Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

I wanted writing that could be lavish, subtle, evocative, that could describe mists and moods and hopes and n...

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.

My parents were, even after decades in the middle class, so governed by old Depression-era fear of poverty that their lives were cramped and cautious.

A book is a little like a star, in that what you read is what the author was passionately immersed in long before, sometimes only because of the time it takes a book to be written, edited, printed, and distributed. And because often the time it takes to make a book means that it represents the residue of interests that preceded the writing.

I’d always heard of it as a celebration of liberation, but you could only read it that way if you imagine that you’re one of the poets, not one of the women. If you’re one of the women, you’ve just been told you’re no one, except a mantrap a bitch and a baggage.

This was a short film, Pull My Daisy

How do you make art when the art that’s all around you keeps telling you to shut up and do the dishes?

I did like some things about Kerouac’s prose style, just not the gender politics of the three men who were most often meant when people talked about the Beats.

Years before I took on the Beats as a subject, I’d had an even more intense sense of erasure at the opening for an exhibition of Ginsberg’s photographs.

I wanted to shout and to shout that I was not disrupting it because a woman is no one, to shout that since I did not exist my shouting did not exist either and could not be objectionable. I was, in that room, that time, clear and angry about my nonexistence that was otherwise mostly just a brooding anxiety somewhere below the surface. But I remained silent; contributing to the sense of women as burdensome, crazy, angry, intrusive, unfit was not going to help.

And later on he notes of the women in these books, “Only in death can they be joined in an embrace as pure as that of males. The only good woman is a dead woman!”

It had been a long time since I’d recalled how bitter my early endeavors to put out books were, in their own small way, or rather how fervently men had sought to prevent me from publishing. I was lucky in that I overcame the obstacles they erected, but I presume others did not. And now I can see how white the world of publishing was and is, and that though some doors slammed because of my gender, others remained open because of my race.

The desire to casually annihilate the years of work and the moment of arrival that a first book represented was stunning. It didn’t help that, so far as I could tell, the editor who received the letter seemed to think it quite plausible that I had gotten my facts gravely wrong.

Native people had been rendered invisible by representations or rather nonrepresentations—in signage, in the more visible of its two museums, in land management practices, and in the depiction of Yosemite by environmental organizations and artists as an uninhabited wilderness recently discovered by white people and a place people only belonged as visitors.

Among other things, it undid the tidy nature/culture binary that was so widely used to organize ideas back then.

The book’s epigraph was James Baldwin’s spectacular sentence “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime,”

When we were already out on the road, I got suspicious and found a pay phone from which I called the first bookstore he was supposed to have booked me into. I found out he’d never contacted it. I made more calls. He was a liar. None of the events he’d claimed to have scheduled me into existed. When I did radio interviews it turned out that the interviewers hadn’t received the copies I’d asked him to send, so they had no clue what we should talk about. He had, one way or another, decided to bury my book.

On a few occasions, as I’ve watched people try to whip up hate campaigns against me on social media, I’ve thought that had they tried to do so at the outset rather than decades into my life in print, their efforts might have had an impact that would be harder to ignore or override

Not everyone makes it through, and what tries to kill you takes a lot of your energy that might be better used elsewhere and makes you tired and anxious.

Contemplating the wonder that was Ed, dressed, I came to recognize that though looking amazing is usually thought of as either a mildly despicable self-glorification or a straightforward strategy to access sex, it can be a gift to the people around you, a sort of public art and a celebration, and, with wardrobes like Ed’s, even a kind of wit and commentary.

Yes, which is why I don’t mind that I am not aesthetically pleasing—I don’t have to look at myself, but I can enjoy the beauty of others. At least until the trends of beauty move far from what pleases my eye. But then I can marvel at the hideousness of them, which elicits a different kind of pleasure.

cherishing the way the city was a magnet for people desperate to get away from the wholesome America that wanted to kill them; awestruck by the vision and heroism of some of the political leadership in the streets and eventually in office.

The gay men and lesbians around me encouraged me to imagine that gender is whatever you want it to be, and that the rules were breakable, and that the price to pay for breaking them was generally worth it and then some.

They modeled for me the radical beauty of refusing your assignment, and if they did not have to be what they were supposed to be, then neither did I.

I wonder about them, about what it must be like to be the kind of person who expected to dominate a country and culture forever and to find safety in homogeneity and danger—mostly imagined, or of a metaphysical variety—in heterogeneous society.

They are the ones still making laws and subverting elections.

I was witnessing his simultaneous appearance and disappearance, the former as an artist rising in ambition and visibility, the latter from the disease that killed him at forty in the summer of 1993.

If what a man does to a woman, or to anyone he penetrates, is imagined as violating and despoiling her, humiliation and degradation come to be indistinguishable from sexuality or a proxy for it in the puritanical imagination. So many of the thousands of sexual assault accounts I’ve read in recent years include acts that have nothing to do with the bodily satisfaction often presumed to be the goal.

Redefining women and their roles redefined men and masculinity and vice versa. If the genders were not opposite but a spectrum of variations on some central theme of being human, if there were many ways to execute your role or refuse it, and liberation for each gender was seen as being allowed to take up what had been considered the proper role and goods and even feelings of the other or find some third (or seventh) way, then the citadel would be broken and everyone could travel freely.

Bob Fulkerson was a rugged outdoorsman and political organizer, a fifth-generation Nevadan devoted to his state, but he was and is someone who calls me up sometimes just to leave me a message that he loves me, almost thirty years after we met at the Nevada Test Site.

Oh weird, we’re friends on facebook; he lives in Reno. I never considered whether he was gay or not gay, but he shares a lot of Nevada history & photos.

Open enough to grow and closed enough to hold together is what a life must also be.

It may be hard for those who came later to understand how utterly ignorant we non-Natives were then, how much Native people had disappeared from or never entered the mainstream conversation or were talked of exclusively in the past tense as people who had vanished long ago and would never appear to speak up on their own behalf. They were also treated as people who had never existed in the first place when artists, photographers, environmentalists, poets, explorers, historians imagined and depicted North America as a place in which human beings had just arrived, or rather that white men had recently discovered.

The Native North American creation myths in which the world was never perfect, never fallen, and never finished being created shone a clear light on the problems with Genesis and the Judeo-Christian preoccupations with perfection and purity and the fall from grace.

The men who wrote these reports seemed like earnest bureaucrats, sometimes sympathetic to the plight of the people they were helping to exterminate, always convinced of their own decency. It is the innocence that constitutes the crime.

So I roamed and explored and made the most of the invitations that came my way. I was rich in time, and alive with excitement about the worlds and connections and ideas opening up to me.

Can people really feel this way? This is what I want to soak up.

Things are one way and then another and the transitions are hard to mark.

What she told me years later was the kind of story I’d collected to make the case that you can’t assume that you know why what you’re doing matters. You can’t at least declare failure immediately, because consequences are not always direct, or immediate, or obvious, and the indirect consequences matter.

I loved this anecdote.

My university interlocutor had accused me of offering palliatives for marketing reasons, but what I’d wanted to offer is encouragement, a word that, though it carries the stigma of niceness, literally means to instill courage. Encouragement not to make people feel good, but to make them feel powerful. I’d eventually realize that what I was doing could equally be characterized as stealing away the best excuse for doing nothing: that you have no power and nothing you do matters. It was nurture of people’s sense of possibility, and it was dissent from a lot of the most familiar narratives in which despair and cynicism—that weird formula in which overconfidence about outcome undermines one’s will to play a role—justify nonparticipation. Something profound had shifted for me to feel capable of changing minds and responsible for tending to hearts. A sense of powerlessness and disconnectedness had faded away and a sense of possibility had replaced it, about my own capacity and role as well as about the way that change itself works.

It prompted an anonymous commenter at the website LiveJournal to coin the word mansplaining soon after it first appeared, a word that caught on, that entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2014,

there are two ways of making contributions that matter. One is to make work that stays visible before people’s eyes; the other is to make work that is so deeply absorbed that it ceases to be what people see and becomes how they see.

Credibility means that when you get into those arenas, people are willing to believe you, by which I don’t mean that women never lie, but that stories should be measured on their own terms and context, rather than patriarchy’s insistence that women are categorically unqualified to speak, emotional rather than rational, vindictive, incoherent, delusional, manipulative, unfit to be heeded—those things often shouted over a woman in the process of saying something challenging (though now death threats are used as a shortcut, and some of those threats are carried out, notably with women who leave their abusers, because silencing can be conversational or it can be premeditated murder).

Paradise is often described as a place with nothing to do, nothing required of its inhabitants. I don’t desire a paradise that demands nothing of us, and I see paradise as not a destination to arrive in, but a pole star by which to navigate.

Yes