Home-Body

An apartment in Brooklyn. Your body is pressed against the cooker. Rice is boiling on the stove, and your brow has begun to excrete half-a-dozen beads of sweat against your dark skin. The life of fire and warmth has been lit in your kitchen. Your body is animated, and your kitchen is alive. I am watching from the corner of the room, my head is directly under the entrance demarcating the kitchen from the hallway. I remember nothing, except for the moment I enter the kitchen. I brush by your body, you flinch, and I retreat: we have shown one another the ending that lies in wait. Our bodies have met in space, but not touched one another. Your body is alien to me, its mass of flesh and bone carved beside the American cooker, a monument of an era now consigned to archives. Your body is inhospitable, no longer of this home: at certain times, it is no longer clear where your body ends and where the anonymous ruins of this Brooklyn apartment begin.

When, asks Anthony Steinbock, is a home a home? In time, an answer forms: “The homeworld…is a privileged world since it is not merely one world among others, and our homecomrades are not simply individuals who happen to occupy the same space” (P. 232). We are (re)turning to Bachelard’s “inhabited space,” only now thrown into an intersubjective, experiential realm of spatiality, in which, after all, space is not enough. (Cf. Heidegger: “the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses.”) Other creatures are met in the hallways and rooms of the places, in which we sometimes dwell. And now these bodies must confront their fate: do they exchange glances in order to reciprocate the other's corporeal being or objectify one another? If we are lucky, then a transformation takes place, beginning with the body which, for Steinbock, “takes on the styles and habitualities of comportment unique to our cultural values….Indeed, this is so much so the case that it might not be too strained to speak of the lived-body precisely as a ‘home-body’” (P. 232-233).

Home-body: You have left the apartment and I am lying motionless on your floor. My body is home-less in this place you call “home.” My body falls through this place, circumvents the brown bricks, dark doors, and iron railings leading to this point in space and time. Way above me, the sky has turned dark and my back is arching toward the ceiling. From this angle, I can see the grooves that your shoes have made in the floor, the scratched surface a testimony to your commitment to this corner of the planet. You have been here longer than I have. Your body is attuned to this place. The shadow of your body pours into the depths of this furniture and cutlery: when I move to the kitchen in your absence, then I can taste your skin on the knife I use to slice bread into smaller pieces. Here your body lingers where you yourself have long since departed.