"A Field Guide to Getting Lost,” by Rebecca Solnit, 2006
Rebecca Solnit is an essayist somewhat along the lines of Susan
Sontag. She is famous for
her 2014 comic feminist essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” which was inspired
by a conversation at a party where a male literary lion insisted on
interpreting one of her own 16 books to her, without knowing who she was.
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| Bryce Canyon - Utah (CGG) |
Solnit’s approach, as she describes it: “histories that
are not neat fields that belong to someone but the paths and waterways that
meander through many fields and belong to no one.” Or perhaps belong only to the individual
writer. She starts the book with a quote
from the sophist Meno: “How will you go about finding that thing that is
absolutely unknown to you?” She is a
poetic writer and you will come upon great lines by accident. Here she is describing the stage in the
molting of a butterfly called ‘instar’:
“… change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near
and far.” Here she describes how emotion
takes you away: “Riding all kinds of
runaway horses.” On memory she comments:
“Some things we have only as long as they remain lost, some things are not lost
only so long as they are distant."
Solnit has loosely organized chapters around what her ‘lost’
means. Lost in the mystery of another
person; lost in a hike in the actual woods; wandering around the summer west by
car; lost in the past; in family history; lost in the far distant color
blue. Lost captives like Cabeza de Vaca or
Cynthia Ann Parker. ‘Captives’ thrown
into new cultures voluntarily or involuntarily.
The dusty lost longing and geography of vintage country music and the
blues. She comments: “In some ways, the blues took over the
world.” Or travel, a form of intentional
lostness. Yet the more one travels, the
more comfortable the whole world becomes. She is a proponent of a method of life not
always controlled by reason every step of the way; open to experience and
serendipity; doing things new or unknown; out of routine, just out of sight. However, she is careful about her discovering,
so that the position comes off as a bit of a literary pose. For example a friend got into heavy drugs and
punk music – Solnit did not follow her down that particular rabbit hole.
Objects get ‘lost’ but most are really misplaced. They are later to be rediscovered by you or
someone else. People get lost and most
find themselves, either literally or figuratively. Whether they like what they find is another
matter. These are Solnit’s vague maps of
the terrain.
For those of us strapped to the rack of labor every day,
this seems like the meanderings of a full-time writer – and indeed they
are. She has something of the
post-modernist, mixing cultural images into a self-reverential and indistinct
pottage. For instance, she spends time
on Yves Klein, a somewhat ridiculous herald of post-modernist and ‘performance’
art, who actually sold paintings that didn’t exist from an empty white art
gallery in the early 1960s. But there
are also valuable insights from this other planet, the leisure planet, where
necessity is not always in charge. After
all, politics is only a necessity, not a desire. Our lives are lived on many levels. The politically oblivious live in an
imaginary world shaped by capitalism, yet they pretend not to know it. The politically conscious focus on the
problem at hand, yet life goes on even so.
That has to be recognized or it leads to sterility.
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| Monument Valley - Arizona (CGG) |
Solnit is a city woman (San Francisco of course) who romantically escapes
into nature when she can. The desert and
its animals are her favorites – she spent three years living in the Mojave with
a hermit lover. The desert is defined by
its austere emptiness – a terrain where ‘loss’ is built into the view. Where what is missing, is what is there.
Her politics are vague, and meant to be. She comments on the 6th extinction without calling it that – species disappearing at the rate of 30 a day world-wide. If you pay attention, you’ll see the woods are becoming empty. But also on humans’ intentional and sometimes successful efforts to protect species from destruction. Her own father was involved in Marin County regarding elephant seals. This destruction started in California with the arrival of the gold miners in 1849, who killed every California grizzly. It now only exists on the California state flag. Yet nature is not her whole story. In reference to punk music and other sub-cultures, she knows that, “…it’s from the underground that culture emerges in this civilization.”
Her politics are vague, and meant to be. She comments on the 6th extinction without calling it that – species disappearing at the rate of 30 a day world-wide. If you pay attention, you’ll see the woods are becoming empty. But also on humans’ intentional and sometimes successful efforts to protect species from destruction. Her own father was involved in Marin County regarding elephant seals. This destruction started in California with the arrival of the gold miners in 1849, who killed every California grizzly. It now only exists on the California state flag. Yet nature is not her whole story. In reference to punk music and other sub-cultures, she knows that, “…it’s from the underground that culture emerges in this civilization.”
One day another working-class underground may emerge, an Atlantis waiting to surface. But it is not here yet, and certainly not in this book.
Other books somewhat along the lines of this topic: “Into the Wild,” “All is Lost,”
“Deep Survival,” “Wild,” “A Traveler’s Tale” and “Empire
of the Summer Moon.” Use blog search
box, upper left.
And I bought in the excellent feminist section at Mayday
Books!
Red Frog
March 7th, 2015
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