Everybody's Coming to My House...
... and they're never gonna go back home. And I'm never gonna be alone. And oh, no. And thank goodness.
Hello there, welcome, welcome! Have a seat, make yourselves comfortable. Please, feel right at home.
Imagine me settling now the way a very old woman settles into an armchair,
slowly,
slowly —
that’s it. Now let me tell you a story.
I moved to Amsterdam mid-October 2024 with the intention of growing roots, something which I felt had to happen with some urgency. I could feel them pushing against the skin of my toes ready for soil, or else they were going to grow tragically into thin air like some forgotten potato in the lowest-right drawer — “What shame, what wasted potatotential”, I wrote in my notebook, “but really — where will I touch ground?”
I knew that I wanted it to be here, and so I am here now for that reason: because I want to be; no invitation. I am aware, too, that this goes not only for the city, but also for my endeavour to build a library of digital roots on Substack.
And so, I want to begin with ancient questions: How to be a guest? How to be a host?
Here’s a proposition: Everybody’s coming to your house, and they’re never gonna go back home, and you’re never gonna be alone.
I love this sentence, because it transports a complex double-emotion of dread and comfort. What do you do in that situation and what do you do next, forever?
It’s the chorus of David Byrne’s song Everybody’s Coming to my House and Byrne himself acknowledges how it takes on different meanings depending on the performance. It walks the tightrope between wanting to and not wanting to be alone, the dilemma of the (neurodivergent) artist to whom being with others is as much necessity as it remains unreachable mystery. And yet he has built a house out of his work and everyone is coming, and everyone is staying. In doing so he has lifted his isolation and made his solitude impossible.
Four years ago, during long months of Covid lockdown at my parents’ house, I turned twenty and decided to read a self-help book from their shelf, “tiny beautiful things” by Cheryl Strayed. I remember one sentence from it vividly, which went something like this: In your 20s, be twenty times more magnanimous than you ever thought possible. Magnanimity, “nobility of feeling and generosity of mind”. I got stuck on generosity. For example: Is it not the case that whether or not everybody comes to my house depends on how welcoming I make my house, which depends, in part, on whom I share my house with, which depends, a lot, on what kind of house I can afford?
Take oikos, ancient Greek for “the family & the family’s house”, from which grew ecology and economy both. Twenty times as magnanimous, in this economy?, I am tempted to joke — and there we have, perhaps, the push to the right of the metaphorical house which is the state and various continents plus my inability to host dinner parties coupled, with a helpless shrug, to the housing crisis.
But in this ecology? Oh, excuses, excuses all! There is a quote from philosopher Timothy Morton which I wrote down on a piece of paper and stuck to my wall: “You are a fully ecological being who has never been separated from other ecological beings both inside and outside your body, not for one second.”1
In other words, you are always already twenty times more magnanimous than you thought possible, in the house that is your body! It is an odd comfort, being part of a biosphere, it’s gezellig, in theory. But oh, how to live it, lichen-like? How do I form with the spiders in my room and the bacteria in my gut the sort of kin that might ease my loneliness on a rainy Sunday evening? Is it possible? Is it necessary? (Stay tuned to find out, let me know if you know…)
In the house that is the city, we are similarly stuck with one another. We share a densely populated, limited space with as many as ten thousand other species in Amsterdam alone: pigeons, of course, and mice and rats, but also parakeets, storks, squirrels, worms, herons, coots, cats, bees, elephants, crabs — those we hold captive and those we deem invasive, all going on together already.
Countless nonhuman guests, aided by human infrastructures, have “gone feral”, using Anna Tsing et al.’s redefinition2: they have adapted to subvert these structures for their own purposes, oblivious of human intent or ethics, and again, how to be a guest; how to be a host? How does life share space? Right here?
The city turns 750 and these are not just my twenties but also those of our century. In many ways, the houses that are the world and the city and our bodies are twenty times twenty times twenty times more magnanimous — as in greatly alive — than rational minds in this corner of the globe have allowed themselves to think possible, and they have been all this time.
“We do not know what hospitality is. Not yet. Not yet, but will we ever know?”, asked Jaques Derrida, trying to extend hospitality to the more-than-human.3 We know at least this much: they’re never gonna go back home, and we’re never gonna be alone —
and oh, no. And thank goodness. And welcome. Welcome! I’m so glad to be furnishing this library of confusions out loud from now on.
Timothy Morton, Being Ecological, p. 156.
See Tsing et al., Feral Atlas.
I love your blog!