Recollections of My Nonexistence

by Rebecca Solnit

Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Art could be almost anything, which meant that every 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.

Ann had converted much of the budget for her show into pennies, because she was ambivalent about the lavish budgets for such projects. The 750,000 pennies that $7,500 dollars translated into would be put on display, then scraped up and taken to the bank to be washed, counted, and converted to currency that could be donated to an education project. In the meantime, she was filling much of the floor of the space with a vast rectangle—forty-five feet by thirty-two feet—of pennies laid down, one by one, on the cement floor “on a skin of honey.” Honey was the adhesive, but also a way of referencing another system of circulation than money, of putting together how bees store their labor and how we do. Ann had been much impressed by a bricklayer in her childhood, and then gone into fine art through textiles. She was interested in how a small gesture repeated enough made something large, and so three quarters of a million gestures laid down that many bits of currency in a shining skin of money.

It was a lovely goal or rather orientation when it was far away throughout my childhood and teens and college years, but when it came time to do it—well, the mountain is beautiful in the distance and steep when you’re on it. Becoming a writer formalizes something essential about becoming a human: the task of figuring out what stories to tell and how to tell them and who you are in relation to them, which you choose or which choose you, and what the people around you desire and how much to listen to them and how much to listen to other things, deeper in and farther away. But also, you have to write. I had published a lot of essays and reviews by that time, but a book—it was like going from building toolsheds to a palace.

Nonfiction is at its best an act of putting the world back together—or tearing some piece of it apart to find what’s hidden beneath the assumptions or conventions—and in this sense creation and destruction can be akin. The process can be incandescent with excitement, whether from finding some unexpected scrap of information or from recognizing the patterns that begin to arise as the fragments begin to assemble. Something you didn’t know well comes into focus, and the world makes sense in a new way, or an old assumption is gutted, and then you try to write it down.

The conduct of the frisky artist seemed to come from something very familiar to me, a sense that since young women are nobody, nothing you do with them is on the record, which was disconcerting to run into while I was making the record of his life and achievements.

How do you make art when the art that’s all around you keeps telling you to shut up and do the dishes? What do you do with culture heroes who have had beneficial effects but not for you or people like you, whether it’s personal malice or categorical scorn?

Which means that some heterosexual men and for that matter whole societies, notably ours, imagine sex with women is punitive, damaging, adversarial, an act that enhances his status and demolishes hers.

Inside homophobia is misogyny: the act of being a man is a constant striving to not be a woman. 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.

Queer culture made it clear that a life can have as its stable foundation friendships so strong that they are a form of family, that family too can be liberated from the conventional roles of spousal contracts and begetting and blood kinship. It was a bulwark against the widespread, wearing insistence that only the nuclear family supplies love and stability—which sometimes it does, but we all know that sometimes it supplies misery and sabotage.

The skull quadruples in size in the first few years, and if the bones knit together too soon, they restrict the growth of the brain; and if they don’t knit at all the brain remains unprotected. Open enough to grow and closed enough to hold together is what a life must also be.

For me there was tremendous hope in the reemergence of people grounded in something other than the Judeo-Christian and European worldviews, who had lived in places for millennia without, for the most part, devastating them.

I argued that we had a lot of power, a history of forgotten and undervalued victories, that while some things were getting worse, the long view—especially if you were nonmale, or nonstraight, or nonwhite—showed some remarkable improvement in our rights and roles, and that the consequences of our acts were not knowable in advance.

But I learned from the artists I researched and wrote about and the movements that changed the culture that 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. It is no longer in front of them; it’s inside them. It is no longer the artist; it’s the people who are no longer only the audience.

Though patriarchy often claims a monopoly on rationality and reason, those committed to it will discount the most verifiable, coherent, ordinary story told by a woman and accept any fantastical account by a man, will pretend sexual violence is rare and false accusations common, and so forth. Why tell stories if they will only bring forth a new round of punishment or disparagement? Or if they will be ignored as if they meant nothing? This is how preemptive silencing works.

There are three key things that matter in having a voice: audibility, credibility, and consequence.

The disregard for a woman’s voice that underlies sexual violence is inseparable from the disregard afterward if a woman goes to the police, the university authorities, her family, her church, the courts, to the hospital for a rape kit, and is ignored, discredited, blamed, shamed, disbelieved. They are both assaults on the full humanity and membership of a person in her society, and the devaluation in the latter arena enables the former. Sexual assault can only thrive in situations of unequal audibility, credibility, and consequence. This, far more than any other disparity, is the precondition for epidemic gender violence.

Sylvia Plath at nineteen had mourned that “I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night” but she felt unable to because of her gender. I was born thirty years later and I and we have been more fortunate.

Efficiency says that grief should follow a road map and things should be gotten over and that then there should be that word that applies to wounds and minds both: closure. But time and pain are a more fluid, unpredictable business, expanding and contracting, closing and opening and changing.

Sometimes it’s not despite but because of something terrible that you become who you are meant to be and set to the work you’re meant to do.

William Stafford: “I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.”