The Bright Cave Under the Hat

A man in a park in Phoenix showed me how to make a home out of cardboard boxes. Not a home, exactly, but something like a backyard playhouse built by an ingenious child. The cardboard boxes interlocked, and the shelter, secret and cozy, kept out the cold of the Arizona night. The man, named Ernest, had once been an engineer at the Boeing Co.

Ernest, I came to understand, was a sort of brilliant grown-up orphan: he had an air that was both distinguished and tattered. Something in his mind had broken years before. He survived on technique. Ernest taught me how to forage for an all-American diet: wait politely behind a fast-food place at closing time and accept the unsold hamburgers and fries. A third problem, keeping clean, was difficult but manageable: a cold-water spigot in the morning sun.

It is not always the physical part of homelessness that is hard: home and homelessness are also ideas, emotions, metaphysical states. Home is all the civilization that a child knows. Home is one of nature's primal forms, and if it does not take shape properly around the child, then his mind will be at least a little homeless all its life.

A child is a precise metaphysician. He (or she) writes down name, house number, street, town, state, ZIP code, country . . . and then, to be exact, "Planet Earth, the Solar System, the Galaxy, the Universe." Creation is an onion with many skins, all layering outward from the child's self. If he gets lost in the galaxy, he can find the way back, can fly through the concentric circles to his own house -- from outermost remoteness to innermost home. Nostalgia means the nostos algos, the agony to return home. What got broken long ago in Ernest was his charts and instruments for the journey.

The ideal of home has been grossly sentimentalized from time to time, of course, just as mothers and small towns have been. Both can be suffocating, like an interminable Sunday in an airless house. Home is a place to run away from when the time comes.

But people want to run back sometimes as well. Home is both magnetic poles, the start and the finish. T.S. Eliot wrote, "We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time."

People tend to run back at this time of year. If war and recession come banging on the door, as they are doing now, the spirit feels unquiet, dislodged. The news carries with it threats of eviction and violence.

The young Americans wait for their presents in the desert. They come addressed to Operation Desert Shield, APO New York, 09848-0006. They are parcels of home shipped into a zone that is nearly as alien and inhospitable as space -- temperatures unnatural, planet sand-colored to the horizon, days blinding, nights full of stars. Home, built around the cave and fire pit, belongs to a more Teutonic, cold-weather scheme of things.

A Connecticut man has been convicted of murder. The man argues in his defense that the police made an illegal search of his "home" -- the cardboard boxes he used as a chest of drawers as he sheltered beneath a highway overpass -- in order to get their evidence. Does the Fourth Amendment protect cardboard boxes? What is the legal definition of home? What confers the sanctity of home? A lease or a deed? Four walls? How thick or thin? Must home have doors and locks?

The womb is the first home. Thereafter, home is the soil you come from and recognize, what you knew before uprooted: creatures carry an imprint of home, a stamp -- the infinitely subtle distinctiveness of temperature and smell and weather and noises and people, the intonations of the familiar. Each home is an unrepeatable configuration; it has personality, its own emanation, its spirit of place. Nature's refugees, like eels and cranes, are neither neurotic nor political, and so steer by a functional homing instinct. Human beings invented national boundaries and the miseries of exile; they have messier, more tragic forms of navigation that often get them lost. The earth is home, and all its refugees, its homeless, sometimes seem a sort of advance guard of apocalypse. They represent a principle of disintegration -- the fate of homelessness generalized to a planetary scale.

In later years a person sometimes visits his childhood home and circles it with a sort of alienated wonder. Someone else's lights are burning inside upon someone else's Christmas tree, and the child that once lived there is now a stranger in the skin of a middle-aged man. It seems a sort of obscure outrage that the windows and doors are not all open at once, telling stories. The home, like the mind, is a time capsule. Where are the stories and jokes of the house? Its old animation has become a ghost and gone into memory. The house is someone else's now.

Love is home. But home may be a horror also, a cage with wild animals in it. Home is aligned on the side of life, and so the perversion of it (by incest, for example; by violence; by betrayal) is a filthy business, and sometimes evil.

The myth of Eden records the first trauma of homelessness. Home, after that expulsion, is what we make, what we build. We build our own home again, endlessly, in memory of Eden, or hope of it. Past or future. The present is never contented, perfection is hypothetical, and home is always incomplete.

The flesh is home: African nomads without houses decorate their faces and bodies instead. The skull is home. We fly in and out of it on mental errands. The highly developed spirit becomes a citizen of its own mobility, for home has been internalized and travels with the homeowner. Home, thus transformed, is freedom. Everywhere you hang your hat is home. Home is the bright cave under the hat.