Boats, Home and the 'In-Between'
Making a few notes this morning regarding life themes and what I term 'psychogeographical symbols' (i.e. Symbols personal to my own psychology). Boats came up, of course, and I began annotating the heading - refuge, liminal, transitory etc. This brought up the idea of the state of moving as liminal - between places and times. It's impossible to travel in space without also travelling in time, albeit one-way. I enjoy (conditions permitting) the moment of travel, the experience of the act of being in motion, transitory between locations. There is, for me, a feeling of interdimensionality, of being stood apart, suspended between the temporal and the spatial.
I often imagine being able to step away from the everyday world, out of reality, into another, very personal, dimension which, in my imagination, is a small, darkened space accessable only by me and apart from the world of everyday reality. There is nothing particularly remarkable within this space, nothing exciting about it. I tend to imagine it as being like a small box-room, or den, standing outside of time and space - a Dr Who's Tardis which never actually materialises but is always available to me. When I travel, by train or bus, the experience is in some respects similar. Although I share the bus with others, if it's not too crowded and I manage to find a double seat by myself, the journey time allows me to indulge in the same sense of 'apartness', of refuge in liminality.
'Home' is a concept which our society tends to present, and even impose, as a fixed location. Itinerant boat people, by virtue of their constant travel, have difficulty with addresses. Technically, many of us are of 'no fixed abode', which is also odd, because we return to the same home every night, though not necessarily to the same place!
Perhaps living in a boat suits me for this reason. It is undoubtedly a refuge, in a way that bricks and mortar are not. My 'nomadic' life renders me apart from the everyday world and is, for the most part, a refuge from it. I feel relaxed and happy when I'm moving a boat and, although traveling by the Waterways is often inescapably a social experience, there is also, paradoxically, that same feeling of temporal and spatial 'apartness'.
So it occurs to me that my 'home', my place of security and comfort, my centre, is a place of motion, of change, a place between places and times and states. Perhaps I have brought my imaginary refuge into the real. I've made a home for myself in the 'between', in the liminal, in the water-filled cracks that run through the concrete and steel behemoth that (we are told) is 'reality'.
