship of his father and his whole vanishing world, which he, my father, had, in a way, a duty to preserve as much as possible, as a sort of "last Mohican" of this world. In the last years of his life, he no longer took any interest in his home or his 'status' and presented himself to everyone, laughing, as a man from the 'Paleolithic': although he still had nostalgia, he had come to terms with the fact that his world had disappeared.
While she dared not (or perhaps did not even consider it) interfere significantly in the home of her other intellectual wife, her mother-in-law, my mother had been preparing almost secretly, probably since the early 1960s, for what she had once intended to become 'their home'. She began by gathering 'noble' objects, furniture, paintings, 'second-hand' carpets, all silently destined for their future home. The house of her dreams was discovered in the late 1960s in Cotroceni: a hybrid peasant's cottage in the city, with two rooms, a porch and a huge garden. He bought it for very little money from its elderly owners, against the wishes of my father, who saw no point in another house: he was at home in his parents' house. It took years to transform the little cottage with a porch into a 'villa'. Obviously my mother took care of everything. Presumably to make the move easier for my father, the house was re-furnished, not the other way around. More specifically, the room that was to be my father's study was built to the dimensions of my grandfather's library, all his furniture being moved into the new building: my father was therefore to move into the new house, but without leaving his study that had become his after my grandfather's death. The living room, however, had been designed according to the furniture my mother had accumulated over the years. When it was all ready and my parents finally moved into their new home, my father brightened up and became its proudest inhabitant: my mother had overdone to her taste what she knew very well was within my father's 'rank' - and my father was not attentive to such 'details' anyway. The same thing happened when my mother took advantage of a new law, according to which my grandfather, being an academician, was entitled to a "creative villa" and bought the roofless half of a shepherd's house in Busteni. My father was really outraged by this "waste", but he would not let go after the villa was finished. He didn't notice much about the restoration, the furnishings and other similar "details", but on the whole he was delighted: it was beautiful, it was to his taste - and he recognized that it was entirely to his wife's credit.
This essentialist view of the house, so to speak, reached a climax when, after my mother's death, professional burglars stole everything of value in the house. Arriving at the police station, my father was obviously asked to give a statement about the missing items: he mentioned two Grigorescu (though he couldn't say precisely whether they were with one ox or two), a Luchian, an old chilim, some silverware, but he couldn't say which. And when he was asked about the jewelry my mother had hidden in a niche in the wall, my father became annoyed and snapped, offended, at the officer who was taking his statement: 'Young man, a gentleman never looks in his wife's handbag! Then he slammed the door. And that's how the investigation stopped for lack of complainant. And my father went back to his tabi-tay without being affected in any way: his way of "inhabiting" the house did not significantly involve such decorative "details".
"Mom's" house, so to speak, was full of such "details". After my father's death, when we moved to Elefterie, but before my wife began domesticating our inheritance, everyone who visited us would exclaim, astonished, from the doorstep: It's like a museum! And so it was: a museum, impressive, but as cold as any museum!

Warm house

The inheritance of the parental home is not always as simple as we imagine. The immediate question that arises is what do we throw away and what do we keep, possibly sell or not sell the house? The arguments are always pragmatic, "rational": this furniture is too old/outdated, we need more space, and sometimes the house is useless, as the heirs have long since had their own home. And yet, not everything is as "rational" as it seems, often it is more a kind of "rationalizations" in the Freudian sense of the term. In fact, the attitude towards the parental home is an indirect way of settling the score with your parents. You can alienate the house but give it a dignified "burial", you can tear it down as quickly as possible to get rid of it (and who knows what traumatic memories), you can simply abandon it, regardless of its fate, you can keep it entirely or choose only certain "soul" objects from it. In any case, faced with this inheritance, most people feel (even if they don't understand) that their parents not only had a home, but were a home: as a consequence, children are unconsciously faced with a kind of real estate Oedipus. At least that's how things were until relatively recently.
We first faced this mute challenge when we had to put radiators in the villa in Busteni. In my mother's house, the heating was provided by wonderful fireplaces, but they were enormous consumers and gas had become very expensive. So it was really "rational" to install radiators. And we did, of course, but before that I almost tearfully apologized to my mother. And we kept the fireplaces! It was many years before I finally tore two of them down, as they were taking up far too much space unnecessarily, really. But the third one, the one my mother liked the most, we never touched and never will - and of course we found a rational reason for that: it didn't take up too much space and it was still very beautiful...
When my father died and the question of what to do with my parents' house arose, the spontaneous decision was to sell it: there was nothing to attract us to that house. There were many reasons... But we couldn't, so we had to decide to move - to leave our own house. But I couldn't see myself leaving home, and I couldn't see Ana settling down in a house haunted by too many memories of a not so warm relationship between daughter-in-law and father-in-law. And yet, it was she who took the initiative and was entirely in charge of transfiguring the house. Of course, under the circumstances, it was the only way to rebuild a home. But it was also a chance to weave a home that was warmer and more intimate than the open-door house that had served as our home in Teleajen. But it was also, I think, a way to finally make her voice heard in that house where she had always had to listen, and at the same time to bring a warm communication with her in-laws, who had always looked at her with coldness: taming their home was also a way to rebuild her relationship with them.
The renovations took two years and Ana did practically everything. What we decided together was just what we 'throw away'. Undeniably, my parents' bedroom could no longer find its place in our house. Not even my father had entered it after my mother had died in their marital bed. Their gorgeous Japanese tradafir-wood bed with ivory inlay was the first to be dismantled and taken to the cellar, until we managed to sell it for a token price to a friend. The other bedroom furniture followed. It was only now that I realized that all the objects I had given up had completely disappeared from my memory, they simply ceased to "exist".
The desk became the expression of a gentle continuity. Grandfather's library remained untouched, the rest of the furniture changed, but keeping the old configuration. In one corner, Ana had a novel idea. Dad kept old family photos in bags stored in the basement. Several floods in a row had practically destroyed them all. Ana searched photo by photo for what could still be salvaged, framed them and composed a votive 'installation' of the Mikhaileists, a kind of shrine to unknown relatives, as I have no idea who the period figures in most of the photos are. At the top of the "installation" there is a photo of me in a tuxedo and a top hat among the actual ruins of Lipscani, the work of master Eugen Ciocan. It is an ironic wink to the continuity of the nation...
As for the rest, the living room, the centerpiece, was far too heavily occupied by my mother's "noble" and massive furniture to be moved or dismantled: the whole was a very solid unit. So nothing was discarded, nothing was moved from its place, but everything was resettled in elective objects. The first to be astonished by the result was me: despite my misgivings, the indisputable sensation when we settled permanently in Elefterie was that we had moved home. I still don't know the "recipe", but I think that the term "resettled", which spontaneously came to mind as I write these lines, fits very well.

What I can see with a rational male mind is that the "wardrobe" with which my parents' house has been "re-worn" has several "basic materials". First of all, plants, which literally and figuratively bring the museum furniture to life. Second, small bronzes and Arab brass, which Ana found abandoned in the cellar or bought on our various travels. Theoretically, they don't match the style of the furniture in any way, but they give it an extraordinary warmth. In fact, this ironic challenge of the "museum" ensemble is the common denominator of the whole arrangement: more than the brass, the owls don't match the rest of the living room, and my desk as a "serious" intellectual would have no place for the piglet Luță or Ignațiu, my guardian angel, both gifts from Ana. And yet it is all this play that gives warmth to the whole. A warmth that strikes anyone entering our house for the first time.
An unintentional irony I only discovered much later. Along the staircase leading upstairs, Ana had framed and placed several glass icons inherited from a distant cousin who had been Ressu's secretary, which lay carefully packed in the cellar. Along the staircase hung a surprising bronze chandelier of a monkey hanging on a string. From a certain vantage point, the shadow of the monkey hovered over the image of God: an ironic metaphor to say the least...
The Florentine table in the dining room, for at least ten people, flanked at the ends by two imposing kneighers of a completely different origin, was the only one that could not be tamed, and so remained decorative-ceremonial. We never ate in it, except when we had guests and it was too cold outside to eat in the garden. After my father died too, no one ever sat in the jilts again, not even when we had many guests. In fact, both my grandfather and my father sat "at the head of the table", like any pater familias, and not because the bower was there; and I never felt like "head of the family"...
The garden went through the same process of domestication. My mother couldn't interfere much in the jungle of unkempt vegetation she had inherited from the previous owners. She greatly enjoyed the rows of vines that covered most of the backyard: they reminded her of her father's vineyard where she grew up. For the rest, she left the fruit trees - from which my father made a perfectly acceptable brandy, distilled in a still also improvised by my mother - and planted, in a frugal way, some onions and garlic, tomatoes and beans: those were the times of food shortages in the 1980s. Ana gave all that up and, over time, created a flower garden. Every warm morning we would sit on the terrace drinking our coffee and chatting with "our" plants and birds: we would go over each bush and the birds that had nested in the trees - each of which had been given a name. We enjoyed every bud and worried about every withered twig. In the end, we looked at each other and smiled and shared a great discovery: great is this nature, Mother!
I remember a younger friend, descended from a famous family of peasants, who had entered politics with a determined determination just after 1990. After a while, he withdrew completely from the public scene and disappeared into a house he had bought in a commune on the outskirts of Bucharest. One Sunday, he invited us over. The first thing he showed us was an apple tree that he had planted a few months before: he was so happy and proud of himself as he showed us every twig and every blossom (it was spring) that had sprung 'from his hand'! He went crazy - was my first reaction. I only really understood him when we had our own garden, sprung from our own (Ana's to be precise) hand.
It was also on this terrace that we welcomed our guests and showed them our garden with the same pride as the aforementioned friend. On leaving or even on entering, everyone who came to us for the first time would say the same thing: what a warm house!
It was no longer an open home, as in Teleajen, but it remained a hospitable home: we liked to "humanize" those who crossed our threshold - and there were still quite a few of them: we remained largely facing the world rather than the house.

Unlike in Teleajen, here I felt at home only after closing the gate to the front garden behind me. There was no longer a neighborhood store on the corner, but a Mega Image, and none of the many cafes in the area had a neighborhood feel. We didn't know anyone and didn't make friends with any of our neighbors, even though Cotroceni had indeed been a "neighborhood."
Home is, first of all, a place cut out in space. "I've heard of space," replies a peasant to Ernest Bernea, "but what is space? In the book it's called space, but we know place; that's what it's called. And another added: "There is good and bad places; all places have their gifts, like man. There are places that make you drunk." As for the house, probably all "traditional" peasants would have agreed with this statement: "The house has its place, like everything. The place of the house is a good place, a sheltered place; whatever you put there, it grows; whatever you do, it is beautiful. It comes from the ancestors'. In modern and cultured terms, the home is also part of what Marc Augé, in his turn, considers to be a place, as opposed to the non-places of shopping malls, airports, corporate offices, etc. "If a place can be defined as identity-laden, relational and historical, a space that has nothing to do with identity and is neither relational nor historical can be considered a non-place". Certainly, being a 'place', the 'home' has a history, which can be reconstructed through a particular kind of 'archaeology of the home', constituting an embodied identity, which can be reached through a particular kind of 'psychoanalysis'. In short, the social biography of domestic objects is always also an autobiography: any sufficiently thorough "archaeology" of the inhabited home is thus also a "psychoanalysis" into the depths of the self. Moreover, body, home, society and cosmogony or ideology make up a more or less explicit coherent whole in any society, even in our individualistic world, in which we have come to be convinced that a house, our house, for example, is exclusively the work of our personal choices. But I do not want to go that far.
For years I have been teaching a "material culture" course on the anthropology of the home. In the last year, I asked the master's students to (analyze) what home means to them and how they would build, in detail, a home that is just right for them. For most of them it was a revelation: "I never imagined that there were so many things inside me", one of the students told me over a beer at the end of the course. She was going to say something neutral, something like "so many things", but the unconscious was stronger and what came out of her mouth was "so many things in me". And that was it, he was right!

Gender of the house

The somewhat more recent rules of inheritance in the country assume that the man comes with the house, the woman with the furniture. In the city, any architect and/or builder who undertakes the construction of a family home knows that the man (possibly) decides on the size and materials of the house, but as soon as the interior fittings are in question, he has no say, the wife controlling everything - right down to moving walls that are out of 'place'. Behind these common practices, however, lies something much deeper: the gender of the house.
The house is usually run by women. Here, the woman looks after the house. It sounds like the same thing, but it is not. I never realized the peculiarity of 'to look after' until a British colleague, who did years of fieldwork in communist blocks, drew my attention to its cultural dimension. For house-keeping is not simply cleaning: to care means "to remove the mess from the house", the mess that Mary Douglas considers a form of "symbolic pollution" and which is tantamount to disorder; to care therefore means to restore order, to live in good order. And this care is (still) embodied in the compulsive chores that are considered indispensable to having a "tidy house". In Teleajen, for example, my neighbor, a woman in her 60s, originally from the countryside, regularly took all the carpets out into the yard and washed them for hours on end, even though her daughter-in-law had a modern laundromat around the corner. "It is only when they experience the satisfaction of having swept the carpets, when they feel the backache from the practice, that women and men alike know they have really cleaned. In other words, they have gotten the dirt out of the house" - notes Drazin. He concludes: "In this sense, tidying carries within it the seeds of its own raison d'être, especially in a domestic context, because tidying is in itself a construction of domesticity that is tidy." From this point of view, home is a cared-for home.

IKEA launched a study on this subject a couple of years ago, conducted on the population of Bucharest, as part of an international survey in 12 other major cities around the world. I wonder if an important difference emerging from this research is also related to neatness: the "smell" of home. Thus, the feeling of being at home is linked by 50% of Bucharest residents to "a particular smell" (compared to 40% on the global average), 58% (versus 46%) say that every home has its own "fragrance", and 51% (versus 31%) expect a house they are invited to smell pleasant: to smell neat? I would wager that these percentage differences related to the "sensoriality" of the home are mostly due to the women in the Bucharest sample, and that if the research had been nationwide, these percentages would have been even higher.
"Taking care" of the house is an eminently feminine role, even when it is delegated to that institution called "the woman who cleans the house". Apart from the unequal social distribution of domestic chores, there is another fairly generic reason for this: statistically speaking, it seems that women are much more attentive to detail - and housekeeping is in the details! I've often found myself exclaiming how well that thing fits in there, or when did you buy that one, and Ana replying that it's been there for months. There is marital wisdom which says that, for a happy marriage, it is good for a woman never to ask her husband what she was wearing on her last birthday or what color blouse she was wearing yesterday. It is certainly true in my case, and it is also true, as a rule, in the neat house. Whether you look good or not - that's all a man can say about how a woman is dressed. The same goes for the home: she's comfortable or not. In fact, in the final analysis, home is not just where you are in a spatial sense, but how you feel; home smells like home.
Building houses is primarily a man's prerogative; home, however, often requires a woman's hand, eye, nose and even hearing: home is female. But when the home loses its meaning in a globalized and mobile world, when women have achieved equality with men, the home becomes a hermaphroditic composition, and the furniture that furbishes it is of the neutral gender.

When we returned to Elefterie after having had to stay in hospital for several months, my wife being my companion, I was seized with the reassuring feeling of having returned home; Ana was overwhelmed by the untidy appearance of the house.

Perhaps the homecoming after the estrangement of the hospital, perhaps the serene assumption of age, perhaps both, made me discover, without looking for an "intimate corner", this quintessence of home. The armchair by the window the size of an entire wall had been there for a long time, but only now have I settled voluptuously into it. With one eye on the garden and one on the house, I sit and sip my coffee for a full hour. What until not so long ago I would probably have considered a waste of time has now become a privileged way to pass the time.