Saturday, July 6, 2013

Sunnyside


When I was a young boy living in South India, no one in the community in which we lived ever bothered with numbered addresses. Instead, all the houses, boarding houses, and even apartment buildings had names. I still remember some of these names. They were magical.  Dunmere, Jumisba, Loch End, Loben....with these words you could conjure up the places immediately in the mind. It was very efficient, like a spell that called up a picture. Also if you just knew the name of the place, just that alone made it somehow automatically more familiar to you, more susceptible to communication with you. You had something like a key to entering its heart, and also a means of describing its mysteries, and of course of being able to inform others of what you had experienced there. 

My conviction that we ought to name more aspects of our surroundings, extends to trees as well.  On the campus of the university here in Valparaiso, stands a beautiful oak with a name: a great big huge spreading oak, out in the middle of the largest green open space on campus. The oak has for generations of students been called Merlin. Which is perfect. People sit under the shade of Merlin, against Merlin's trunk. People read books under Merlin. Couples kiss under Merlin. Every year actors perform Shakespeare under the leaves of Merlin. Merlin is their canopy. 


It is generally easy enough to cut a tree down in this world. All you have to do is claim to own it. Even on a University campus this is usually true. But try taking a chain saw to a tree named Merlin! What a protective spell the name literally casts! What's in a name? Well, reverence and affection for one, sometimes even awe. And let me add that, in the same way that naming a tree changes our feelings towards it--deepening them, fixing them like dye to a cloth--naming our homes could be a first step to caring more deeply about them as well. And to living in them more happily and contentedly. 

I remember a Canadian friend in college, making fun of the American penchant for numbering our streets. We were on band tour, and while we were traveling, the subject naturally came up. "Yes," he said to someone on the tour bus, "In Canada we actually name our streets." Someone hazarded the point that Americans, by numbering their streets, made navigation in their cities easier, but my Canadian friend simply shrugged, "Look at a map." By which I think he meant (if I can presume to extrapolate especially his shrug and guess at its larger intent) "It's a shame that any nation would value efficiency of navigation above unique and descriptive names. It bespeaks a poverty of imagination. A lack of settled affection. An addiction to easy abstractions."

Of course, I know that most Americans would never name their homes, just because it's not a custom here. To do so, or even consider doing it, may seem too pretentious or just plain strange. But I want to posit some other reasons as well. I want do so because it seems to me that, when certain impediments stand in the way of some action, and you can name those impediments, and then carry out the action anyway, or even pretend to carry out that action, the act serves as a powerful antidote to the negative spiritual conditions that might have placed the impediments in the first place. For instance there may be all sorts of reasons why I wouldn't use the word "brother" or "friend" to describe this or that person I disliked or felt angry with or estranged from. However if I were then to use the word brother or friend anyway to describe that person--even to myself alone--well, that act alone might serve as an antidote to my estrangement and my anger. In fact, I have tried this. I know it works. 

So. Here are some possible reasons why we might never want to name our homes, even if the larger culture were more or less indifferent to the act of naming them. 

1. Our houses generally are not very different from one another. We have not made them so. So we do not name them. After all, it's the urge to acknowledge unique attributes that generally precedes and motivates the act of naming.

2. Too few of us stay in one place long enough to fall in love with it. Since love, or at least affection, is also often involved in most thoughtful acts of naming, and love for a place takes time to grow, it follows that we never name our homes.

3. For too many of us, our homes give us little pleasure. Perhaps we are lonely there. Or perhaps the people whom we live with there hurt us over and over again, even as we hurt them. Or perhaps our homes are the generators of financial worry, or of continual headaches of practical inconvenience. In any case, why would we affectionately name the generators of pain? Better to forget about them whenever we can. 

4. Often because of our own modern inability to connect with the immediate and the real, when we are at home we are not really at home at all, but are doing our level best to project ourselves outside of our homes, beyond them, say into cyberspace or into televised landscapes or cities. Again, why would we bother naming a place which we do not truly inhabit?

5. As with old light bulbs and obsolete computers and used automobiles, so with our homes; our ambitions lie in the direction of improvement, and improvement equals replacement equals moving on.  "I don't intend to stay here," says the ambitious heart, "I intend to upgrade." But if the point of life is to achieve as many upgrades as possible, it would seem foolish to expend much affection on what we wish to leave as quickly as possible behind.  Avoid names, avoid affection, avoid all the gravity involved with both. Avoid getting stuck. 


These are just a few possibilities, but I think they are important ones to consider. 

Just to make it clear: I think that naming our homes would be a good idea. It would make them more dear to us, and the world is short on affection. Why should we leave naming our houses to the folks on historical dramas on TV? Aren't our own homes sweet enough? Important enough? Couldn't we at least, by naming them, begin to make them so? 

As for our homes not being big and important enough to be named, certainly the English of past eras had no problem with naming their cottages, so let's leave off thinking of the practice as too pretentious, and meant for big estates and such. In any case, if we really feared coming off as pretentious, well in the first place, the names we chose for our habitations could be as natural as we wanted to make them, and in the second place, there's no reason to make the names of our homes public knowledge...

...though I for one will go out on a limb and say that my family's home here in Valparaiso is named Sunnyside, for all the windows it features, and for the cheerful, nutritive sense of eggs done sunny-side up which we feel that living here injects into our lives. To me Sunnyside also signifies that visitors can come and enjoy warm hospitality, and take away with them a memory of the same. 

I hope that these words too contain something in them of the sun.

HB

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