BEGINS TO LOOK LIKE HOME

Re any conjectured anthropomorphic sense that the Universe could possess: A pronoiac attitude--that the Universe is at least benign, and not actively malefic--seems to me a good one to have, if no less for the "fact" that surely there is power in positive thinking. I know; it assumes that the Universe is an active force that has teleologic, purposeful design (and not just a random occurrence with random events).

In these matters, I was profoundly influenced by R. Buckminister Fuller, ca. 1970, even attending campus meetings at the University of Kentucky, where I was fortunate enough to have attended a lecture by Bucky himself. I was thoroughly atheistic at the time, until reading Fuller's writings in which he speaks of the "cosmic intellectual integrity at work in the design of Universe." Fuller was a design scientist (otherwise an architect and mathematician by training, and an inventor by vocation) who thought about "design science" both mundane and cosmic.

Starting from the position that Universe has an undeniable overall design based on fundamental design principles that are endlessly repeated and never abrogated, it is appropriate, I believe, to postulate that humans are integrally part of the "design integrity."

When speaking of "God," Fuller said this many times: "God is a verb, not a noun, whether proper or improper." So, that's where I stand: the term "god" is not useful except to replace in a shorthand way the reality of the active, ongoing design integrity of Universe.

If one wants to reify "design integrity" into "Design Integrity," as I do, then cosmic processes begin to have an active, benign design. True, Universe does not "care," but Universe continually designs itself using its always-existing principles of design integrity, even at the level of an individual human who exists and develops within these design principles.

Fuller says humans are "magnificently successful products of design in a Universe the complexity and intricacy of whose design integrity utterly transcends human comprehension, let alone popularly acceptable descriptions of 'divine design'." Yet, that design (or Design) includes, I believe, the development of Homo sapiens sapiens and human consciousness as successful, "designed" events in a non-neutral (even "friendly") Universe where we are integrally designed to belong.

It begins to look and feel like Home.         

HOME-CENTERED

Electronic connectivity to people and places enables a new social form of the Geographic/Cosmological Imagination in which we again reside at the center of it All. Finally, humanity is superseding, hopefully in time, the worldview of the de-centering Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution which promoted the literally "eccentric" view that we reside OUTSIDE everything: nature, our bodies, the Earth (i.e., living ON the surface of the globe of the planet, instead of "dwelling" IN the spherical World).  


From the perspective of our lived experience (the lifeworld, including electronic connectivity), we dwell from an experiential center--the center of the World. The global view looks to exploit the spatial substrate of the planet, even to escape from it, and creates an "Earth alienation." The spherical view looks outward from the center, similar to Medieval cosmology. 


Science, psychology, and cosmology are coming together to "re-place" the alienation of the last four centuries. Now, we can again live here and now in this spacetime. Call it Home.

LIVING AT (CYBERSPATIAL/REAL) HOME

The diasporics and nomadics of the world share a new sense of global space, but, also, a concomitant placelessness. In fact, I believe nearly everyone in the world does today to some degree. From the "global souls" written about by Pico Iyer to the stay-at-"homes" (with "home" now a contested term) who experience telepresence while viewing their TVs which show event-spaces around the world--we all now have some expansive sense of global space while feeling the alienation of placelessness.

Yet, as the world globalizes--and because of it--people feel the need for a renewed sense of place: The need for attachment and rootedness to a place to counter the deracinated global sense of space. Using the term "glocalization," which indicates the interweaving of localities into larger economic spaces, I call the cognition of the continuum from local to global spaces, "glocal spatial cognition."

We live in spaces from local to global. In the case of bloggers--those who maintain a presence in their own blog sites, including ones such as MySpace--we create cybernetic space, to afford us some identity and sense of "home." Further, our cyberspatial presence also is partly defined by our presence in "real" space wherever we live (and vice versa). Indeed, we who have our own blogs are creating some sense of home--albeit, partly cybernetic and partly "real."

The computer and "real" space are now interwoven--we live at "home" with the machine. Thus, "home" itself is now cyborgian. So is our spatial cognition.

SYMBOLIC SPACES OF HOME

My cognitive space of home breeches borders and includes viewing the framed calligraphy of "Spring" by a Peking University professor, burning Japanese (temple) incense, sipping green tea (steaming with undertones of honeysuckle) from the cup I purchased at a small Shanghai shop; surrounded by sundry other objects--tea sets, chops, jades, silks, statues all bought in Taiwan, China, and Japan--and visualize that I am a Tang Dynasty scholar (with no attempt to read the Analects and no talent for any Chinese arts) living and creating in my micro-space of an imagined scholar's studio (described below).

http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/editorial.php?issue=013

This 'studio world' was a very special space. It was a physical space, often a pavilion set apart in the garden, screened perhaps by bamboos, a place of seclusion and privilege, where the literati could elaborate their fantasies, surrounded by their favourite knick-knacks (strangely carved inkstones, armrests for calligraphy, paperweights, brushes, seals, incense burners, weird roots and rocks etc.). It is in just such a space as this that many of the experiences and encounters of Strange Tales take place. But the 'Studio' was more than this: it was also a symbolic space, a gestalt. It denoted a whole cultural, spiritual, aesthetic and sensual world.

We all live in symbolic spaces. I have described mine.

MENTAL SPATIALITY OF HOME

Thinking of living space, I sometimes scale up to larger spaces, because this is the general area that I study, especially how we cognize place and space.

I say emphatically that spaces affect our psyches. And perception and feeling of space does, too. Place and space affect how we identify who we are. And it works obversely, too: Our perception and conception of place and space determine what those places and spaces are. We construct space; it is not "something" that exists unchanged without our construction of it.

The latter is more difficult for us to understand because in ordinary consciousness we think of space as a container (the container theory of space) in which objects and events take place. (Here I go again on the conceptual level. But, theory is needed to explain reality, to place it in context of meaning.) But, there is a great deal of postmodernist thinking which sees space as not absolute--a preexisting thing--but as social and mental construction. This says that we construct ideas of place and space, as society (e.g. the Frontier Thesis) and as individuals. Some people, for example, require a home of cozy sparseness (or sparse coziness); others have other spatial preferences.

It's interesting to think about the role our childhood home has as a template for what we now in adulthood perceive as the spatiality in which we are most comfortable. In the childhood home, inhabited space transcends its geometrical space and becomes a place--a trellis--upon which we construct something of our conception of the larger universe. After all, the childhood home is the place of our first universe; it was the only space that we knew.

Incidentally, my childhood home was filled with stacks of newspapers. In the house of my psyche, I've been stacking up the "newspapers" ever since!

SELF, DIDN'T I KNOW YOU WHEN?

I have had some experience with whether it is good or even possible to "go home" again, as I grew up in a small western Kentucky town, where my parents still lived after I left for university, and to which I still periodically return. (My parents are long departed.)

Another return I experienced was, after living in Jamaica, I returned to the U.S. for the first time in 3 1/2 years. Returning with different eyes, I was a different person and had a changed perspective on life in the States. For example, I experienced a heightened awareness of the public infrastructure that we are blessed with here. I am speaking of things that we take for granted which poor countries have an economically difficult time providing: sidewalks, street curbs, street lights, street signs, electric grids that work, clean water, parks, schools, and so on. We possess great public wealth. These were not new things to me; it was that I saw them with fresh insight.

The place to which one returns has also changed--the flowing river is different in each spot and time. There is truly nothing that is stationary in this world. So, it's a moving target-river-home to which one returns. My old home town certainly is not the same. For example, some years ago WalMart moved in; subsequently, downtown moved out.

Returning home can be a measure of who one has become (and how much one is the same). It is a good place for adding a perspective to self-knowledge. However, the experience can be quite uncomfortable, as I have seen. One's history can be weighty. It is an emotional, moving experience.

Finally, a quote by T. S. Eliot, in which I have inserted a phrase, is appropriate here: "...the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at where we started and know the place [and OURSELVES] for the first time."