Home Soul: The collective consciousness and a Philippe Stark chair
Turn on your TV and flip through the channels. Count the number of shows you run across that are related to designing and decorating a dream home. Shows like Trading Spaces, Design on a Dime, and reruns of This Old House flourish in a never ending parade beaconing us to consider ourselves in terms of how we live, what symbols reflect us and who we want to become. Ever wondered what this fascination with homes says about us?
These shows and the resultant proliferation of artfully designed home goods seem at first to be another crack at wonton materialism. On closer inspection, there may be another construct that has been emerging and making its way into public view. Peel back the façade and perhaps the shows are actually echoing a soundless chorus of desire to find our symbolic center and nestle securely within in it, wrapped snuggly in a Ralph Lauren paisley wool throw. Maybe this rapidly growing interest in all things ‘home’ is a modern evolutionary Jungian method of raising our collective consciousness via a familiar visual and consumer driven pathway to meet that of our collective soul.
Even if the word ‘soul’ is never uttered in relationship to the home products, this may be the very aspect of self that responds to the message these shows stimulate and send to our consciousness. The message is then processed as an urge to purge, purchase, or otherwise participate in a change to the way we live. It is the pursuit of a Shabby Chic treasure, procurement of a piece of Chihouly glass or selection of a Philippe Stark chair that may stir more than the mind. These items become symbolic representations so deeply imbued with meaning that their very presence and position in the home can be a powerful entity adding to or subtracting from the actual feel and energy of a home. This ‘think and so it is’ perspective is fundamental to various philosophies like that of Descartes and Ernest Holmes. This thought concept is also an aspect to the artful practice of Feng Shui and other emerging interior design work.
Every year magazines like Real Simple, Cottage Living and Domino emerge to reflect our increasing obsession to know what to buy for our homes or which kind of home to live in to be able to create a bit-o-nirvana right there on the block. It is becoming increasingly more difficult to sum up this growing cultural interest as ‘keeping up with the Joneses’. It is entirely possible that it was never really ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ even for those who were trying to do so. Maybe something more imperative was at work all the time. Perhaps it is awareness of our surroundings and their interplay with our very essence that has grown en masse. It is a more careful armchair psycho-spiritual anthropologist that takes note of the ramping up of these home related themes in our mass consciousness.
In consideration, if you are following along with this line of thought, the next time you are moved to make a purchase, be it a Thomas Pheasant sofa or new Poggenpohl kitchen, take a moment to do a quick scan of your psyche. Ask yourself what desire it fulfils, wonder aloud what you think it will say about you and imagine the actual life it will take on in your home. Consider if the selection is food for the soul or a temporary fix. Determine if it is a true reflection of who you are or if it will, in a large or small way, support you to be called you to your highest self. Perhaps Edgar Guest, in his 1916 poem, “Home” was on to something when he wrote that “it ain’t home t’ye, though it be the palace of a king, until somehow yer soul is sort o’wrapped ‘round everything.”
