Recollections of My Nonexistence

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Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 9

by Rebecca Solnit


  You depend on men, and what they think of you, learn to constantly check yourself in a mirror to see how you look to men, you perform for them, and this theatrical anxiety forms or deforms or stops altogether what you do and say and sometimes think. You learn to think of what you are in terms of what they want, and addressing their want becomes so ingrained in you that you lose sight of what you want, and sometimes you vanish to yourself in the art of appearing to and for others.

  You are always somewhere else. You turn into trees and lakes and birds, you turn into muses, whores, mothers, the vessel for others’ desires and the screen for their projections, and in all that it can be hard to turn into yourself, for yourself. Even reading novels by men can instill this, and it did in my case. Sometimes the women devoured to the bone are praised; often those insistent on their own desires and needs are reviled or rebuked for taking up space, for making noise. You are punished unless you punish yourself into nonexistence in this system. The system is punishment. A novel like Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark in which the ambitious, amorous, extraordinarily talented heroine is not punished comes as a shock.

  Solitude was reprieve from this endless task, but when I turned to books I often turned into a man looking at women. Looking at women as problems or trophies or mildly baleful phenomena with opaque motivations and limited consciousness probably did something to me, and so did being encouraged to identify with the man over and over again, and to live in imagination in places where women were just ornaments in the margins or trophies or broodmares.

  In my case, this meant identifying with male protagonists, with the Jim of the almost womanless Lord Jim and Jim Carroll’s self-anointing stud junkie in The Basketball Diaries and with Pip rather than Estella in Great Expectations, and all the grail seekers and ring bearers and western explorers and chasers and conquerors and haters of women and inhabitants of worlds where women were absent. And the task of finding one’s own way must be immeasurably harder when all the heroes, all the protagonists, are not only another gender but another race, or another sexual orientation, and when you find that you yourself are described as the savages or the servants or the people who don’t matter. There are so many forms of annihilation.

  But there were some I craved. When I read, I ceased to be myself, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug. I faded into an absent witness, someone who was in that world but not anyone in it, or who was every word and road and house and ill omen and forlorn hope. I was anyone and no one and nothing and everywhere in those hours and years lost in books. I was a fog, a miasma, a mist, someone who dissolved into the story, got lost in it, learned to lose myself this way as a reprieve from that task of being a child and then a woman and the particular child and woman I was. I hovered about in many times and places, worlds and cosmologies, dispersing and gathering and drifting. A line by T. S. Eliot, the first poet whose work I got to know, comes to mind: “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” Alone, immersed in a book, I was faceless, everyone, anyone, unbounded, elsewhere, free of meetings. I wanted to be someone, to make a face and a self and a voice, but I loved these moments of reprieve. If moments is the word: they were not intermissions in a normally sociable life; they were the life itself occasionally interrupted by social interludes.

  There is something astonishing about reading, about that suspension of your own time and place to travel into others’. It’s a way of disappearing from where you are—not quite entering the author’s mind but engaging with it so that something arises between your mind and hers. You translate words into your own images, faces, places, light and shade and sound and emotion. A world arises in your head that you have built at the author’s behest, and when you’re present in that world you’re absent from your own. You’re a phantom in both worlds and a god of sorts in the world that is not exactly the one the author wrote but some hybrid of her imagination and yours. The words are instructions, the book a kit, the full existence of the book something immaterial, internal, an event rather than an object, and then an influence and a memory. It’s the reader who brings the book to life.

  I lived inside books, and though it’s often assumed that we choose books to travel through them to get to the end, there were books I took up residency in, books I read again and again and then picked up and opened anywhere just to be in that world, with those people, with that author’s vision and voice. Jane Austen’s novels, but also Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books, Frank Herbert’s Dune, eventually E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, and Michael Ondaatje, some children’s books I returned to as an adult, and early on novels that don’t have much standing as literature. I roamed freely in them, knowing the territory in all directions, and familiarity was a reward as strangeness might be in a book read once just to find out what happened.

  I would not call books an escape if that meant that I was only hiding out in them for fear of something else. They were glorious places to be, and they set my mind on fire and brought me in contact with the authors themselves, indirectly in their fictions, directly in the essays and journals and first-person accounts that I gravitated to as I came to understand that my own vocation was going to be essayistic nonfiction.

  I swam through rivers and oceans of words and their incantatory power. In fairy tales naming something gives you power over it; a spell is some words you say that make things happen. These are just concentrated versions of how words make the world and take us into its heart, how a metaphor opens up a new possibility, a simile builds a bridge. They let me listen to conversations and thoughts that went deeper and expressed more than most people could face-to-face.

  But they were not warm, they had no bodies to meet my body, and they would never know me. There was nonexistence in living through books as well as many other existences and minds and dreams to inhabit and ways of expanding one’s own imaginative and imaginary existence.

  4

  It is as easy to decide to be a writer as to decide to have a piece of cake, but then you have to do it. I moved into that beautiful apartment as I was in my final semester of my undergraduate education at San Francisco State University. It was an intense spring: I was working to support myself and taking nineteen units of classes, helped along by a handful of prescription speed in the form of little yellow pills that had been the only gift given me by the man I’d been dating before I moved.

  I graduated as I turned twenty, and then realized that the world and I were not ready for each other. I got a desk-clerk job a pleasant walk from home in a small hotel, out there on the edge of the Castro District in those last years before AIDS would change everything for the gay men who thronged the streets of the neighborhood. I stayed there for a restorative year of catching my breath and looking around and not being desperate for time or money. The job left a lot of time to read behind a rolltop desk, in between checking guests in and out and taking reservations by phone and mailing confirmations and sometimes making up beds or breakfast trays. There were troubles—a lecherous elderly boss, the sorrows of a refugee housekeeper whose husband beat her, a few crises with customers—but mostly it was peaceful.

  After graduation, I had realized that though I had learned to read, I had not learned to write, or to do anything better than sales and service work for a living. In those days before nonfiction was considered creative and taught in writing programs, I applied to the only place that I could afford and that made sense to me, the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, and was admitted. The writing sample I submitted was a blithely amusing (but laboriously typed) account of an encounter with a group of women at a punk club when I was eighteen or nineteen.

  The women had invited me to audition for a movie that turned out to be an attempt to repeat the process whereby they and the quadriplegic man who’d be the film’s director had groomed a teenage girl via sex work to obey him. They wanted to repeat the process only with a movie camera and with me; sex with him, the women explained, was part of the deal,
and he chimed in by spelling out “show me your tits” on his communication board with his pointer. Servitude and obedience were described, of course, as liberation.

  The Pygmalion myth, whereby a woman is turned from insensate sculpture into a living being, happens much more frequently in reverse, as a story of women who don’t need help being fully alive and aware confronted with the people who want to reduce them to something less. Perhaps in turning the encounter into an essay, I had affirmed my capacity to think, judge, speak, decide, and maybe thereby to make myself. I was going to graduate school to get better at those things.

  I didn’t fit into the school well when I started it a few months after I turned twenty-one, because most of the other students seemed to want to be what the school wanted us to be: investigative journalists whose holy grail was the front page of the New York Times. They were more sophisticated about politics, older than me, consciously low key in their appearance while I was still flamboyantly punk rock in thrift-store black and crayoned-on eyeliner. I wanted to be a cultural writer, an essayist, though what exactly I wanted was not nearly as clear as what I did not want. I wanted to be pretty much what I eventually became, but there were not a lot of models and examples that I knew then, just inclinations and excitement from the work of writers like Pauline Kael, George Orwell, Susan Sontag, Jorge Luis Borges.

  What I learned there was immeasurably valuable. I was trained in resourcefulness in how to find out things, in ruggedness about meeting deadlines, in how to organize a story and verify facts. I was instilled with a commitment to precision with language and accuracy with data and a sense of responsibility toward readers, subjects, and the historical record that still matters to me.

  Just before my first year began, the hotel in the Castro was sold, and the new owners laid me off after promising not to. Desperate, I talked my way into a waitress job at an Italian restaurant just opening, but my inability to remove corks without a graceless struggle was one of the reasons that didn’t work out. Had I been better at sales and service my fate would probably have been worse. I trudged over to UC Berkeley’s work-study office, disclosed my plight, and got my chance to apply for one of the jobs they orchestrated and partially financed. I pursued one at the Sierra Club and one at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, both of which were offered to me. I went with the museum, for reasons I no longer remember; I still work with both institutions from time to time.

  That the gracious women in pearls and pumps who made up the research/collections department hired me still surprises me. I had gone for my interview wearing a baggy men’s suit from a thrift store, pants held up with a cowboy belt, and my new rockabilly haircut, short on the sides and frothing into a pompadour on top. (I had thought I’d look tough and androgynous when I chopped off my long hair, but instead it curled when it was relieved of its own weight; toughness was an ideal I aspired to without success, at least as an aesthetic.)

  Those women must have seen something in me, because they soon promoted me from rote filing work and set me to do serious research. I was there every Tuesday and Thursday for the next two years, and full time in the summer between my first and second years of graduate school. It was the best job I ever had. The museum, which had been the second modern art museum in the country, was preparing for its fiftieth anniversary in 1985, and I was helping with the catalogue of the permanent collection’s highlights that would be published on the occasion, the first time I produced content for a book. I was researching major works of art, and it was the beginning of an education in modern and contemporary art.

  I was handling Matisses, Duchamps, Miros, Derains, and Tamayos (I don’t think I worked on anything by a non-male artist, though I was excited by San Francisco art historian Whitney Chadwick’s recuperation of the reputations of the women surrealists and the emergence of Frida Kahlo as a cultural icon in those years). I was putting together a dossier on each piece—sales and ownership history, exhibition history, a bit of information on the life and work of the artist at the time of its creation, contextual material on related works, and more. For two years I wandered in and out of storage spaces, file rooms, library stacks, typing up data on a big electric typewriter, corresponding by letter with scholars, solidifying the biographies of a few dozen works of art and broadening and deepening my own sense of art history.

  I worked directly with paintings in the course of documenting the labels and inscriptions on their back sides. I went into the basement to catalogue Marcel Duchamp’s Boite-en-Valise, a little suitcase with miniatures of his major works of art, and the brief covetous moment I had—my boyfriend at the time loved his work—faded when I realized that every work of art lives in its context, and a stolen work of art has to exist outside of it, silenced, unable to circulate in the conversation from which it emerged. That storage basement had other lessons to impart: it contained some art that would probably never be shown again—paintings and other items that had seemed significant in their time but been written out of history or never written into it, odd trends and faded heroes, movements that had lost their sheen, detours from the official road of art history, a windowless room of orphans and exiles.

  I also spent hours in the hushed back room full of files from the era of Grace McCann Morley, the museum’s inspired, forgotten founding director, and it was then I fell in love with archives and the task of assembling a history out of fragments. I noticed a drawing by Matisse in a letter to her and had it moved from correspondence files to the art collection. I wandered through the history of many artworks like a traveler, learning about the world around them, coming to recognize landmarks I could return to. I worked on a painting by the German expressionist Franz Marc—a mountainscape he had repainted after he’d been to Paris and seen the brand-new thing that was cubism: I had it X-rayed to show the old painting underneath, and I found the data to change the title. To play a role in the writing of art history, even with this one tiny act, was electrifying.

  Since Morley, all the directors of that museum have been men, but a few ranks below, women seemed to run everything. I worked under a kind patrician woman out of a tiny office in the library who taught me my job, and I often wandered over to consult the dashing, graying, gravel-voiced longtime librarian Eugenie Candau in her own office, and sometimes I scrounged from her wastebasket the exhibition postcards she discarded. I was ravenous for images. It was a second education as valuable and formative as the one I was getting across the bay at the university.

  One day I saw a work of art by Los Angeles artist Wallace Berman that captivated me. It was a grid repeating an image of a hand holding a transistor radio with images bursting out of the radio’s speaker, a piece about pop culture and mysticism with a few Hebrew letters scattered on it. In my naïveté, I went to find the book that I assumed existed on this extraordinary creator. There wasn’t one then, though there was a slender exhibition catalogue surveying his work. I didn’t yet know that I would write that book, or a version of it, some years later. I picked Berman as the subject for my thesis, though it was unconventional for a journalism student to focus on something so far from the news and the realms of news. Berman had died in 1976, having destroyed the recording of the only interview known to have been conducted with him, so there was a lot to reconstruct from archives and interviews with members of his circle. The coincidences that led me to the museum that led me to the image that led me to the project make me grateful for my failure at opening wine bottles.

  5

  Though I was browsing at City Lights bookstore and researching the Beat poets for that thesis, and interviewing some of them, I encountered my fellow San Franciscan Diane di Prima’s work only later, including her declaration “You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology.” Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind, and so underneath the task of writi
ng a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to make.

  It formalizes the process everyone goes through, of making the self who will speak, of settling on what values and interests and priorities will shape your path and your persona. You have to find out what kind of tone you are going to take, how you pitch your words, whether you’re going to be funny or grim or both. Often what emerges is not what you intended; it turns out you’re someone else who has other things to say and other ways to say them (what gets called “a voice” is at the outset like some person you don’t know very well arriving at the front door with a different focus and tone than you expected). You discover what ethics are implicit or explicit in how you describe the world, what ideas of beauty you are going to pursue, what your subjects are, which means what you care about, all those things labeled style and voice and tone behind which lies a question of self.

  I went back to di Prima’s declaration in her famous “Rant.” Further down, the poem continues:

  There is no way out of the spiritual battle

  There is no way you can avoid taking sides

  There is no way you can not have a poetics

  no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher

  you do it in the consciousness of making

  or not making yr world

  The voice that came out of me when I spoke in social settings and often even to a single friend wore a thousand pounds of armor and was incapable of saying anything direct about emotions, which I was barely feeling or feeling through so many filters I hardly knew what was spinning me around. But the voice: it was the voice I’d grown up around and learned to emulate and then to promulgate, a voice that strove to be clever, cool, sharp, and amused, to shoot arrows with precision and duck the arrows that came back or pretend they hadn’t stung. It relied on jokes and quips that were often cruel in a game where anyone who was hurt or offended by those jabs was supposed to be lacking in humor or strength or other admirable qualities. I didn’t understand what I was doing, because I didn’t understand that there were other ways to do it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t mean-spirited at times. (Later, I discovered that scathing and mocking reviews were the easiest and most fun kind to write, but I tried to write them only about much-lauded successes.)

 

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