Is There Still Such a Thing as Home?

I found myself in the Stockholm city center at an awkward time of the day, and fled into a major bookstore I rarely visit these days, and had the idea I should buy a recent Swedish book. The only one that seemed to possibly motivate the high prices was one which was at least thick and hardbound, by an author who is an acquaintance from way back, “Hem” by Erik Andersson.

“Hem” means home. It is the second part of an awful lot of placenames in Sweden, especially old ones. (International readers may be more familiar with German cities ending in the equivalent -heim) And in fact, in the Västergötland province where the author lives, there turned out to be 50 different parishes ending with -hem or a derivation from -hem (in some of the more distorted ones, this part wasn’t obvious. In many cases it had become -um, looking rather Latin, and in some cases only -m, making the connection possible only by tracing it through old historical sources).

Erik Andersson set out to visit all these 50, and take a walk around each. Usually a day’s walk, indeed, most of them are pretty small. Being in the Västergötland plains with rich clay soils, calcium content added from sedimentary rocks, cultivated for a very long time with plenty of stone age and bronze age archeological sites, agriculture has been quite productive and leading to rich landowners and a rather dense distribution of churches, and thus small parishes.

He did it over a long period of time, at different seasons and different weathers, and wrote a little travel reportage of what he encountered in each of them. Usually agricultural fields, often archeological sites, plenty of flowers, cattle, geese and cranes, and quite a lot of wild boars, quite a lot of regular people walking around, quite a lot of strange signs that someone had put up, tiny villages, some lakes, some forest groves, all the regular stuff that the non-urban walker usually encounters. Not much happens. A lot happens when not much happens. Whatever pointlessness emerges from walking around 50 countryside parishes is far from pointless.

Apart from the casual historical observations about the economic history and the agriculture and whatever else seems to determine the present guise of the landscape, this will of course also provide a conceptual analysis of what “home” is, and what we might have it for. Actually a great opportunity for that. And a highly topical issue at that, in the present situation, when so many people have been forced to stay at whatever home they’ve had for such a long time, and gotten used to working from home, trying to socialise from home, never being able to escape family members and constant reminders of what one is supposed to be as reflected in the conventional identity markers of furniture and decorations and selection of commodities. The author stops short of starting this analysis in a systematic manner, he doesn’t draw much attention even to rather obvious coincidences. He’s quite happy with a random web of associations between the etymologies of all these placenames and his own observations. And he does not have the perspective of a massive political isolation campaign, since he actually did his fieldwork 2012-19 (he chose to explore the home province while travelling abroad was still an option).

By some surrealists this may be recognised as an obvious surrealist experiment (others may still cultivate the traditional modernist hatred of the countryside), but the author himself is of the non-committal and modest kind. He has indeed made a few very curious investigations together with Aase Berg in the past, but been associated more with pataphysics, but even that in a modest and seemingly non-committal and if you will characteristically pataphysical way. But then, the unprejudiced modest exploratory walking in a strange landscape is, according to its own nature, dependent on curiosity and not commitment, mobility and not positioning. The walker is, you know, a “modest recording device”, that’s one of the reasons why walking has been a constant in surrealism through history. And my point in bringing this up as a topic in this channel is clearly to provide it as an example, and not to recommend or unrecommend a book published in a language that very few read globally anyway.

These 50 places are remarkably similar, and all very different. While each have their little peculiarities, there is also something interchangeable over them. A bit like homes. I am not saying one could live in either. Most if not all are probably dreadful in the long run. But that is again one of the things that home is about. At least if you walk through 50 little strange places where you certainly don’t know each nook and cranny (I don’t use this expression too often and at first I erroneously said nook and crane, which made associative sense since roosting cranes in large numbers are characteristic of the Västergötland plains, and then perhaps nook could be nuke, since uranium mining has been a problem in the area). 50 small epicycles. Even with this limited sampling of each such point, there are clearly things to discover, encounters to have, little enigmas to ponder and striking absurdities to notice.

No doubt, walking in the countryside, you do of course greet all strangers, and very often you strike up a conversation, which is usually trivial in some sense but also has a randomness and a rather moving humanity and quite often an immediate absurdity to it. One does not have a place in the world, but one might behave quite normally almost anywhere. Homes are not very different. Yet different. A home is not a privileged place. It is just a place of departure. And, as it were, usually of return after a walk around the parish, with briefer or much longer detours.

Also, while there is nothing admirable with preferring domestic tourism before exotism for moralist, spartanic reasons, it is quite true that the tourist very often gets to see mainly what is specially offered on display for tourists, whereas the wanderer in the forgotten smalltowns and countryside just round the corner of one’s resident city has all kinds of opaque absurdities to discover, and non-packaged non-premeditated strange experiences to make. One might even have been walking in one’s own very neighborhood, without realising. A familiar landscape is an illusion. Home is not home.