The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

by Rebecca Solnit

  In one landmark incident during the week of the second inauguration of G. W. Bush, American soldiers killed a father and mother at a checkpoint, leaving their five children instantly orphaned as well as bloodied inside the family car. The sequence of images captured by photographer Chris Hondros was widely seen in Europe, and a U.S. general in Qatar reportedly demanded the television station Al Jazeera stop showing them, but few Americans saw them. Photographs of the coffins of dead soldiers were not permitted throughout the war, though Russ Kick of the website The Memory Hole obtained several through Freedom of Information Act requests and released them in April of 2004. When news anchor Ted Koppel commemorated the dead by showing their faces and reciting their names, he too was denounced as unpatriotic; patriotism consisted of voluntarily renouncing intelligence of all kinds, even unclassified intelligence. Most dramatically of all, photographs taken by the torturers themselves of torture at Abu Ghraib Prison near Baghdad launched one of the biggest scandals of the war when they were leaked to the media and journalists such as Seymour Hersh made something of them—one of the few proud moments in a fairly shameful era for the news. Photojournalists were making compelling and even revelatory pictures, but the media were mediating between them and the pacified public.

  At the start of the war on Iraq, then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously proposed, “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” It was a weirdly interesting statement from an ordinarily thoughtless man. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek added a fourth category for him: “the ‘unknown knowns,’ things we don’t know that we know, which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the ‘knowledge which doesn’t know itself,’” as [psychoanalyst Jacques] Lacan used to say.” You could translate that into visual terms. There are the things we know we see. There are the things we know we do not see. Then there are the things we do not know we do not see. And finally, there are the things in plain sight we choose not to see, or repress. Walter Benjamin referred to photography as the “optical unconscious,” and that’s one way to describe this fourth category.

  Photography and visibility have a tangled history. The 1838 picture by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre often hailed as the first photograph depicts in sharp detail a Parisian boulevard on which a lone figure is visible, or rather his legs are, because he stood still while his shoes were shined. The shoe shiner is a blur at his feet, and his upper body and head are also dissolved into the atmosphere that is time itself. The rest of the people are invisible, because they were in motion and the exposure was slow. The photograph is usually described as failing to show the people who were on the boulevard. It could also described as a different way of seeing—the image saw through the people present to perceive all the hard still surfaces, a little reminiscent of the neutron bomb that would annihilate people but leave structures and infrastructure intact. The first photograph is a bomb of vision, showing us the world as we do not see it, and it is handily emblematic that it scraped human beings from the view. Photography has ever since represented various kinds of visibility and invisibility. The blue-sensitive films of the wet-plate era turned blue and cloudy skies into milk-white expanses, unless you exposed separately for the sky and the ground—as many did, and some, such as Eadweard Muybridge, added clouds from other negatives; photography was also manipulated from the start. The slowness of vision was another way the camera saw differently than the eye—water became filmy white stuff, and anything in motion blurred—until Muybridge’s 1870s breakthroughs that turned photography into a medium faster than the human eye could see, and another world of the real motion of horses’ legs, women’s gestures, water’s splashes and spills opened up.

  The snapshot was originally a term for guns—for pulling up your gun suddenly to take a shot—and cameras were only thought of in terms of guns when they became light and fast. Shooting was never more than a metaphor. Paglen points out, though, that Muybridge’s sequential motion studies led to Harold Edgerton’s stroboscopic photographs of super-fast motion, which led both to his photography of the first atomic explosion and to his work on triggers for such bombs. Knowledge is power, and visual knowledge is one variety of it, but information rarely otherwise crosses over into action in such an extraordinary way. X-rays provided a look inside the human body, and telescopic and microscopic photography allowed us not only to see into scales and distances otherwise off-limits to the human eye but also record those images permanently. Infrared film provided another version of the world, and in recent decades a whole range of technologies, from CAT scans to probes inserted into the body, have appeared. Satellites show what a human eye might see if the human body were capable of sustaining itself in endless whirling orbit around the earth, but show it with a degree of detail at distance the human eye does not have. For a long time, the “photographic world” chose to deal largely with art photography, but in recent years the whole panoply of mechanical image-making technologies have come under scrutiny, the imagistic regime under which we now live.

  Photographs are mute. The drab satellite image of Iraq that was used to insist the place was making forbidden weapons was almost meaningless without the language that contextualized and explained it, truthfully or not. The incomprehensible is another kind of invisibility. Where most of us see nothing or see meaningless signs, doctors see symptoms, or trainers and fellow athletes see aptitude, or detectives see tiny signs giving away insincerity and anxiety, or carpenters see types of wood, technique, and structural soundness. Much military activity also requires educated eyes to see. The bright, moving dots in the night sky that are surveillance satellites, the planes at regional airports that are torture transports, the offices that are fronts for dubious activities, the buildings in which secret operations are carried out take effort to see at all—and yet another kind of effort to recognize, to see with knowledge of what one is seeing, with knowledge that is not strictly visible. They are perhaps another kind of unknown knowns, invisible visibles. A minority dedicates themselves to learning to see this way. We could call what they do seeing in the dark.

  2010

  REVOLUTION OF THE SNAILS

  Encounters with the Zapatistas

  I grew up listening to vinyl records, dense spirals of information that we played at 33 revolutions per minute. The original use of the word revolution was in the sense of something coming round or turning round, the revolution of the heavenly bodies, for example. It’s interesting to think that just as the word radical comes from the Latin word for “roots” and means going to the root of a problem, so revolution originally means to rotate, to return, or to cycle, something those who live according to the agricultural cycles of the year know well.

  Only in 1450, says my old Oxford Etymological Dictionary, does it come to mean “an instance of a great change in affairs or in some particular thing.” The year 1450: forty-two years before Columbus sailed on his first voyage to the not-so-new world, not long after Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable type in Europe, where time itself was coming to seem less cyclical and more linear—as in the second definition of this new sense of revolution in my dictionary, “a complete overthrow of the established government in any country or state by those who were previously subject to it.”

  We live in revolutionary times, but the revolution we are living through is a slow turning around from one set of beliefs and practices toward another, a turn so slow that most people fail to observe our society revolving—or rebelling. The true revolutionary needs to be as patient as a snail.

  The revolution is not some sudden change that has yet to come, but the very transformative and questioning atmosphere in which all of us have lived for the past half century, since perhaps the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 or the publication of Rachel Carson’s attack on the corporate-industrial-chemical complex, Silent Spring, in 1962; certainly since the
amazing events of 1989, when the peoples of Eastern Europe nonviolently liberated themselves from their Soviet-totalitarian governments; or since the people of South Africa undermined the white apartheid regime of that country and cleared the way for Nelson Mandela to get out of jail; or since 1992, when the Native peoples of the Americas upended the celebration of the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in this hemisphere with a radical rewriting of history and an assertion that they are still here; or even since 1994, when this radical rewriting wrote a new chapter in southern Mexico called Zapatismo.

  Five years ago, the Zapatista revolution took as one of its principal symbols the snail and its spiral shell. Their revolution spirals outward and backward, away from some of the colossal mistakes of capitalism’s savage alienation, industrialism’s regimentation, and toward old ways and small things; it also spirals inward via new words and new thoughts. The astonishing force of the Zapatistas has come from their being deeply rooted in the ancient past. “We teach our children our language to keep alive our grandmothers,” said one Zapatista woman. And so that force also comes from the half-born other world in which, as they say, many worlds are possible. They travel both ways on their spiral.

  REVOLUTIONARY LANDSCAPES

  At the end of 2007, I arrived on their territory for a remarkable meeting between the Zapatista women and the world, the third of their encuentros since the 1994 launch of their revolution. Somehow, among the miracles of Zapatista words and ideas I read at a distance, I lost sight of what a revolution might look like, must look like, on the ground—until late last year when I arrived on that pale, dusty ground after a long ride in a van on winding, deeply rutted dirt roads through the forested highlands and agricultural clearings of Chiapas, Mexico. The five hours of travel from the big town of San Cristobal de las Casas through that intricate landscape took us past countless small cornfields on slopes, wooden houses, thatched pigsties and henhouses, gaunt horses, a town or two, more forest, and then more forest, even a waterfall.

  Everything was green except the dry cornstalks, a lush green in which December flowers grew. There were tree-sized versions of what looked like the common, roadside, yellow black-eyed Susans of the American West and a palm-sized, lavender-pink flower on equally tall, airily branching stalks whose breathtaking beauty seemed to come from equal parts vitality, vulnerability, and bravura—a little like the women I listened to for the next few days.

  The van stopped at the junction that led to the center of the community of La Garrucha. There, we checked in with men with bandannas covering the lower halves of their faces, who sent us on to a field of tents further uphill. The big sign behind them read, “You are in Territory of Zapatistas in Rebellion. Here the People Govern and the Government Obeys.” Next to it, another sign addressed the political prisoners from last year’s remarkable uprising in Oaxaca in which, for four months, the inhabitants held the city and airwaves and kept the government out. It concluded, “You are not alone. You are with us. EZLN.”

  As you may know, EZLN stands for Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army for National Liberation), a name akin to those from many earlier Latin American uprisings. The Zapatistas—mostly Mayan indigenous rebels from remote, rural communities of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost and poorest state—had made careful preparations for a decade before their uprising on January 1, 1994.

  They began like conventional rebels, arming themselves and seizing six towns. They chose that first day of January because it was the date that the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, which meant utter devastation for small farmers in Mexico; but they had also been inspired by the five hundredth anniversary, fourteen months before, of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas and the way Native groups had reframed that half-millennium as one of endurance and injustice for the indigenous peoples of this hemisphere.

  Their rebellion was also meant to take the world at least a step beyond the false dichotomy between capitalism and the official state socialism of the Soviet Union, which had collapsed a few years before. It was to be the first realization of what needed to come next: a rebellion, above all, against capitalism and neoliberalism. Fourteen years later, it is a qualified success: many landless campesino families in Zapatista-controlled Chiapas now have land; many who were subjugated now govern themselves; many who were crushed now have a sense of agency and power. Five areas in Chiapas have since that revolution existed outside the reach of the Mexican government under their own radically different rules.

  Beyond that, the Zapatistas have given the world a model—and, perhaps even more important, a language—with which to reimagine revolution, community, hope, and possibility. Even if, in the near future, they were to be definitively defeated on their own territory, their dreams, powerful as they have been, are not likely to die. And there are clouds on the horizon: the government of President Felipe Calderón may turn what has, for the last fourteen years, been a low-intensity conflict in Chiapas into a full-fledged war of extermination. A war on dreams, on hope, on rights, and on the old goals of Emiliano Zapata, the hero of the Mexican Revolution a century before: tierra y libertad, land and liberty.

  The Zapatistas emerged from the jungle in 1994, armed with words as well as guns. Their initial proclamation, the First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, rang with familiar, outmoded-sounding revolutionary rhetoric, but shortly after the uprising took the world by storm, the Zapatistas’ tone shifted. They have been largely nonviolent ever since, except in self-defense, though they are ringed by the Mexican army and local paramilitaries (and maintain their own disciplined army, a long line of whose masked troops patrolled La Garrucha at night, armed with sticks). What shifted most was their language, which metamorphosed into something unprecedented—a revolutionary poetry full of brilliant analysis as well as of metaphor, imagery, and humor, the fruit of extraordinary imaginations.

  Some of their current stickers and T-shirts—the Zapatistas generate more cool paraphernalia than any rock band—speak of “el fuego y la palabra,” the fire and the word. Many of those words came from the inspired pen of their military commander, the nonindigenous Subcomandante Marcos, but that pen reflected the culture of a people whose memory is long and environment is rich—if not in money and ease, then in animals, images, traditions, and ideas.

  Take, for example, the word caracol, which literally means “snail” or “spiral shell.” In August 2003, the Zapatistas renamed their five autonomous communities caracoles. The snail then became an important image. I noticed everywhere embroideries, T-shirts, and murals showing that land snail with the spiraling shell. Often the snail wore a black ski mask. The term caracol has the vivid vitality, the groundedness, that often escapes metaphors as they become part of our disembodied language.

  When they reorganized as caracoles, the Zapatistas reached back to Mayan myth to explain what the symbol meant to them. Or Subcomandante Marcos did, attributing the story as he does with many stories to “Old Antonio,” who may be a fiction, a composite, or a real source of the indigenous lore of the region:

  The wise ones of olden times say that the hearts of men and women are in the shape of a caracol, and that those who have good in their hearts and thoughts walk from one place to the other, awakening gods and men for them to check that the world remains right. They say that they say that they said that the caracol represents entering into the heart, that this is what the very first ones called knowledge. They say that they say that they said that the caracol also represents exiting from the heart to walk the world. . . . The caracoles will be like doors to enter into the communities and for the communities to come out; like windows to see us inside and also for us to see outside; like loudspeakers in order to send far and wide our word and also to hear the words from the one who is far away.

  The caracoles are clusters of villages, but described as spirals, they reach out to encompass the whole world and begin from within the heart. And so I arrived in the center of one caracol, a litt
le further up the road from those defiant signs, in the broad, unpaved plaza around which the public buildings of the village of La Garrucha are clustered, including a substantial two-story, half-built clinic. Walking across that clearing were Zapatista women in embroidered blouses or broad collars and aprons stitched of rows of ribbon that looked like inverted rainbows—and those ever-present ski masks in which all Zapatistas have appeared publicly since their first moment out of the jungles in 1994. (Or almost all: a few wear bandannas instead.)

  That first glimpse was breathtaking. Seeing and hearing those women for the three days that followed, living briefly on rebel territory, watching people brave enough to defy an army and the world’s reigning ideology, imaginative enough to invent (or reclaim) a viable alternative was one of the great passages of my life. The Zapatistas had been to me a beautiful idea, an inspiration, a new language, a new kind of revolution. When they spoke at this Third Encounter of the Zapatista Peoples with the People of the World, they became a specific group of people grappling with practical problems. I thought of Martin Luther King Jr. when he said he had been to the mountaintop. I have been to the forest.