I wrote this post on contemplation of visiting Dennis Severs House
‘Atmosphere mainly arrests the visitor, and rarely the resident whose burrow it is’ they too cloudily attatched by the energys and experiences that have created the complex and often weighty interconnections that flow through our personal environs, mainly the visitor can see for real what is there, sometimes the resident on returning after a long while away, our personal environs will slap us cleanly in the atmospheric eye, and we see them a little more clearly than usual, but too soon the tendrils of our energys, emotions, investments interface and are painted as one back into them, and as such we re-embrace the cocoon, spun of spent energy we make for ourselves, and at such close proximity to ourselves we lose focus enough to see what our personal environs really are.
Sadly smell often has deeper interconnections to home within the brain than most other things and we have de-scented modern environments or quite copiously placed such artificial and non functional scents into them that there is little connection. And sadder also that scale and proportion of what we call home is now so often subdivided and diminished and at such great expense that there is little character to be found in the modern world, there is little passionate display and mainly a cold passivity. And also such the poverty of those that must rent, that little investment can they make in places, because the core sense in the property no matter how pleasant is founded on the belief that it might have to be left at a short notice at some undisclosed time in the future. All these factors contribute to deplete our environment of the rich significance it should attain throughout our lives and diminish its foundational role within our psyche, Some of the arduos roads of great worth in life can be borne with the psychological cushion, of a home to back them up if all goes wrong.
And the times when one enters a functioning home that has rhythms and seasons are memorable and few. Mainly because their curators were housewives, and this was mainly possible when an individual mans wage was sufficient to support a family and home, now we live in times when two wages are barely enough, The war bringing women into the workplace and the 60’s feminism that followed ultimately led women into corporate hands with no financial possibility to return to the home, So the curator and creator of the home is lost, and with this collapses the entire concept, and we are poorer as a society for it. Being in the way of the worship of work and money, as such must be enslaved to its attainment, when will people realise that money is only valuable in its disparity, In the sense that if we all strive for more money as a populace and attain it, we will all relatively have the same increase and the value of the extra money attained will be pointless. And in the process we will have lost much to attain the little extra, usually the subtle things that are of real measure to the soul that become valueless in society because they cannot be measured against that yardstick of all, money.
