Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

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.

underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to make.

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.

Your life should be mapped not in lines but branches, forking and forking again.

Things seen small at a distance lack detail, and growing up when I did you saw California through eastern telescopes when you saw it at all.

There was a sexual geography in San Francisco, with the leather scene on Folsom Street, trans women and drag queens in the Tenderloin, gay men on Polk Street before the vitality of that scene faded as the Castro became the new capital, and lesbian bars and clubs in North Beach before my time and then in various places around the city before they too faded away.

Growing up, we say, as though we were trees, as though altitude was all that there was to be gained, but so much of the process is growing whole as the fragments are gathered, the patterns found.

I began exploring and camping, wandering first in local places and English ideas of landscape and then into what lay over the horizon, the American West, the dry lands and open spaces that lay east of us, and non-Western ideas of nature that were more about understanding patterns and relationships than making pictures out of it all.

We would like the people involved in monstrosity to be recognizably monstrous, but many of them are diligent, unquestioning, obedient adherents to the norms of their time, trained in what to feel and think and notice and what not to.