Psycho-Babble Writing Thread 376625

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Home is where the hell is

Posted by Jai Narayan on August 11, 2004, at 21:14:14

Home
Home is where the hell is
Home is where the police come to take mother away
Home is where we yell, scream and break glass against the garage wall
Home is where mom stands over me on Saturday morning and demands that I do the vacuuming while I am dying to watch cartoons instead
Home is where we learned to kill ourselves each one of the five girls using different methods
Home is where dad deafened as mom chatted animatedly to her voices
Home is scary
Home has ghosts that live in the attic
Home is where the lights turn on and off by themselves, boxes float and hit us, an invisible man comes in off the front porch on a summer night and makes the hot humid room go icy
Home is where the fear lives
Jai Narayan

 

Re: Home is where the hell is

Posted by malthus on August 11, 2004, at 23:17:20

In reply to Home is where the hell is, posted by Jai Narayan on August 11, 2004, at 21:14:14

"Home is where the lights turn on and off by themselves, boxes float and hit us, an invisible man comes in off the front porch on a summer night and makes the hot humid room go icy"

The lines have a nightmarish, Luis Bunuel quality that you've portrayed so well. Reminds me of his movie: El Angel Exterminador.

 

wow I don't know that movie

Posted by Jai Narayan on August 12, 2004, at 7:48:31

In reply to Re: Home is where the hell is, posted by malthus on August 11, 2004, at 23:17:20

Well that is a real story from my life and the family house. My family owned that house from 1948 till 1999.
My parents are dead and a new family lives there. It's a beautiful house in the historical area of my home town.
When my parents were declining in health and getting quite old. My dad wanted to move into an assisted living building. My mother declared she would kill herself rather than leave the house. It was like a second skin for her. It was her. Her comment slowed down the process of moving by years. But the house was much too large for two older people to continue to live in safely.
I was always afraid of the house. That never went away no matter how old I became.
That's why the book by Shirley Jackson was so important to me, "The Haunting of Hill House". I could relate.

The movie you mentioned might be too scary for me.

 

Re: Home is where the hell is » Jai Narayan

Posted by Atticus on August 12, 2004, at 8:40:05

In reply to Home is where the hell is, posted by Jai Narayan on August 11, 2004, at 21:14:14

What a powerful, intense, compact piece of writing. The almost suffocating sense of dread and pain -- intangible yet thick as taffy -- comes across so well. I've always wondered if homes absorb psychic vibrations -- good and bad -- into their walls and wood and brick and stone as if they were sponges, then periodically release them as either benign or malevolent presences in response to triggers set in motion by the living, like the man who makes the humid room go chilly in your piece. Sounds a little like how I conceptualize mental illness, come to think of it; the really deep depression comes when that dreadful apparition manifests and steps across the threshold from the porch into the entrance hall and makes himself felt. Atticus


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