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In November, the Animal Collective were supposed to open for the Black Dice at Lee's Palace. Instead, the Black Dice cancelled a week or two before the show and the Animal Collective headlined. I went right up against the stage that night, which I normally never do because it makes me feel conspicuous. Avey Tare stood inoffensively to my left, shoulders hunched just enough to exude an air of modesty and politeness. Geologist crouched on the floor to my right with his electronic toys, wearing a hat with a light on the front, just like the one I wore when I was crawling through damp caves and crevasses somewhere in central Ontario. Deakin stood beyond him. Panda Bear moved about in the back, banging on drums in naturally exaggerated gestures, the way the Chinese man dressed in ceremonial attire swings his arms in turn at the gong.

They looked down at their instruments, concentrating on their fingers and hands as if none of us were there, standing in front of them. They moved their hands and bodies without taking their eyes from their fingers, the ethereal sounds floating in the air around them as their only guide in moving their hands and bodies. The sounds blended together and then faded away into the darkness surrounding the stage, and the four figures were illuminated by colored spotlights.

At the foot of the stage, I stood with my hands crossed over my chest and I stood with my hands buried in my back pockets, and I watched them honing their wills on their fingers to produce those sounds. I imagined them sitting in a screened porch in rural Maryland, recording Campfire Songs on mini-disc players, with the same twinkles and murmurs and swells of sound surrounding their bodies as the twinkles and murmurs and swells of sound hanging in the air at that moment. Avey Tare leaned towards the microphone, emitting sounds that weren't words and words that were pure. Panda Bear drummed on his drums as I reached back into my memories, and I was walking through the trees in the Canadian Rockies with my feet moving along to the pulse of his drums. The mountain air was cold and clear, the dirt under my feet was soft, and rays of sunlight flickered through the trees.

There is a scene in Emir Kusturica's Underground where Natalija, former actress for the National Theatre and now wife of Marko, has drunk several glasses of wine and brandy at a wedding and is dancing by herself, writhing her body in madness and oblivion. She is wearing a red dress that twists with her as she moves, uninhibited, against the dark green and brown of the bunker, against the tank that looms in the background. It is 1961, and the wedding is underground, where the inhabitants of this bunker in Belgrade have been manufacturing arms for the anti-fascist, Communist resistance movement for 20 years, believing that their homeland is still occupied by Germans, believing that the second World War is still raging strong.

The sound of horns playing boisterous horn music fills my room as dancing guests and drinking guests fill the screen. Natalija writhes. It's three-thirty in the morning and the riotous scene glimmers in front of me. The horn players stand in a tight circle facing outwards around the rotating wedding cake, rotating around like figurines on a rotating jewelry box. A group of boys play with a ball, Marko watches Natalija writhe, and the bride sits at a long table deep underground in Belgrade as I watch from my cluttered room, on my 14 inch laptop monitor. I fall asleep once the movie is over and I dream of horns and dancing and a musty underground smell, and it feels like home.

When I type in 'homeland' on google.ca, I am presented with 11,200,000 potential links, 0.21 seconds after I click on 'search'. What are these links? Most of them are for Homeland Security. The Department of Homeland Security. Texas Homeland Security. Pennsylvania Homeland Security. Civil Homeland Defense. Alabama Homeland Security. Illinois Homeland Security. McGraw-Hill Homeland Security. Does no one feel secure in their homeland? Also, I always thought McGraw-Hill was a publishing company. After 10 pages of links, I lose patience. Every one of the hundred links has to do with Homeland Security.

The Jews want a homeland, and they wandered the world for many years, wandering because they had nowhere to settle until they settled in Israel where they once ruled. The Palestinians want a homeland. They want a place in which to build a Palestinian nation, a place that doesn't pull them to the ground and weigh them down with their past. A homeland is a place that all people dream of, a place fixed in their minds, a place where they can belong. A homeland is a place of origin to which we strive to return. A homeland is a sanctuary, a utopia.

When Natalija dances, she is exorcising demons and spiting Marko, for unbeknownst to the rest of her comrades, she and Marko are living a famed and comfortable life above ground off the profits and rewards of their comrades' labors. Marko has been feeding them an elaborate lie for over 15 years, in order to keep Natalija for himself. The reason: his best friend, Blacky, who has been locked up in the bunker along with everyone else, loves her too. Blacky doesn't know that Natalija is Marko's wife. Natalija writhes, uninhibited, in front of the tank the workers built from scratch, their pride. She drinks brandy and she dances because her innocence is lost, because she is complicit in Marko's infidelities. She writhes in madness and sorrow, a patch of red against the dark green and brown of the bunker, but her demons are never exorcised.

I sit in the library writing about homelands and thinking about homelands and withstanding the icy glares of people waiting to use the computers, and I wonder to myself if this is a homeland. Would these rows of computers be part of the homeland? Would these people breathing down my neck, ready to pounce on the keyboard the moment I log off, would they be part of that homeland too?

The Germans also strove to create a homeland once.

As Natalija dances, the happiness and serenity of the bunker begins to unravel. As she twists and shakes in front of the tank, Blacky tells his son, the groom, that he is tired of waiting for Marko, for Tito, to tell them it is the right time, and that the two of them will escape from the bunker and take back their country on their own. When they steal out of the bunker, his son confuses the moon for the sun. He has spent all of his 20 years underground.

Can a world feel like home when it is always mediated by machines and preconceptions, where every action taken and every pixel of it is ground in politics, either by confirming or negating the status quo or revealing our blindness about it? How can a homeland be a homeland if you never experience the world simply and directly?

The Germans strove to create a homeland once and it was a disaster because it was such a success.

Blacky is in his briefs, running along the beach with an automatic rifle. It is the next day, and we see them at a lake under a clear blue sky. He shoots out rounds at a helicopter that has suddenly appeared. With every shot, he feels himself taking back a little more of his country from the Germans. As he runs he yells and his eyes light up, and as he runs his son is drowning in the lake where he left him, unable to swim and unable to stay afloat. When the helicopter disappears, Blacky looks for his son, running frantically down the beach yelling his name and running into the lake yelling his name, but he never finds him and he spends the rest of his life looking for his son, asking for his son 30 years later even as he leads his commandos in civil war.

A homeland should always be an open-ended striving, never an active attempt to eliminate everything that is alien, everything that is unfamiliar. The German homeland only presented the illusion of a homeland, for it could only achieve its dream by eliminating all other dreams. The line between utopia and dystopia is usually invisible.

Marko returns to Belgrade as a weapons dealer in 1992. It is a heap of rubble and ashes. "No war is a war until a brother kills his brother". Marko and Natalija are shot and burnt as war profiteers by a militant group. They are no more than an orange flame circling around a monument to Jesus. Marko's handicapped brother hangs himself from a church bell. It rings clearly and ominously through the gunshots and explosions and thick clouds of smoke blanketing the city. Blacky sees his son appear in a well, and dives in after him, in pursuit of his home. Of all the inhabitants of the bunker, only a monkey, Soni, survives.

Homeland is the moment of purity and simplicity amidst the labyrinth of power and motives and regrets that underlie our entire world. It is something we can only ever touch but never grasp, for the instant we try to make it permanent, it becomes infected by our complicities and the complexities of our world.

Underground is supposed to be an allegory for the story of Yugoslavia, a story about the disintegration of a great country and the uncertainty of its future, about a homeland that was destroyed and the attempt to regain it. More directly, though, it is a story about a group of people trapped in a world of horror who nonetheless manage to create happiness in spite of that. Natalija is not simply exorcising demons as she dances, but is participating in a moment of purity lodged within what she knows to be a lie.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer write: "A happy life in a world of horror is ignominiously refuted by the mere existence of that world". They could not be more wrong here, for that moment of happiness is as real as any other experience we can ever have. We do not simply dismiss Natalija, Marko and Blacky's lives as worthless because they finally disintegrated, because they were finally broken down by the broken circumstances in which they lived. Instead, we remember that they were once full of life and full of idealistic spirit, and this memory redeems them.

The beauty of sorrow lies in the knowledge that everything good in this world is fleeting, that the world itself is fleeting, but that we still strive to achieve the good nonetheless. This is part of the beauty of music and the beauty of Underground, for they are in themselves reflections of this striving. They lift us from the estrangement of modern life by presenting us with something that is other, alien, yet remotely familiar, a moment that allows us to suspend ourselves from what we already know. They remove us for an instant from the world that always confronts us and in which we are always involved. This is also the beauty that inheres in the idea of homeland.

At the end of Underground, all the characters are reunited in a celebration by the water, under a clear blue sky. The horn players play their boisterous horn music and everyone dances without a care in the world. All demons have been banished. Blacky tells Marko: "I can forgive, but I cannot forget". Everyone laughs and everyone hugs in reunion and everyone dances, and Marko's brother sits facing the camera, speaking without the stutter that plagued him in life: "With pain, sorrow and joy, we shall remember our country, as we tell our children stories that start like fairytales: 'Once upon a time, there was a country…'".