There was another kind of humor, or rather a ponderous wit, that was convoluted, full of citations and puns and plays on existing phrases, of circling around, far around, what was happening and what you were feeling. It was as though the more indirect and referential your statement, the further away from your immediate and authentic reaction, the better. It would take me a long time to understand what a limitation cleverness can be, and to understand how much unkindness damaged not just the other person but the possibilities for you yourself, the speaker, and what courage it took to speak from the heart. What I had then was a voice that leaned hard on irony, on saying the opposite of what I meant, a voice in which I often said things to one person to impress other people, a voice in which I didn’t really know much about what I thought and felt because the logic of the game determined the moves. It was a hard voice on a short leash.
That voice isn’t just in your conversations, it’s inside your head: you don’t say that hurt, or I feel sad; you run angry tirades about why the other party is a terrible person over and over, and you layer on anger to avoid whatever’s hurt or frightened underneath, until it’s certain that you don’t know yourself or your weather, or that it’s you who’s telling the story that’s feeding the fire. You generally don’t know other people either, except as they impinge on you; it’s a failure of imagination going in and reaching out.
But that was just the stories within. The stories I wanted to write and the person who would write them were not yet born. I knew who I admired, but not who I was. You cannot write a single line without a cosmology. I had so much work ahead of me, and I did it slowly, in stages. I was many different writers along a road on which my various books and essays are milestones or shed snakeskins. In journalism school I learned to write straightforward reports, though my first teacher there resented my inability to write the flat prose that was often taken for journalistic objectivity, which even then I saw as a masculine voice. I could keep opinions at bay if I tried hard, but not adjectives.
The television show Dragnet, which was old even then, opened every episode with a hard-boiled man’s voice flatly declaiming, “The story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.” It was like the prose of Ernest Hemingway, which my first college English professor had insisted was the pinnacle of good writing, that stripped-back, clipped, terse language that was also about masculinity and its parsimonious words packed in silences. It was a voice policing many things, and leaving a lot unsaid in the same way that the ironic poses favored by my family did. The tone that we were supposed to deploy as journalists sounded to me like that tone, though at least we were allowed to quote people who might be more expressive and emotional.
I wanted language that could be simple and clear when the subject required it, but sometimes clarity requires complexity. I believe in the irreducible and in invocation and evocation, and I am fond of sentences less like superhighways than winding paths, with the occasional scenic detour or pause to take in the view, since a footpath can traverse steep and twisting terrain that a paved road cannot. I know that sometimes what gets called digression is pulling in a passenger who fell off the boat. I wanted English to be an instrument on which many kinds of music could be played. I wanted writing that could be lavish, subtle, evocative, that could describe mists and moods and hopes and not just facts and solid objects. I wanted to map how the world is connected by patterns and intuitions and resemblances. I wanted to trace the lost patterns that came before the world was broken and find the new ones we could make out of the shards.
Some Uses of Edges
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It’s written in pencil on a large sheet of now-yellowed newsprint whose bottom half has the wide-ruled lines for beginning writers, and I’m pretty sure it’s my first essay, from first grade. In its entirety, it reads, “When I grow up I will never get married.” The illustration on the top half shows a man in a red shirt whose black hair wraps like a nimbus around his circular head and a yellow-haired woman in a flounced purple skirt. “Get married with me,” he says in a cartoon balloon, and she says, “No, no.”
It’s comic and horrible, a sign that I was looking at my mother’s life and thinking that whatever I did, I would try to not do what she did, because she so clearly felt trapped and powerless in a violently miserable marriage. I am the offspring of a victim and her victimizer, of a story that couldn’t be told at the time. Most conventional stories for girls and young women ended in marriage. Women vanished into it. The end. And then what happened and who were they? The fairy tale “Bluebeard” is about a woman who finds out, by disobeying his orders and using the forbidden key to unlock the torture chamber full of her predecessors’ corpses, that she’s married a serial killer, whose intent to kill her is whetted by her knowledge. It’s an unusual fairy tale in that she survives and he does not.
I’d just rejected the principal story for women, and I’d soon elect to try to put myself in charge of stories. That is, the same first year of literacy, after a brief period when I wanted to be a librarian because they spent their days with books, I realized someone actually wrote each book, and decided that that’s what I wanted to do. Such an unwavering goal from early on simplified my path, though the task of writing is never simple. Becoming a writer formalizes the task that faces us all in making a life: to become conscious of what the overarching stories are and whether or not they serve you, and how to compose versions with room for who you are and what you value.
But when it comes to writing, every chapter you write is surrounded by those you don’t, every confession by what remains secret or indescribable or unremembered, and only so much of the chaos and fluidity of experience can be sifted and herded onto pages, whatever your intentions and even your themes. You’re not carving marble; you’re grabbing handfuls of flotsam from a turbulent river; you can arrange the detritus but you can’t write the whole river. Though so much of the stories of those who came before is missing, I understand now how the deep damage passed down from my grandparents formed my parents, and how public histories shaped our private lives in various ways. I’ve lived long enough to know five generations of my family and to see how the weight of history that happened two generations before me—hunger, genocide, poverty, the brutalities of emigration, discrimination, and misogyny—still has consequences two generations after me. I’ve written my parents’ obituaries on that little desk from the woman who didn’t die and lived in the peace that came after they were gone. I’m uninterested in the brutalities of childhood in part because that species has been so dwelt upon while some of the brutalities that come after have not.
Threads are usually the wrong metaphor for things that branch and fork and lead in many directions, but maybe the way many fibers are twisted into a thread means that following a thread should mean unraveling it or recognizing the individual strands. For example, after graduate school, I got hired by a little art magazine as an editorial assistant and I quickly became the assistant editor, by title, and more or less the managing editor in terms of what I actually did. I learned a lot of things there, from the rules of copyediting to how to direct a staff older than me to how to put together a publication to quite a lot about contemporary art, particularly California art. I wrote obituaries, reviews, some features, and a few investigative reports, and endless bits of filler, and with the magazine’s owner coedited the dozen or so often abysmally written pieces we received each Monday until they were ready to send to the printer on Thursday afternoons. It was an all-woman office in downtown Oakland I worked at for three and a half years after I graduated from Berkeley, and it was a haven of calm and routine, and a place where even though the magazine was not a great magazine I learned great things.
I am endlessly thankful that my path to writing detoured through visual art. It was an arena in which artists were asking questions that went down to the very foundations and reached in all directions. Art could be almost anything, which meant that ever
y premise was open to question, every problem to exploration, every situation to intervention, and I came to understand visual art as a kind of philosophical inquiry by other means. I learned from paying attention to the work of some artists, from conversations with others, and from collaborations with yet others, and from wandering through the texts often then referenced in the art world, the French philosophers and feminists, the postmodernists, and other dense things from which useful ideas could be gathered.
When I was a couple of years out of graduate school, still working at the magazine, I went to a slide talk by the photographer Linda Connor about landscape and gender. She had collected a lot of amusing images of men pissing and teeing off golf balls from high places, and she postulated, with this evidence and a lot of more serious contemporary photography, that men photographed space, but women photographed place. It was a funny, tough, insightful talk about how we represent place and what our place is supposed to be. I’m not sure either of us would now agree with the neatness of categories she sorted the world into then, but she stood there as someone with a key to a door I wanted to unlock and pass through.
I cooked up a couple of assignments to write about her so I could learn more. She was sixteen years older than me, in her prime, with a great halo of curly hair and a big circle of friends, a house full of curios and objects she’d picked up around the world, and nonchalance about cooking dinner for forty at a time or carrying through deserts and mountains her enormous view camera that made eight-by-ten-inch negatives. Her black-and-white prints were made on printing-out paper, an archaic light-sensitive—but not too sensitive—paper she could just lay under the negatives and leave out for hours to develop in the sun of her back garden, in what felt as domestic an act as hanging out the laundry.
She was traveling while I was on deadline to write about her, so I asked if I could talk to her while coming along on her drive to New Mexico. It was a tutorial in how to go on a road trip, and she was a brilliant guide to diners, campsites, motels, to when to detour and when to cover distance. We pulled into the grand old pile that is the La Fonda Hotel in downtown Santa Fe one afternoon in early August, where she’d arranged for the artists Meridel Rubenstein—another landscape photographer I knew slightly—and her husband, the painter Jerry West, to meet us. We had come all this way like an arrow flying through the air past many other things to hit exactly this target that was the table in a shadowy alcove in the honeycombed hotel, where Meridel’s assistant, Catherine Harris, was also seated. We ordered margaritas, and Meridel and Jerry invited me to come stay at the house Jerry had built on the prairie outside town on land his parents had homesteaded during the Great Depression.
And Catherine—a darkly beautiful young artist with tawny shoulders in a sleeveless white jumpsuit—and I began talking. We became close friends, perhaps best friends, for years after, had a falling out that kept us apart for years, then I dreamed of her one night and ran into her on the street in the morning—she had moved to San Francisco at that point—and we exchanged phone numbers and picked up where we left off. I am not a proper memoir writer in that I cannot reconstruct a convincing version of any of our conversations, even the long one last summer in the house where she lives in Albuquerque with her husband and two kids and some dogs.
Those conversations were analytical, confessional, usually punctuated with gales of laughter, taking up the pieces of our education, the ideas and templates and pigeonholes, and trying them on to see how they fit our urgent personal needs. I do remember how amused we were one time as we rejected the earth-mother ecofeminism of the moment by noting that our mothers—squeamish, anxious, repulsed by human bodies and their smells and secretions—were not in the least like nature. And of course in those early years we talked about the boys we were pursuing or entangled with or disentangling from, but that was mixed in with books, politics, ideas, projects, and plans.
When we were eating breakfast in the yard of Meridel and Jerry’s house a day or two after I first met her, Catherine told me, as she watched me untangling my damp hair, about going to the pueblo corn dances two days before and seeing women with hair down to the hems of their long dresses, and then about the job she’d had photographing the students at a Native American school and how one of the girls told her about cutting off her own long braids. The story found its way into an essay of mine, because Catherine was told the child “was ashamed to go home afterward, and when she did, her grandfather chided her gently, telling her that her hair contained all her thoughts and memories.”
I had published journalism and reviews, but I was exploring a more intimate, lyrical kind of writing, one where the spirit guiding the connections and trajectory was intuitive and associative rather than linear or logical. The results were short and dense, though this essay was a thicket of stories about hair and its power. Catherine’s anecdote gave me its conclusion. Then she made a photograph of me sitting and looking back at her with my own hair hanging to my waist, against one of Jerry’s unfinished adobe walls, the concrete scraped into rough ridges so the mud would adhere.
We began a correspondence by mail and then email and launched a series of adventures, driving back and forth together between Santa Fe and San Francisco, doing projects together and encouraging each other as she came into her own as an artist and then a landscape architect and I kept writing. And so out of the lecture of Linda’s that I wandered into so casually came some ideas about place and landscape, friendships, eventual collaborations with all four of these artists, a cherished friendship with Catherine in particular, and an anecdote about hair as a repository of memory. And a return to the region in which I spent the first two years of my life, a place I fell in love with as an adult for its sense of deep time on the ground and constant change in the sky.
Your life should be mapped not in lines but branches, forking and forking again. Meridel introduced me to people who became significant friends in New Mexico, and I’ve returned there nearly every summer since, and that summer landscape became one of my great joys. Jerry deepened my understanding of the place he’s now spent more than eighty years in and paints with such love. Catherine moved to New York for a few years, and I first visited the city as an adult to stay with her (as a young art critic, I’d thought that I was probably supposed to move there to plunge more deeply into the art world or climb its career ladders, and when my writing began to be about western places, I was hugely relieved that I’d written my way out of that fate).
Perhaps you could tell a story the way children play hopscotch, returning to the beginning and going a little further each time, tossing your token into another square, covering the same ground in a slightly different pursuit each time. You can’t tell it all at once, but you can cover the same ground a few different ways, or trace one route through it. In 1988 I went to the Nevada Test Site for the first time, to join the immense antinuclear activist gatherings there that my younger brother was already helping to orchestrate. That was a path I would travel far on, meeting extraordinary people, and finding another route into the landscapes I craved, into a world far beyond San Francisco. A path, or a gate.
Out there in the Nevada desert one day the photographer Richard Misrach met me, walking up with his huge view camera slung casually over his shoulder. His big color photographs of places of violence and destruction in the American West had a major impact then and were the subject of some controversy, from people who thought he was glorifying the wrong things, perhaps because they believed that only the good should be beautiful, while he was interested in the tensions of a hideous beauty and the demands it made on us when the ethical and the sublime or beautiful are at odds. He became another artist whose work quite literally made me think—about that conflict between beauty and morality, the invisibility and pervasiveness of certain kinds of violence, the legacies of the conquest of the West, and what he often called “not the representation of politics but the politics of representation.” Later in the 1990s, I wrote the tex
t for a couple of his books.
The support of these artists who were so much further along in their work and their sense of purpose and self gave me the confidence to move on from regarding myself as a critic and a journalist to trying on being a writer. Or rather they told me that’s what I was when they told me they wanted to work with me, and reminded me that that had been my original goal I had somehow backed down from. Criticism and journalism had felt like subordinate forms of writing in which you were always serving a subject and operating by constraining rules. To be regarded as a writer freed me to feel that anything was possible and everything was available.
One day an artist I knew told me that Ann Hamilton was making an installation in an industrial space in the city, and she was looking for volunteers to help, so I wandered down to Capp Street Project, a former auto-detailing garage in the Mission District. Ann had become recently and suddenly famous for her immense, ambitious installations, often involving vast accretions of small objects and materials, enlivened by performers present throughout the duration of the exhibition. She was only five years older than me, full of midwestern steadiness and modesty, but also an extraordinary confidence manifested in the sheer scale and effort of her works, at a time when many young women were making what felt like miniatures.
Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 10