Colin Ellard - You Are Here

A distant glimpse of home

I'm back from England and the first leg of my home pilgrimage.  In fact I've been back for some time now.  To say that I'm still digesting would be a bit of an understatement.  I have photographs, notes, and diagrams that I'm still putting together into....something.....but mostly a lot of churning recollections that come into focus fleetingly and then they're gone again.  The good news is that I was able to visit both of my first two homes, meet the wonderful people who live in them now, and through their incredible generosity wander freely through the rooms where I first opened my eyes, took my first steps and, according to one unverified report from a family member, where I peed on the floor a few times as well.

One of the biggest happy surprises of the adventure was the discovery that one of these two homes is still owned by the people who purchased the house from my parents almost 50 years ago.  They told me that when they came to look at the house, they saw me playing footie in the back garden.  It was a bizarre sensation to see myself, as I'd been such a long time ago, innocent short-pants barely-in-school Colin, kicking a ball around on the grass.  I expected my habitation of those old spaces to trigger thoughts and memories -- and it did -- but I hadn't anticipated a distant, tiny image of me as a little boy, in someone else's memory, to unleash such a cascade of feelings.

I'll have more to say soon but I can't rush this.  I want to savour it.

Housing the psyche

In a week's time, I'll be in Britain at the beginning of my pilgrimage into my past, visiting the first two places that meant home to me.  I haven't heard back from the current owners of either of the homes, so I don't yet know whether I'll be seeing things from the inside or simply standing on the sidewalk and peering through the front garden like a deranged prowler.  For an adventure that I've had years to plan, things seem to have come together unexpectedly quickly and now I'm scrambling with train schedules and hotel bookings, trying to make sure I've got everything right.  I'm a little nervous about this.

It's an odd thing, but I've been thinking a great deal about a man I "met" on a call-in radio show a couple of years ago.  He told me that he'd made an impulsive decision to purchase a house that he'd been inexplicably drawn to after a brief viewing.  After moving in, he found himself haunted by negative feelings about the house and he was struggling to find some way to redesign it.  What he'd realized was that the house was very much like the one that he'd grown up inside, and that his childhood had not been a happy one.  It seemed as though he had placed himself back into the space of an unhappy period of his own past without even being aware of it, as if to give himself a second chance to make things right.

I wonder how things went for him.  I wonder if his attempts to open walls and build new doorways in his home built new cartographies for his soul.  

I wonder if anything like that will happen to me.

A shot in the dark

Yesterday i sent letters (and freebies!) to two addresses in England.  One was the house in which I was born and the other was the house that I left at the tender age of 7 to vault across the ocean to Canada.  Well, ok, the vault was in one of those venerable old Boeing 707s so I suppose it was more of an amble but a bit faster than a sailing ship.  I tried to imagine how it might feel to get a letter from a complete stranger asking to come take a peek at your house and ask you a few questions.  If it was me I think I'd be intrigued and quite keen, but I can imagine that things might not go as well as I'm hoping.  Time will tell.  

It's a little daunting to realize that this entire quest to visit every place I've called home will consist of 24 different houses and apartments on 3 continents.  It's going to take a little time.  Some of these homes were chosen out of pure expediency - there were times when I was such an unattractive tenant --massive untrained dog and ragtag kids in hand -- that I had no choice but to leap at the first landlord foolish enough to let me unload my stuff inside their real estate investments.  Others,like my current home, seem to have been tailor-made for me and have felt like home from the moment that I first walked into them.  I suspect my friends are more tired of hearing the story than I am of telling it that I made the decision to buy this place within five minutes of walking in the front door and I had signed a terrifying firm offer within an hour.  But that's the end of this story.  I'm still not even at the beginning.

The beginning of everything

In about three weeks, I'm going to fly back to the beginning of everything.  Or at least the beginning of my everything.  I'm going home.  

One of the things that I'm most interested in is the interaction between  home and psyche.  I've tried to understand this link in a number of different ways:  I've conducted impromptu interviews with friends, family and strangers on the meaning of home.  I've designed elaborate virtual reality simulations of homes that people can walk through while wearing a suite of instruments that measure their physiological state.  I've talked to architects, designers, stagers, planners about what home means, and I've sat on committees where we've turned questions about home upside-down and sideways.

Now it's time to get a little more personal.  I suppose, in a way, you'd call this a pilgrimage.  In fact, I'm certain that that's what it is.  But in my case, I'm not going to walk the Camino.  I'm going to retrace my own path across the planet from the day that I was born up to the present.  I'm going to re-visit every place that I've ever called home.

The journey begins in early April when I'll find myself on the doorstep of an ordinary looking house in Stevenage where, about a half-century ago, I was born.  I don't know yet whether I'll be able to go inside the house, but that's my fondest hope and the truest beginning I can think of for a project such as this one.

Right now, for me, the idea of standing in the room where I came into being seems too staggeringly huge to even contemplate.  I think there are many reasons for this, and my own special professional interest in home is only a part of the story.  I'm also an immigrant and, like all who migrate from their homeland to some other domain, the very idea of "home" becomes something great and unknowable -- a mythical land to which there is no easy return.  Until I began to think about this project, the very idea that I was "from" somewhere seemed academic and sterile.  Intellectually, I knew it was true, but emotionally, I felt nothing.  Will all of that change when I see the room where the me-egg hatched?

The year behind me

It's pretty typical that I'm writing my final post of 2011 in the early days of 2012 -- that's the kind of year it was - full speed frantic activity with lots of change on both professional and personal fronts and somehow, as always seems to be the case, the two realms were intertwined.

A big piece of my professional life in 2011 was my participation in the BMW-Guggenheim Laboratory in New York City.  The Laboratory opened in August and my now fuzzy recollection was that I was invited on board in about June.  So the second half of my year was really a frenzy of nail-biting, planning, coding, and flying back and forth between mission control and the test sites we used for the experiment.  I had intended to write a series of blog posts outlining what we did for the Laboratory, but I've ended up spending so much time analyzing data (and catching up on all the stuff that got put aside when I dropped everything to take advantage of this great opportunity) that I've barely had a moment to take a breath.

So what was it all about?  I still plan to give a decent accounting of myself here at some point soon, but the short version is that I had an opportunity to design and execute an experiment in urban environmental psychology using some pretty cool mobile gear for measuring people's minds and bodies as they sauntered from place to place in New York's Lower East Side.  It was really one of my first forays out of the world of the virtual into the world of the real.  It was tough!  Collision-detection in the real world is pretty graphic and some bruising may occur.  But I think we managed to put together some tantalizing early findings -- enough for us to begin planning the next round, which I'll also eventually discuss here.

On the personal front, one of the most interesting things to happen to me was that I found myself buying and moving into a new house.  I've spent such a lot of time ruminating about how the house purchase decision takes place and how the homes we live in influence our psychology, that it's been fascinating to self-observe during that process.  As with anything, when the distance between one's data points and one's own awareness is very small -- in this case essentially zero -- any kind of objectivity is impossible.  But this doesn't mean that the process of observing is meaningless.  Indeed I've learned a lot about domestic spaces through the process of adjusting to a new and very interesting living space.  In future months I'll write about some of those adventures as well.

There's much more I could tell, but the year ahead promises to be just as busy as the year just past, and I've got to get going.

More soon.

Pilgrimage by wire

I haven't said very much about it here yet because we're saving all of our heavy ammo for an article that is in the works, but I made a new friend in the summer who has turned me on to the idea of pilgrimage.  When we first met online and via telephone, I had a very particular idea about what a pilgrimage might be and mostly it involved images of the Catholic church, bleeding feet, and lots and lots of crucifixes along the way.  Having now gone on a mini-pilgrimage with my friends Nicole and Keith, my mind has been broadened quite considerably, but I can't talk about all of that today.  Not ready for showing, as they say.

Today, just a little thing.  Here's one of those funny stories about people relying on their GPS and becoming lost.  In this case, pilgrims looking for Lourdes are ending up a few miles off course in the tiny hamlet of Lourde where, according to this little article, there's not much to see or do.  We're all getting a little tired of these stories, no?  But in this case, there was a pilgrimage connection, and so I sent the tale off to Nicole.  Her comment was characteristic.  Part of what seems to happen on a pilgrimage is that nothing goes according to plan.  All roads lead somewhere.  If you are aiming for Lourdes and you end up in Lourde then that means something, and it's up to you to figure out what that something might be.  Or not figure it out, as the case may be.  

When these kinds of stories are posted, whether they are about pilgrims or hapless tourists getting lost, I always wonder what they found.  Who spoke to the pilgrims in Lourde and asked them what happened there?  When we travel with an intention, whatever that intention might have been, and we find ourselves blown off course by technology, we find something we didn't expect to find, and it becomes a part of our story.  How we shape that new story to our intentions is in part up to us and in part in the hands of the universe.  I want to know about the pilgrimage to Lourde.  Who speaks for the lost?

Brief check-in from Cambodia

I've much to tell about the most recent phase of my worldwide quest for happy and interesting spaces.  I've spent the last two days exploring the sacred spaces of thousand year old Buddhist temples in Angkor, near Siem Reap.  My setup here is rather crude, though, so I'll save the pictures and maps for my return to Singapore.  Not only could I not afford to post any images from this hotel computer, but I'm not sure I could muster the concentration for the process, for I have just discovered a fundamental truth of travel:  there may be nothing louder in the world than a cavernous hotel lobby filled with a busload of effusive Korean tourists who have just discovered the joys of those gigantic bottles of Angkor beer. Only one thing for it.  I'm going to join them.  GPS logger is now turning off.

Important mixology research

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Flying away eve

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Where I am now

To travel along with me and participate in my geo-adventure, follow my tweets at this link (also in the sidebar).  We'll see what we can find out about life in ultra-high density and perhaps have some cyber-scavenger hunt fun along the way.