The Unlikely and the Unimaginable

Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit (Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian)

My respect and admiration for the writer Rebecca Solnit is long standing. The author of many extraordinary books, she posted a short essay online a few years ago that went viral immediately. No wonder, since the title captures in one phrase an experience that every woman I know has had, and continues to encounter in spite of everything that has happened over the last 50 years: Men Explain Things to Me.

In a new collection of seven essays that takes the first as its title, Solnit has allowed gender to be a leitmotif that strings these insightful explorations together. As much as I enjoyed the title essay in Men Explain Things to Me, my favorite in the collection is Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable, a rich blend of the fearless probing that characterizes the minds and writings of Solnit, Virginia Woolf and Susan Sontag. And because the inexplicable has been a leitmotif for me these eight years of Slow Muse posting, exploring the realm of the inchoate in company with these three is pure pleasure.

Solnit begins with a Woolf quote: “The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.” The future is an unknown and should be just that, a radical idea in a culture that longs for control, prognostication and predictability. Solnit then quotes wilderness survivalist Laurence Gonzalez: “The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.” It is our nature to be fearful of the unknown ahead, and often it feels easier to choose to be oblivious. When a plan (or a belief, or a relgion) becomes your safety net, you see what you want to see. It is the job of artists and explorers, says Solnit, to let go of preconceptions and to walk into the unknown with eyes open. Relentlessly.

When it comes to the work we do and the positions we take, we cannot see the larger arc of these actions. Solnit shares a conversation she had with Sontag about taking a political position:

I had just begun trying to make the case for hope in writing, and I argued that you don’t know if your actions are futile: that you don’t have the memory of the future, that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be: and that, in the end, we always act in the dark. The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine. They may unfold long after your death. That is when the words of so many writers often resonate most.

Every artist who is digging deep in the work they do comes up against that unknowingness with every gesture, with every word. Solnit’s insights resonate for me as an artist, but they also speak to anyone struggling for truth, justice and equality. You know who you are.

To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don’t know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.

Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it; despair is a confident memory of the future, in Gonzalez’s resonant phrase. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we don’t have that memory and that reality doesn’t necessarily match our plans; hope like creative ability can come from what the Romantic poet John Keats called Negative Capability.

8 Replies to “The Unlikely and the Unimaginable”

  1. This is the best post yet I’ve read about Solnit’s new book.

    1. deborahbarlow says:

      That’s a high honor from you Maureen. Thanks!

  2. Deborah,

    Who is there who does not struggle at some time, or all the time, for truth, justice, and equality? There are a thousand essays in that topic. There are ten thousand causes. Truth where? Justice when? Equality with whom?

    I stand as if flatfooted and barefoot in a desert with not a visible resource and even less brain when I read your logic, your vocabulary, and your analytical powers. I always read with interest, and wonder what I really think about the ideas you proffer. If your purpose is to get womankind thinking, you have at least succeeded with one such being!

    I always enjoy your posts!

    Ann

    1. deborahbarlow says:

      Thank you dear Ann for this comment. As always, your insights and thoughts are of such interest to me. Best aunt ever, you are.

  3. dipittsburgh says:

    Wonderful comment, Ann to a provocative post!

    1. deborahbarlow says:

      Thanks dear Di. I hope you and my aunt, Ann Dibble Call, can get to know each other–you are kindred spirits.

  4. Judy Dushku says:

    Deborah, Dear, this idea of the necessity of a dark future never occurred to me before, but now I am thinking of it often. How strange that it is a kind of comfort, rather than a downer. I am not sure I could have wrapped my head around it without your discussion of the idea from Wolff. Thank you. It requires some mental work for me to keep myself from trying to preemptively fill the future with cheer. But, Deborah, I really felt a bolt of something over your recalling for us and reminding us of the name of Solnit’s book and the essay, Men Explain Things to Me. No wonder that keeps resonating with women. I appreciate your blog so much.

  5. chris dougherty says:

    this photo this idea is so hackneyed and predictable what else but a stage
    what a disgrace to sontag
    the idea of Staging A Life … is that what art is what life is what are you trying to PROVE
    Sontag’s intelligence waned when she went showbiz the relattionship with lightweights like the photographer liebovitz is typical of the genral decline
    sontag exposed herself out of a strange exhibitionism/intimacy she really did not like being a woman (whatever that means) built herself up into something … why .. guilt over her hedonism, addictions, shallowness … like a pan of wayer being splashed in all the time … her decline started with Brosdky a real SOB, a ridiculous figure in a way … and Sontag’s Notes and Journals SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED … did she say they could, I doubt it … Rieff has had the final word in his Mommie Dearest mode ..

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