6.08: Features

Archive | 6.08 - Aug 1998 | Features

Jet-Age Bedouins
By Pico Iyer

Home isn't what it used to be.

It's all over the place, in every sense, as more and more of us are. We live on planes, in fast-food courts and hotel lobbies. True to the spirit of the times, I haven't had a place of my own for almost a decade now; I simply shuttle back and forth between my mother's house on one side of the Pacific and my girlfriend's apartment on the other. The only piece of property I've ever owned is inward - in the friends and loyalties and values I carry around with me, as a snail transports his house or the Konjo people of Indonesia bear their shelters on stilts, centipede-like.

More and more of us, I think, are going tribal - either living in the crevices between cultures like jet-age Bedouins, in homes as mobile as our spirits, or hiding out in the corners of the world in flamboyant, idiosyncratic fancies that look like nothing on Earth (almost). The rock climber's portaledge, Philip Johnson's Glass House, the Coober Pedy underground dwellings all reflect the whimsy and rebellious energy of people determined to live on their own terms, or bounded by their own premises (as Thoreau once punned). Solar powered, underwater, camouflaged, scavenged - these habitats are not just places to live, but ways to live, in a world that's moving as much as we are.

Much of this tribalism arises from new technologies, which allow us to live more independently, reclaiming some of the freedom of nomads. Yet in an age of ever greater complexity, we hanker for simplicity - for something basic, portable, and indifferent to the conventional definition of home.

Then why do so many modern constructions echo the oldest dwellings, as if to imply that tomorrow can be a high tech form of yesterday? Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch provocateur, is designing a "Generic City" of the future, inspired, he acknowledges, by the simplicity of villages in Thailand, where shelters are furnished with nothing but bamboo, palm leaves, corrugated iron, and fluorescent tubes. Such "liteness" is essential, Koolhaas says, because it's "capable of dealing with anything bound to come along in the 21st century."

Whether rooted in such "global village" huts, or wandering the planet, Modern Tribal Man is colonizing his dreams with structures that are often as much the product of imagination as of brick. Consider Michael Jantzen's conceptual Southern California beach house of video screens, with TV panels projecting images of the world - or, at least, the Net - into a Malibu living room. Cyberspace has reinvented our sense of habitat by giving us a new dimension to inhabit; in doing so, it has made literal all our once science fictive notions of seeing the world without leaving the house, or dwelling in a custom-made community with no physical borders. The denizens of the new millennium are living, for good and ill, in the literal, tangible equivalent of cyberspace, in spaces as individual as our passwords, in homes as virtual as our workplaces. If Bill Gates can build a pharaonic mansion "made of silicon and software" - a Web site writ enormous, more or less - why can't we construct homes, and even lives, as private and unlegislated (as solipsistic, too, and removed from all coordinates) as our email addresses?

Wim Wenders set the conclusion of his millennial road movie Until the End of the World in an aboriginal cave somewhere in central Australia, in which people's dreams and memories could be projected onto screens; in Vineland and Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon describes people living above, below, and around the world we know, in parallel states of consciousness. The real world, Don DeLillo's recent magnum opus suggests, is the Underworld, that realm of blood and clan and secrets that exists right under our noses and beneath our undifferentiated labyrinths of Holiday Inns and Golden Arches.

Such visions reflect a future of alternate and individual worlds, in which the conformist impulses of old are eclipsed by communities of one. Not that we're living without traditions; we're simply living with fewer constraints and greater choices, building habitats and laying foundations in spirit as much as space.

Pico Iyer's most recent book, Tropical Classical:Essays from Several Directions, is out in paperback (Vintage Books).