top of page

Andreas Gursky

NO WAY HOME PIC.heic

14 October 2024

No Way Home

ALEX RALSTON

Student-living is characterised by the advent of two occasions: moving into a new flat, and moving out of an old one.

 

Whether it be moving back from a non-university residence into a familiar semester-time abode or the decoration of a new living-space, the rhythm of university life is kept together by the cycles of home-making. A few months ago, my flatmates and I moved out of our final student flat. This, of course, wasn’t the first time I’d had to endure the relatively arduous moving-out process. But in scrubbing every imaginable and unimaginable corner of our flat, hastily trying to erase the evidence of long-gone parties and the smoking of thousands of cigarettes, there seemed something quite brutal about the finality of the last few days of cleaning. This place and the home that it represented to us were to be separated and sanitised of each other. The final cycle of our student-living was coming to a close, and our last days in this city weren’t spent visiting friends or going to favoured haunts, but providing free labour to our letting agents under threat of financial penalty, toiling to destroy any trace of ourselves lingering in this place in which we’d spent a year of our lives. As we set about dissolving our home back into the financialised asset of some faceless rentier, our last physical tie to the city was being slowly severed.

​

Looking over the corpse of our flat, half cleaned and half packed, the idea that this was once something more than a roof over our heads became increasingly distant. Scouring all traces of yourself, removing all evidence of your past, your own memories, from your soon-to-be former living space, done in the full knowledge that the letting agents are glancing at your deposits with hungry eyes - the space ceases to seem like it ever could have felt like home. It was a temporary and explicitly conditional situation, any sentimentality furtively attached to it constantly undermined by every email from the letting agency, every reminder that this space was not yours to do with as you desired or imagined. And, with our friends leaving around the same time as us, the streets surrounding us suddenly felt alien too: they didn’t feel like they belonged to us anymore, and seemingly neither did we belong to them. This city, in which we had all in various ways grown up in, that meant so much to us, was finally becoming a feature of our past. Our futures seemed scarily opaque without the certainty of being anchored and immersed within the city’s ecosystem. All that was left for the present was to continue the process of erasing our home from this flat; all that was left of the past was being packed erratically into suitcases that might not begin to be properly unpacked for weeks. 

​

The striking thing in moving back to where my parents live was how much it didn’t feel like home. The functionality of it. The lingering feeling that this is just a place to sleep, and the fear that my real home was the one we’d just taken apart, in the city which suddenly seemed intangibly unfamiliar. All that seemed to come out of packing up our flat was a sadness encouraged by a new pervasive sense of rootlessness, of feeling adrift in both the places I previously would call home. That near-perfectly meaningless live-laugh-love-adjacent maxim “there’s no place like home!” started to take an almost stupidly literal meaning. After four years of feeling such a wonderful, palpable relation to place, suddenly it felt like there was no space anywhere that a sense of home could be found in or attached to. 

​

And yet, in spending time with friends all over throughout the summer, that feeling slowly returned. If anything I felt it more strongly precisely because there was no place to attach it to. Home is so much more than just a physical space made personally familiar and resonant over time. Home is temporal, not spatial. It’s a personalised time article, a yearning for a period. Some immediate yet impossibly originary place where the distant past and the near present coexist. Chronologically separate periods are memorialised as coalescing fluidly together in ways they never did and never could outside of the feeling of memory, structured by a yearning unbound by any linearity. Our visions of home – warmth, comfort, safety, happiness – thus appear to be dissonant. In our minds, anachronistic images and objects sit cosily together, the dissonance of their conjoint situation only becoming apparent through contact with the linear straight time of what passes for reality in capitalist modernity. The memory of home, its light and colours, its people and feel, exists within our own personal time – a time not made sense of through chronology, but instead one created by and adhering to our personal structures of feeling, unbound by the rigour of events and statistics. 

​

Every new living space becomes a new site in which our dreams can inhabit. Posters go on the walls, photos of friends and beautiful, evocative things, alongside rugs, records, mugs, bottles, books, notes, blankets. These objects create the studio in which home can be conjured, enacted in a new context with different faces and challenges characterising its experience within the drudgery of the dreary day-to-day. But home is free of drudgery! It’s free of drear, of boredom and misery. Instead, it is the repository of the good – the memories of fun nights and great days that act as a redoubt in which to retreat when misery gnaws away at us. What I’m mourning, then, is not the loss of home – our flat was merely a place in which home could be felt. Instead, it is the end of the ecosystem of our worlds as we knew it, the psycho-geography of our time as students for this past year. Our other friends are moving too and the maps that we have accumulated in our heads – this friend on that street, the library fifteen minutes away, a reasonably priced and reasonably tasting coffee place down the road; ‘God, I once went to a really shit pres at that flat up on the right a few years ago’ – cease to exist in the day-to-day. That ecosystem seems to be wiped away like the dust off our skirting boards. There is no end of an era – the era has simply gone. 

​

We can no longer utilise the city as a resident can. We can’t be part of it, exist amongst and within it. Instead, we can only imagine or affect participation, replaying our own utilisation and inhabitation of the space, fruitlessly trying to translate ourselves back to. The real sadness is our loss of utility, the freedom of our inhabiting a place in such a way that can only be done during your early youth. I suppose, what I am describing is culture. And with the loss of our final flat, which has been stripped bare and catapulted once more into the piled wreckage of The Edinburgh Housing Market, our place within this city’s immediate culture seems to have disappeared with it. 

​

The city becomes part of our home of memory. Ultimately, home (whatever that represents) was when we were happy. We are our memories, and our memories influence us totally and constantly. The forced physical evisceration of the evidence of place, the removal of the signs that this space once was the site of our home’s enactment and conjuration, feels almost like the digging of your own grave. But the memory lingers and persists. Home gains a new face, a new incarnation for us to return to, to translate, to utilise. 

​

Landlords can’t rent our own souls to us; letting agents can’t charge extra for experiencing their rented space through more than the singular lens of functionality. They can’t ask us to scrub the insides of our heads along with the detritus from our bedside drawers. No amount of letting agent-enforced self-gravedigging can remove us totally from this city. We’re written into this city as much as the city is written into us. The physical detritus of our time here may be all but eradicated, but our trace still lingers indefinitely.

​

"Trio", by the late Glaswegian poet Edwin Morgan, tells the story of the briefest of chance encounters, where Morgan, weary and alienated on a cold winter’s evening on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street, witnesses the passing through of three young people, bearing a baby, a guitar, and a dog wrapped in a tartan coat. In the course of the poem, Morgan’s isolation and dejected exhaustion melt away through the vicarious experience of the collective joy of the three passers-by, their “laughter ringing round them like a guard”. The sheer vibrancy of this tiny glimpse of collective euphoria and wonder dispels alienation, the memory of which acts like a barricade against Morgan’s isolation and melancholy. Morgan’s sense of home suddenly bursts through the page, vividly conjured through the ecstasy he communicates in this embrace of the collectivity enjoyed by others. In observing their sense of place, their home, Morgan’s “monsters of the year” – anxiety, alienation, drudgery – “go blank, are scattered back” through basking however briefly in the collective and interpersonal love shared amongst others. 

​

In Morgan’s case, this vicarious joy becomes part of his memory of Glasgow, his sense of place. Morgan wrote throughout his life about Glasgow, constantly evoking the weight of the emotionality that dripped from its soot-stained tenements. Our senses of collective joy, those that become our memories of place and home, have been witnessed by others, have been woven into the city. We, like Morgan, will be able to have these senses invigorated through the vicarious experience of the joys of others. Our homes, in this sense, are all around us – in every person, on every street, waiting to be conjured by the briefest of glances on a busy street or an afternoon that stretches into a long evening with a close friend that now lives far away. 

​

This is just a cycle: we aren’t the first students to go through this process of home-conjuring and space collapsing, and inevitably it’ll continue long after our temporary ecosystems have ceased to have any bearing on the reality of the city. We are becoming part of a great mass of before-consciousnesses that is liberally, if imperceptibly, daubed on the walls and streets of the entire city. The imprint of us left upon the space we inhabited, our psycho-geographies, collapses into a web of intimacies between us and our friends. Individually, we become our own sites of collectivity, the repository of these memories of our home(s) that continue to exist in the present through the love shared amongst us and our friends. 

The city of our student years was a constellation of homes stretched out into a live map of collective love. That space’s collapse deposits these collective joys into the realm of memory. But a residence in memory is not a confinement – our memories aren’t simply a place into which things that-once-were are placed. Our memories anticipate our future, react to our present, re-imbue themselves with our adjusted day-to-day spirits. The city, our city, may no longer be the same inhabited geography to us. But its generation of our collective joys that shape our senses of place, of home, will long outlast the tenancies of all those who come after us. 

  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • TikTok
  • LinkedIn

SEND US YOUR STUFF: 
thesleazemagazine@gmail.com

bottom of page