Solnitessence

_Rhizome_detail_MC
Vascular bundle of a fern rhizome (Image from a fascinating website, Urbagram which addresses a set of interlinked concepts, models, speculations, probings, essays and artefacts based on urban systems.)

I first encountered Rebecca Solnit quite by accident. About ten years ago I was making my usual pilgrimage to the lusciously overstuffed and highly iconic City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco when As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art fell off the shelf and into my hands. I knew nothing about Solnit, and her bio was not the academic-centric one so typical for an art critic. But I read Eve on the plane heading back to Boston and fell under its spell. I have been an unwavering fan of everything Solnit has written ever since.

Solnit is a woman of strong opinions and a fiery intelligence—one friend described a dinner party where she was a guest as harrowingly intense—but what makes her a not quite companionable party guest is also what drives her compelling work. Her interests are far ranging, from politics to art to urbanism to disaster to illness. But in every case her approach to a topic is a rich tapestry of interwovenness, full of unexpected turns and an idiosyncratic take on the facts. She is not a writer that will appeal to linear thinkers who like an arboreal structure to thought. David Ulin wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “That’s classic Solnit, to take what sounds like conventional wisdom and reframe it on her own terms…She is what used to be known as a public intellectual, an essayist defined by her ability to connect the dots between seemingly disparate ideas.”

The dot connecting is even more masterful in her most recent book, The Faraway Nearby. This very personal volume begins with the arrival of an oversized box of ripe apricots picked from her mother’s tree. It is from that unexpected starting place that Solnit finds a way to tie those apricots to so many stories and realities, the public as well as the private.

One of the many themes she circles around repeatedly is storytelling itself. “The fruit on my floor made me start to read fairy tales again. They are full of overwhelming piles and heaps that need to be contended with.” The assignment to sort, so common in myths and folktales, elicits these wise insights from Solnit:

Such tasks are always the obstacles to becoming, to being set free, or finding love. Carrying out the tasks undoes the curse. Enchantment in these stories is the state of being disguised, displaced in an animal’s body or another’s identity. Disenchantment is the blessing of becoming yourself…

Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into it and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route of becoming…Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of the youngest sons, abandoned children…Fairy tales are children’s stories not in who they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one. In them, power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindess.

Solnit’s method of sorting through life’s mysteries and seeing connections everywhere—a style I often refer to as the “e) all of the above” approach—is one that I feel completely at home with. She is a good example of a rhizomatic thinker (as articulated by the works of Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari) and her skill just keeps getting better.

Her work brings to mind the towering figure of another brilliant and self-styled thinker/writer, Susan Sontag. Solnit wrote a tribute about Sontag in 2005 just after she passed away, and her words about Sontag could apply to her own work as well:

One of the things to be appreciated about Sontag, I think, is that she considered everything a proper occasion for more thinking, more analyzing, more writing…one of the things clear through all her work is that she was not interested merely in writing, but in tending and cultivating a literature-based public sphere in which ideas and principles mattered. It was a romantic idea, but not an unrealistic one—since, after all, she realized it.

Sontag and Solnit are fierce. And we all know that fierceness in a woman is greeted differently in the world than fierceness in a man. Why that is so is an endless discussion and not one I am entering into today. But part of the power of both of these writers is their unswerving devotion to doing it and saying it their own way. And if it were possible to name the primary theme underlying seven years’ worth of posts on Slow Muse, it would be just that.

2 Replies to “Solnitessence”

  1. I don’t know Solnit’s work, but the paragraph about fairy tales that you quoted is beautifully written and analyzed.
    And congratulations on all the years of this blog; I know it for a much shorter time, but truly appreciate the range and depth of your thought.

  2. I too have not yet read Solnit, but checked out her book on Amazon. One new fan wrote:

    “The Faraway Nearby, is the first work I have read by Rebecca Solnit. I am awestruck with her literary genius, and her genius in general. I did not agree with many of her views but that is neither here or there. Incomparable, is the only way to describe her incredible ability to put into words the abstract feelings and emotions written upon her psyche. Many of the feelings and emotions she shares are common to humankind, but few of us could come remotely close to putting these into acute focus with words, written or spoken.She shares that this book was written as an emergency… Dealing with her mothers disappearance into the mists of Alzheimer’s, dealing with the trauma of surgery, possible breast cancer, the death of a dear friend, and the pain of a breakup with her boyfriend, wow, a walk on a thin line for any of us…A master of description, a rare gift of literary ability to her readers, Rebecca Solnit walks above the realm of the average gifted author.”

    Solnit herself writes to her readers that:

    “She is very grateful to her readers, for writers are nothing without readers and books are dormant treasures that come alive when they’re open and read; they live inside your head….”

    I have been reading and re-reading fairy tales for years and have a huge book of them under the bed table. They fascinate me, haunt me, and educate me. They shed a light on the darkness of the psyche. And I agree with Soinit, that most of the stories are about powerless and how that is dealt with, especially as a child.

    Thanks, Deborah, for turning me onto her. I will read this one, though I have to admit my trepidation. As I am watching my own parents moving into their later years, and witnessing so many friends deal with Alzheimer and Parkinson’s Disease in their parents, that childhood feeling of powerlessness is coming up like a retched fairytale of it’s own. And I am not sure I want to look at it or keep it under the end table by my bed. Is this a book better read after the fact?

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