Recollections of My Nonexistence

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Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 8

by Rebecca Solnit


  When I wrote my book on walking almost twenty years later, I quoted Sylvia Plath, who declared when she was nineteen, “Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.” Reading the passage long after I’d put it in the book, I wondered about who she might have been if she’d had the freedom of the city, as they used to call it, and of the hills, and of the night, of how her suicide in her kitchen at thirty must have been in part from the confinement of women in domestic spaces and definitions.

  Children are diurnal animals. Nocturnal life to a newcomer to adulthood was almost synonymous with the new world of sensuality and sexuality, of freedom of movement and exploration, with a lingering sense that the rules fade a little when the sun goes down. Nightlife. Nightclubs. Nightmares. Patti Smith’s first hit, “Because the Night,” had come out only a few years earlier, telling us that the night belongs to lovers and to love. Love is made mostly in dimness or darkness, and darkness—the failure of sight, the most rational of the senses, the awakening of the other senses, the otherworldliness that the world takes on when it turns away from the sun and faces out into the galaxy—can itself be an erotic embrace.

  My bohemian aunt had given me a copy of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood when I was eighteen, and I had fallen in love with what that brief novel did with words and with its romantic extravagance about pain and loss. It’s mostly remembered as a lesbian novel now, and the love of Nora Flood for the elusive Robin Vote forms the bones of its plot set mostly in Paris. But the ode-like monologues by the garrulous cross-dressing garret-dwelling doctor Matthew O’Connor, “an Irishman from the Barbary Coast (Pacific Street, San Francisco) whose interest in gynaecology had driven him half around the world,” dominate it. He is an expert on the night, on night as the mysteries of the human heart and the fluidity of who we are and the foolishness of who we think we are and what we think we should have and hold. “Every day is thought upon and calculated, but the night is not premeditated,” he tells Flood. “The Bible lies the one way but the night-gown the other. The night, ‘Beware of that dark door!’”

  He’s an oracle akin to the transgender Tiresias in Oedipus Rex, someone who understands men and women and the things they want and imagine and do together and alone. Night is the space in which poetic intuition, not logic, prevails, in which you feel what you cannot see, and perhaps in some sense he is the night itself, or its oracle and high priestess. In that letter to that old friend of my late teens, I was saying that I wanted to bring Barnes’s ferocious lyricism to my own immediate experience, to wed the poetics of what I wanted and the politics of why I had trouble reaching it. To whom does the night belong? It did not seem to belong to me.

  2

  At least books belonged to me. Closed, a book is a rectangle, thin as a letter or thick and solid like a box or a brick. Open, it is two arcs of paper that, seen from the top or bottom when the book is wide open, look like the wide V of birds in flight. I think about that and then about women who turn into birds and then about Philomela, who in the Greek myth is turned into a nightingale after she is raped, as her brother-in-law pursues her to murder her.

  The word nightingale is an old one in the English language, cobbled together from night and singer. I wonder if Keats had Philomela in mind when he wrote his “Ode to a Nightingale,” or if I did when I dreamed of him and flying. In it the poet imagines flying himself “on the viewless wings of poesy,” into a dark forest—“for here there is no light . . . and tender is the night,” a line I was happy to recognize again in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, which is also about incest and rape and their unspeakability and the way the harm spreads outward. Both Keats’s poetry and Tender Is the Night came to me the year I was seventeen and was finally taught some ways to read more deeply, to see a story as made up of layers, echoes, references, and metaphors.

  I had read Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, with the story of Philomela and all those other goddesses, nymphs, and mortals being ravaged, much earlier. In the myths, women keep turning into other things, because being a woman is too difficult, too dangerous. Daphne is turned into a laurel as she flees Apollo; I’d known that even before I’d memorized Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden,” including these lines:

  The gods, that mortal beauty chase,

  Still in a tree did end their race.

  I’d learned it in the same introductory class where we read Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” which I can see now is creepily specific about the details of a god in the form of a bird raping a woman. “How can those terrified vague fingers push / The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?” That so many Greek myths are about rape and women trying to escape it never came up. It’s not that I think we were too fragile to be exposed to this stuff that was everywhere, in pop songs as well as sonnets and classics, just that the fact that the reality, the ubiquity, and the impact of rape were weirdly unspeakable, in art and in life. Our tongues had been cut out too.

  Ovid tells us that tongueless Philomela weaves the story of her violation into a tapestry and by signs conveys that the tapestry should be delivered to her sister, the wife of her rapist. When the truth is unspeakable you say it indirectly; when your speech is taken away other things speak; sometimes the body itself speaks with the tics, eruptions, numbness, paralysis that are cyphers for what happened. In the myth, there’s more gore, and then the sisters are both turned into birds—and in some versions it’s the sister who becomes the night singer, the nightingale. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairies call on Philomela when they sing their queen to sleep, evoking maybe the beauty of her singing voice or the ways she’s tricked and deceived as a woman.

  Keats’s nightingale is not the mortal victim but the transcendent figure, impervious to human suffering: “Though wast not born for death, immortal bird,” he apostrophizes her. “No hungry generations tread thee down,” and I memorized those lines when I first met the poem, or maybe they just stuck, as so many lines I read then have, as though I was laying down a foundation of those bricks. He thinks of her song heard long ago, of the words that last innumerable lifetimes. She is poetry itself or something that poetry—that the durable wings of words and the ether of narrative they generate—brings us to, a sanctuary and a place out of time. A refuge. A place beyond bodies and the flesh. In Philomela’s case, the mutation into a nightingale doesn’t come in time to save her from rape, mutilation, silencing, and imprisonment, but it does save her from murder, if being turned into something other than yourself is survival.

  A book: a bird that is also a brick. I arranged my battered paperback library on stacks of plastic milk crates I pilfered one at a time from in front of the liquor stores when they were closed, and then returned them to where they’d come from when I managed to acquire some wooden bookshelves. My birds flocked, and eventually a long row of shelves narrowed the hallway and half filled the main room and piled into unstable pillars on my desk and other surfaces.

  You furnish your mind with readings in somewhat the way you furnish a house with books, or rather the physical books enter your memory and become part of the equipment of your imagination. I was building up a body of literature, points of reference for a map of the world, a set of tools to understand that world and myself in it by reading. Mostly I wandered in books on my own, or read what was given me, an indiscriminate omnivore then, as the young often are with people as well: not sure what their criteria are, what feeds them and what discourages them. So I read what came my way and then learned enough to trace paths through the forests of books, learn land
marks and lineages.

  I loved the physical objects that are books too and still do. The codex, the box that is a bird, the door into a world, still seems magical to me, and I still walk into a bookstore or a library convinced that I might be on the threshold that will open up onto what I most need or desire, and sometimes that doorway appears. When it does, there are epiphanies and raptures in seeing the world in new ways, in finding patterns previously unsuspected, in being handed unimagined equipment to address what arises, in the beauty and power of words.

  The sheer pleasure of meeting new voices and ideas and possibilities, having the world become more coherent in some subtle or enormous way, extending or filling in your map of the universe, is not nearly celebrated enough, nor is the beauty in finding pattern and meaning. But these awakenings recur, and every time they do there’s joy.

  3

  As a reader I roamed free. As a would-be writer, it was more complicated. In my teens and well into my twenties, I mostly encountered the literature of heterosexual men, where the muse or the beloved or the city they explored or the nature they conquered was a woman. Throughout my teens, I wrestled with Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, which seemed to have something valuable about trees and alphabets I could never quite extract from its erudite jumble. It’s a book that seemed to assume that the poet’s orientation is that of a straight man to a female goddess; it might have encouraged some young women to smile enigmatically and levy tribute, but I wanted to be a writer, not a muse.

  I also struggled secretly against the men around me who were convinced that they were the artists and I was the audience. Young women like me were supposed to exist as orbital figures, planets around a sun, moons around a planet. Never stars. When I was eighteen, one man was so adamant that I was his muse that he inspired in me a vivid sense that I was literally standing atop a pillar; I can still summon up a sense of being stranded in the hazy grayish atmosphere of nowhere. On a pillar there’s nothing to do but stand still or fall. I was happy to listen and read, but I was mutely against being only a listener and reader, though all I could do about that was bide my time and build my work.

  I had been clear that I wanted to be a writer since the year I had learned to read, but I hardly ever spoke of this, for fear of mockery or discouragement. And until my twenties I wasn’t writing much beyond what school required, though sometimes what I wrote for school worked out well. I was reading, hungrily. Classics, reassuring books, discomfiting books, contemporary novels, popular fiction, history, myth, magazines, reviews.

  There were comfortable books, and another kind of comfort in recognizing my own condition or its equivalents and analogies in others, in not being alone in my loneliness and angst. Sometimes one piece would crash into me: I still have the poem “Never Before” by Philip Levine, from the New Yorker in the fall of 1980 (I clipped Levine’s columns and taped them together into a narrow strip, now yellowed, exactly as long as my arm, with a deeper amber where the tape joins the sections together. It looks like a bandage but reads like a wound).

  It is a poem of devastation:

  Never before

  have I heard my own voice

  cry out in a language not mine

  that the earth was wrong

  that night came first and then nothing

  that birds flew only to their deaths

  that ice was the meaning of change

  that I was never a child

  It spoke to me when I was very nearly a child. Sometimes when you are devastated you want not a reprieve but a mirror of your condition or a reminder that you are not alone in it. Other times it is not the propaganda or the political art that helps you face a crisis but whatever gives you respite from it.

  Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in the New Yorker in installments the same second half of 1980 and passed along to me in a stack of magazines. The chapters were, like Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths a few years earlier, revelatory. They gave me a sense of how you could mix things, how the personal and the political could spell each other, how a narrative could be oblique, how prose, like poetry, could jump from subject to subject or take flight. Of how the categories were optional, though it would take me another decade to find my way through their walls.

  I wanted urgency, intensity, excess and extremes, prose and narrative bursting against the confines. Except when I wanted reassurances. I found both. I lived so deeply in books that I felt unanchored and adrift, not particularly part of my own time and place, always with one foot or more in other places, medieval or imaginary or Edwardian. I had in that floating world a sense that I might wake up or otherwise find myself in one of those other times and places.

  My literary aunt who had given me Nightwood had given me Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird when I was twelve or thirteen, far too young to read about the sexual brutality and genocidal violence of the Polish peasantry as seen by a dark-haired, dark-eyed Jewish child wandering through their world, barely eluding death. It took hold of me, and so did Anne Frank’s diary and other Holocaust literature. One of my recurrent anxious daydreams in my childhood and adolescence was whether I with my fair hair and skin might have been able to pass as a gentile and thereby escape the extermination that had taken all the members of my father’s family who had stayed behind. It was another kind of annihilation that haunted me.

  But I also had a vague sense that I might find myself somehow in a less pointedly vicious time and place, where what I had learned from books would at least partially equip me to get by. That I might wander into Georgian England or medieval France or the nineteenth-century West or some of the other places in which I had immersed myself, and some sense of this, ridiculous though it sounds, made me hesitate to cut my long hair, and I found encouragement in archaic ideas of beauty to which I thought I measured up more than I did to modern ones. In those days, it didn’t seem impossible that someday someone else would be in the mirror in the morning, or the world around it would be another world. “I is another” was a phrase of Arthur Rimbaud’s that I also kept handy.

  Of course what I had learned from books and from life had hardly equipped me well enough to fit into the time and place I actually lived in. Long after this anxious daydream had passed by, I lived a comic version of it when I read Wordsworth’s book-length autobiographical poem The Prelude twice in order to write a chapter of my book on walking. I was so immersed in his language—unhurried graciousness, elaborate and sometimes inverted syntax, circumlocutory ways of saying things—that my casual remarks to strangers and check-out clerks were met with baffled looks.

  There’s a benefit to being untethered from your own time. I think I gained a sense of how differently constituted the idea of being human, the purpose of life, the expectations and desires had been even a generation or two ago, let alone half a millennium before, of how the definitions metamorphosed, and how that meant you could step outside the assumptions of your time, or at least wear them lightly, and at least in theory not let them punish you. That being human can mean many things, in other words. At thirteen, I had read C. S. Lewis’s The Allegory of Love, which describes the social construction, in twelfth-century France, of what would become our ideas of romantic love. That these expectations were the result of a particular time and place gave me a sense of liberation, like someone opening the windows in a stuffy room.

  Despite that Lewis book, I soaked up novels’ impossibly dramatic notions of love and romance and their myths of completion and ending. And I got something most women got, an experience of staring at women across a distance or being in worlds in which they barely existed, from Moby-Dick to Lord of the Rings. Being so often required to be someone else can stretch thin the sense of self. You should be yourself some of the time. You should be with people who are like you, who are facing what you’re facing, who dream your dreams and fight your battles, who recognize you. And then, other times, you should be like people unl
ike yourself. Because there is a problem as well with those who spend too little time being anyone else; it stunts the imagination in which empathy takes root, that empathy that is a capacity to shape-shift and roam out of your sole self. One of the convenient afflictions of power is a lack of this imaginative extension. For many men it begins in early childhood, with almost exclusively being given stories with male protagonists.

  The term double consciousness is sometimes used for black experience in a white culture. W. E. B. DuBois famously wrote in the last years of the nineteenth century (and wrote, as so many men did up through at least James Baldwin, as though all people were men or even one man) “the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” Perhaps there should be another term for never looking through the eyes of others, for something less conscious than even single consciousness would convey.

  DuBois’s framework found an echo in John Berger’s 1968 Ways of Seeing, when Berger imagined, with generosity and brilliance, what it was to be something he had never been: “To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage with such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two. A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continuously accompanied by her own image of herself. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.”

 

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