Homesickness

“The knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.” (Rilke).

I am touching the house in which I was born, but my hand passes through the place, leaving a residue of fog where the house was. This is the place where I was born. A certain longing was conceived here. Muffled and croaking, it finds its expression in the body of the nostalgic. I am here, and my hand passed through the white wall, reaching into a lacuna in space, but comprised from the boundary of my hand. It is as though something outside of this place exceeds the material presence I face, as though this place resists the very act of being touched.

The phobia creeps through the hedges, lurks within the gardens, affecting a cold indifference on the world. I am home, but the home remains simultaneously absent. Homesickness: that which renders all memories of place derealized; a disease, but one that is cast in neither the body nor the mind, but in the spirit roaming between each place—.

I create a boundary. I summon a memory to ward off the anonymity of the lifeworld. I am human. My ideal remains incompatible with this white wall, which presses down on my flesh. It is time to leave, to remould my ideal from the wreckage of the materiality of things. This is the pathology of a prosaic homesickness: it localises itself in the body, rather than dispersing itself in the world of human affairs. And there is no return. Everything outside this imagined realm suffers from its own reality. The time of homesickness: without a future, without a past. An impasse with no resolution, a homecoming with no movement.