'This is My House!': A Thought on Having, Habit and Habitat

'This is My House!': A Thought on Having, Habit and Habitat

The House That Made Me: Boy George, Channel 4

9pm, Thursday 9 December 2010.

In this television series, the production company return to the house or flat in which a celebrity lived as a child and re-create certain rooms by using photographs and the recollections of members of the celebrity’s family. For George O’Dowd (Boy George) they recreated a green-hued, shockingly wallpapered 1970s front room in a council-owned semi in Eltham. They could have got him to look through photographs, but the aim was something more Proustian. The programme’s format seemed to tacitly acknowledge that are formed of experiences that are received from all our senses – from the feel of objects, from the acoustics of rooms, from background noise. It was as if, to steal a line from Gore Vidal, they had set O’Dowd knee-deep in madeleines awash with tea. The moment I found most interesting was O’Dowd’s recollection of his father’s habitual yell of rage: ‘This is my house!’, then his memory of shouting the same words at a boyfriend during an argument. A lightbulb flicked on: he realised the source of this response.

I use the word ‘habitual’ to describe his father’s words deliberately as there seem to be very few forks on the etymological road between ‘habit’ and ‘habitat’. I also write ‘seem’ deliberately as the OED, spoilsport literalist that it is, has ‘habit’ as the descendant of habēre, ‘to have, to be constituted, to be’ and habitat as from a separate root - habitāre, ‘to dwell’. The parallels between being and dwelling have been discussed by Martin Heidegger and I can’t get sidetracked into writing about that here. (Though I do think I can now claim the world record for the swiftest leap between Boy George and Martin Heidegger). I also don’t want to be too easily put off the ‘habit / habitat’ line of thought by etymology. My interest in this moment came from two ideas. The first is the fact that a place prompted O’Dowd to a realisation of the origin of his own behaviour. The second is the idea that a state of life (owning a house in which another lives) brings with it unexamined, inherited ideas and – importantly – that with these ideas come words (‘this is my house!’). Does what we have control what we say? This carries the unsettling suggestion that possessions can make us the unconscious, and therefore the unwilling, re-creators of previous times, and even of other people. What is 'habit' but an action that does not require the pressure of will? A habit is not a million miles from being a form of automatism. What we own may shape our words and therefore our lives in ways we rarely consider: what we own may perform us. Elizabeth Bowen had something similar in mind when she wrote of ‘living under the compulsion of the furniture’.