Jonardon Ganeri on Fernando Pessoa, The Poet as Philosopher

 

An elusive point sits on the horizon. A deep yearning stirs within to move closer to this point, perhaps in search of the unknown, perhaps in search of questions without answers. It is a yearning that will never be fulfilled. It is a point never reached. This yearning is the all-too-human inclination for our lives to somehow be different than they are, and for the universe not to be indifferent to our cares and concerns.
 
In her essay ‘The Blue of Distance’ (2005), the US author Rebecca Solnit associates this point never-reached with the colour blue. She writes:
 
“For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go.”
 
When combined with the longing for something absent, for something that simply can’t be, this is saudade, a Portuguese expression for a state akin to melancholic longing. A complex emotion where a melancholic grey seeps into the distant blue.
 
Lacking any easy English translation, saudade seems to be an emotion that can be expressed only through poetry or other evocations of its melancholic longing. Whereas nostalgia is a longing for something that once existed, a person or place or experience that lives in our memory, saudade encompasses a longing for something that never was, something not attainable.
 
Within the yearning, a sense of incompleteness exists, a feeling of loss for something we never actually had. We want, for example, to connect to the divine, to the universe, in a personal and meaningful way. We long to find meaning in our existence and our experiences – and the meaning we tend to attach to the confusion and loss we feel when this fails to happen is of some sort of providential punishment or karmic backlash. No matter how we attempt to make sense of what we experience, the indifference lingers, an unsettling realisation that nothing, ultimately, matters. We long for the things we do and say to make a difference, for the universe to respond to our call in a way that is just and kind. But it simply can’t.
 
How can we still find solace living in such a world, where indifference is all there is, to reach a place where our yearning has not disappeared but yet has, in some way, been transformed?
 
In her essay ‘“Saudade” and “Soledad”: Fernando Pessoa and Antonio Machado on Nostalgia and Loneliness’ (2007), the Lusophone scholar Estela Vieira provides a possible solution. She writes:
 
“‘Saudade’ in Pessoa is a lot more related to loneliness since the absence of others is what causes the painful feelings regularly associated with nostalgia. Yet the absence is itself a creative presence populated with imagined others a lot more real than the emptiness of reality. Like all feelings, loneliness for him is nothing more than one of the sources of creation.”
 
​​Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) lived what was in many ways an astonishingly modern, transcultural and translingual life. He was born in Lisbon, the point of departure for Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India as commemorated by Pessoa’s forebear, the poet Luís de Camões. Pessoa grew up in Anglophone Durban in South Africa, acquiring a life-long love for English poetry and language. Returning to Lisbon in 1905, which he would never again leave, Pessoa set himself the goal to travel throughout an infinitude of inner landscapes, to be an explorer of inner worlds.

 
He published very little during his lifetime but left behind a renowned trunk containing a treasure trove of scraps, on which were written some of the greatest literary works of the 20th century, mainly in Portuguese but also substantially in English and French. Pessoa wrote poems under a variety of heteronyms, the ‘virtual subjects’ of his imagination; and also, importantly, a novel, or rather the anti-novel, The Book of Disquiet (1982), whose protagonist, Bernardo Soares, ruminates in detail on the meaning of being.
 
Vieira’s interesting idea is to fashion a link between saudade and Pessoa’s creation of a coterie of heteronyms, virtual other selves through which he could live a multiplicity of imagined lives. If saudade is a melancholic yearning for something the universe will never provide, perhaps the very absence to which it draws our attention can be a creative opportunity, an empty space that Pessoa seeks to fill, and the invention of heteronyms is his way to fill it.
 
 
And yet this doesn’t quite work. In The Book of Disquiet, for instance, Pessoa has his novel’s putative protagonist Soares – the literary vehicle through which he explores the idea of saudade – say:
 
“What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.”
– all quotes are from the Richard Zenith translation of The Book of Disquiet (2002)
 
The indifference of the universe is not, then, a creative opportunity but instead directly confronts us with the fact that nothing we might try to create is of any importance. If what Soares expresses here is true, we find no solace in inventing heteronyms, or anything else. If everything is unimportant, then all we do is unimportant too. This is only to reinforce the sentiment Soares expresses earlier in the same passage, saying:
 
“These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say.”
 
Pessoa isn’t finding solace in his creations, or even in his confessions, but in his acceptance of their unimportance, an acceptance that the universe is indifferent to anything he creates. In the voice of Soares, Pessoa himself says as much:
 
“Ah, no nostalgia [saudade] hurts as much as nostalgia for things that never existed! The longing I feel when I think of the past I’ve lived in real time, when I weep over the corpse of my childhood life – this can’t compare to the fervour of my trembling grief as I weep over the non-reality of my dreams’ humble characters, even the minor ones I recall having seen just once in my pseudo-life, while turning a corner in my envisioned world, or while passing through a doorway on a street that I walked up and down in the same dream.
 
My bitterness over nostalgia’s [saudade] impotence to revive and resurrect becomes a tearful rage against God …”
 
In saudade, which Zenith translates as ‘nostalgia’, our yearning then begins to take on a new kind of melancholy – one that takes away any kind of comfort we might have found in our attempts to seek connection with an indifferent universe, one in which the longed-for blue point on the horizon turns a blue-grey. Saudade is woven throughout Pessoa’s work. It reflects that he has found solace in the understanding that there is no meaning, that he has accepted everything as it is, an acceptance of the indifference of the universe. Pessoa has Soares say:
 
“The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since to be human is to realise it can’t be understood.”
Perhaps, then, the idea is that finding acceptance in indifference is a way to move closer to being fully human.
 
Rather than the sufferings of loneliness, it is more helpful here to think about the process of grieving. Moving through denial, anger, bargaining and depression can lead us, eventually, to an acceptance that we cannot change the one we have lost and that their absence is now a permanent feature of the universe we inhabit. We try so hard to deny the indifference of the universe by finding meaning in religion, spiritual practices or our experiences. When these meaning-making efforts stop making sense, then anger, bargaining and depression surface, sometimes all at once when the wave of shock at the world’s indifference subsides.
 
As we emerge on the other side of these emotions, a glimpse of hope appears in the form of acceptance. We can still yearn for something to fill the empty space in what feels like an incompleteness of life, but that yearning takes on a new purpose: it exposes a new humanness that before was obscured. The Dutch photographer Nanouk Prins is one who finds this connection between saudade and grief, and many of her photographs have a blue-grey tone.
 
 
Here is how Pessoa (as Soares) makes the link between grief and meaninglessness:
 
“In these times of acute grief, it is impossible – even in dreams – to be a lover, to be a hero, to be happy. All of this is empty, even in our idea of what it is. It’s all spoken in another language that we can’t grasp – mere nonsense syllables to our understanding. Life is hollow, the soul hollow, the world hollow. All gods die a death greater than death. All is emptier than the void. All is a chaos of things that are nothing.
 
If, on thinking this, I look up to see if reality can quench my thirst, I see inexpressive façades, inexpressive faces, inexpressive gestures. Stones, bodies, ideas – all dead. All movements are one great standstill. Nothing means anything to me … And in the bottom of my soul – as the only reality of this moment – there’s an intense and invisible grief, a sadness like the sound of someone crying in a dark room.”
 
 
In this movement of grief, Pessoa arrives at a self-awareness, an acceptance of the world’s inevitable insouciance. This allows him a kind of clarity to see the meaninglessness and inexpressiveness of everything. And it is within this clarity and stillness that solace is finally found. The longing hasn’t vanished but is now truly seen and accepted without giving it meaning or importance. He does not claim understanding, but instead embraces just how things are.
 
To find solace here without the yearning for meaning is to find stillness and to experience it as what it is to be fully human. The French philosopher Simone Weil develops the idea of acceptance in a particular direction. ‘At the centre of the human heart, is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world,’ she writes in her ‘Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations’ (1943).
 
We must stop searching for meaning, and instead accept that all we can do is wait, with an open and ready heart
 
In her posthumously published Waiting for God (1950), Weil finds resolution in a new concept of attention, attention as ‘waiting’ not as ‘searching’:
 
“In every school exercise there is a special way of waiting upon truth, setting our hearts upon it, yet not allowing ourselves to go out in search of it. There is a way of giving our attention to the data of a problem in geometry without trying to find the solution, or to the words of a Latin or Greek text without trying to arrive at the meaning, a way of waiting, when we are writing, for the right word to come of itself at the end of our pen, while we merely reject all inadequate words.”
 
Rather than straining ourselves in a supreme effort to find answers, to achieve goals, to reach destinations, we should instead – and this is equally difficult – learn to wait. Waiting means making oneself receptive, and being ready to recognise a truth when it shows up. We must, in other words, stop searching for meaning or for the things that will satisfy our melancholic longings, and instead accept that all we can do is wait, with an open and ready heart, for such truths as there are to turn up. In The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa writes:
 
“All that we love or lose – things, human beings, meanings – rubs our skin and so reaches the soul, and in the eyes of God the event is no more than this breeze that brought me nothing besides an imaginary relief, the propitious moment, and the wherewithal to lose everything splendidly.”
 
Pessoa acknowledges the relief in finding meaning, but also that it is not real. The true solace is in this acknowledgment, this acceptance of its fleeting nature on the other side of grief.
 
If, as we have argued, the visual vocabulary of colour is as appropriate as that of taste in describing the quality of an emotion, and if blue is the colour of solitude and desire, somewhere on the distant horizon of understanding, then perhaps the solace in saudade, the unfulfilled melancholic longing, is where blue begins to turn shades of grey – a colour called Payne’s grey, of landscapes much further away, a sombre atmosphere filled with distances, a blue-grey of shadows, storm clouds, and winters with no end.
 
The colour that the US novelist Henry Miller attributes to the wintry streets of Paris is surely not so dissimilar to that of the Lisbon streets along which Pessoa walked. As Miller wrote in a letter to his friend, the novelist Emil Schnellock, in March 1930:
 
“It is winter and the trees do not obscure the sky. One can look between the naked boughs and observe the colors changing from rust and purple to lilac, to Payne’s gray and then to deep blue and indigo. Along the Boulevard Malesherbes, long after the crepuscular glow of the evening, the gaunt trees with their black boughs gesticulating, stretch out in infinite series, somber, spectral, their trunks vivid as cigar ash. Where is the Seine? I inquire at intervals. Tout droit, monsieur, tout droit.”

 
The Seine: a destination never found but perpetually longed for. Some scholars have suggested that the Portuguese term saudade derives from the Arabic word saudā, which, according to the dictionary of Hans Wehr, means ‘melancholy, sadness, gloom’. And yet the colour associated with this emotion is black, which is the root meaning of saudā, and what black lacks is the blueness in Payne’s grey, the blue of longing, which offsets the greyness of melancholy alone. Where the black of sadness and gloom – saudā – meets Solnit’s distant blue, colours blend into Payne’s grey.
 
If saudā describes a nothingness beyond death, and the distant blue is the impossible hope of reaching what is out of reach, such as finding meaning in the meaningless, the grey of saudade is the acceptance of never reaching what sits over the horizon. It is a place we can never go back to – or, in the instance of finding meaning in an indifferent universe, a place we cannot reach.
 
 
Only the Portuguese have a single term for an emotion that is, nevertheless, arguably universal. More than merely loneliness or nostalgia or homesickness, saudade instead evokes a melancholic yearning for something absent, something that perhaps never was and never will be, but still haunts one’s psychological life in one’s memory and desire. A sense of loss for that which one never had; the anticipation of a future that will never be.
 
Nowhere in literature and philosophy has this quintessential feeling been better studied than in The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa’s brilliant if enigmatic book. The question for us is this: how should one live a life in the face of such a feeling? How does one find, if not meaning, then at least solace? To our knowledge, only Vieira has provided a possible answer, linking saudade in Pessoa to his creation of heteronyms. Yet this does not do justice to the feeling, a feeling of being at sea in a life without horizons. Nor does it do justice to Pessoa, for whom solace is, rather, to be found in an acceptance that this is, after all, the human lot. In the end, saudade’s closest cousin isn’t loneliness but grief, and the solace we must hope for is akin to that of coming to terms with a loss that can never go away.
 
Saudade permeates our desire for truth beyond what we can possibly know. In her book The Rock That Is Higher: Story as Truth (1993), the US author Madeleine L’Engle longs for a garden of Eden that she is certain once existed. She writes:
 
“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.
 
In literature the longing for home is found in many stories of paradise, of the forgotten place where we once belonged.”
 
L’Engle yearns for something that is no more, but that she deeply believes in. Her hopeful language reflects that she has not gone through a grieving process to reach the state of acceptance that what she longs for never did exist. Her point on the horizon is still blue, but out of reach, not quite yet a Payne’s grey.
 
In some translations of saudade, there is a beauty or enjoyment in the longing for what was. And in some passages of The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa’s indifference comes across as something like delight, as though he has found beauty in saudade, an enjoyment in his longing for the non-existent:
 
“The sweetness of having neither family nor companions, that pleasant taste as of exile, in which the pride of the expatriate subdues with a strange sensuality our vague anxiety about being far from home – all of this I enjoy in my own way, indifferently.”

 
Even these moments of enjoyment or bliss are fleeting. As our emotions shift while we move through the grieving process, the beauty we may see in it or experience does as well. In her essay ‘The Blue of Distance’, Solnit touches on this:
 
“If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond.”
 
Solnit’s views here begin to reflect those of Pessoa’s indifference – saudade without beauty or sadness or joy. The beauty of the blue on the horizon vanishes or moves further away as we move closer to it. The more we try to find meaning in the meaninglessness, in the indifference, the further away from us it becomes. When the moments of happiness or beauty in our longing fade back to indifference is when the blue on the horizon shifts to shades of grey. It is in the grey, not the blue, where we find solace in the indifference of the universe.
 
Solace and saudade. By Jonardon Ganeri.  Aeon, July 17, 2023.

 

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) lived what was in many ways an astonishingly modern, transcultural and translingual life.  He was born in Lisbon, the point of departure for Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India as commemorated by Pessoa’s forebear,  the poet Luís de Camões. He grew up in Anglophone Durban, acquiring a life-long love for English poetry and language.  Returning to Lisbon, from where he would never again leave, he set himself the goal to travel throughout an infinitude of inner landscapes, to be an explorer of inner worlds. He published very little, but left behind a famous trunk containing a treasure-trove of scraps, on which were written some of the greatest literary works of the 20th century, mainly in Portuguese but also substantially in English and French.  He is now acknowledged as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, and he has emerged over the last decade as a forgotten voice in 20th century modernism, taking his rightful place alongside C. P. Cavafy, Franz Kafka, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Jorge Luis Borges.Pessoa was also a serious student of philosophy and himself a very creative philosopher, yet his genius as a philosopher has as yet hardly been recognized at all. 
 
This programme was streamed live on March 24th 2022.
 
Fernando Pessoa: The Poet as Philosopher. By Jonardon Ganeri.   Royal Institute of Philosophy, London, 2022.

Rebecca Solnit on Violence Against Women

 

The alleged murderer of eight people, six of whom were Asian American women, reportedly said that he was trying to “eliminate temptation”. It’s as if he thought others were responsible for his inner life, as though the horrific act of taking others’ lives rather than learning some form of self-control was appropriate. This aspect of a crime that was also horrifically racist reflects a culture in which men and the society at large blame women for men’s behavior and the things men do to women. The idea of women as temptresses goes back to the Old Testament and is heavily stressed in white evangelical Christianity; the victims were workers and others present in massage parlors; the killer was reportedly on his way to shoot up Florida’s porn industry when he was apprehended.
 
This week an older friend recounted her attempts in the 1970s to open a domestic-violence shelter in a community whose men didn’t believe domestic violence was an issue there and when she convinced them it was, told her, but “what if it’s the women’s fault”. And last week a male friend of mine posted an anti-feminist screed blaming young women for New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s travails, as though they should suck it up when he violated clear and longstanding workplace rules, as though they and not he had the responsibility to protect his career and reputation.
 
Sometimes men are written out of the story altogether. Since the pandemic began there have been torrents of stories about how women’s careers have been crushed or they have left their jobs altogether because they’re doing the lioness’s share of domestic labor , especially child-rearing, in heterosexual households. In February of this year, NPR opened a story with the assertion that this work has “landed on the shoulders of women” as if that workload had fallen from the sky rather than been shoved there by spouses. I have yet to see an article about a man’s career that’s flourishing because he’s dumped on his wife, or focusing on how he’s shirking the work.
 
Informal responses often blame women in these situations for their spouses and recommend they leave without addressing that divorce often leads to poverty for women and children, and of course, unequal workloads at home can undermine a woman’s chances at financial success and independence. Behind all this is a storytelling problem. The familiar narratives about murder, rape, domestic violence, harassment, unwanted pregnancy, poverty in single-female-parent households, and a host of other phenomena portray these things as somehow happening to women and write men out of the story altogether, absolve them of responsibility – or turn them into “she made him do it” narratives. Thus have we treated a lot of things that men do to women or men and women do together as women’s problems that women need to solve, either by being amazing and heroic and enduring beyond all reason, or by fixing men, or by magically choosing impossible lives beyond the reach of harm and inequality. Not only the housework and the childcare, but what men do becomes women’s work.
 
Rachel Louise Snyder in No Visible Bruises, her 2019 book on domestic violence, noted that the framework is often “why didn’t she leave?” rather than “why was he violent?” Young women affected by street harassment and menace routinely get told to limit their freedoms and change their behavior, as though male menace and violence was just some immutable force, like weather, not something that can and should change. And sure enough in the wake of Sarah Everard’s alleged kidnapping and murder by a policeman a few weeks ago, the Metropolitan police went knocking on doors and telling women in south London not to go out alone.
 
When it comes to abortion, unwanted pregnancies are routinely portrayed as something irresponsible women got themselves into and that conservatives in the US and many other countries want to punish them for trying to get out of. (You get the impression from anti-abortion narratives that these women are both the Whore of Babylon when it comes to sexual activity and the Virgin Mary when it comes to conception.) Though people who want to be pregnant may get pregnant on their own, with a sperm bank or donor, unwanted pregnancies are pretty much 100% the result of sex involving someone who, to put it simply, put his sperm where it was likely to meet an egg in a uterus. Two people were involved, but too often only one will be recognized if the pregnancy ends in abortion.
 
Katha Pollitt noted in her 2015 book on abortion that 16% of women have experienced “reproductive coercion” in which a male partner uses threats or violence to override their reproductive choice and 9% have experienced “‘birth control sabotage’, a male partner who disposed of her pills, poked holes in condoms, or prevented her from getting contraception”. One of the arguments for why abortion should be an unrestricted right is: violations resulting in conception needs to be counterbalanced by choices over consequences.
 
And of course anti-abortion laws with rape exemptions require pregnant people to prove they were raped, an onerous, intrusive, protracted process that often fails anyway, while Pollitt points out how many unwanted pregnancies result from violations of bodily self-determination that falls short of legal definitions of rape. Rape itself is a crime in which the victim rather than the perpetrator is often held responsible. In her stunning memoir Know My Name, Chanel Miller writes about all the ways she was blamed for being, while unconscious, sexually assaulted by a stranger – “the Stanford swimmer rapist”. Likewise, the legal consequences of his actions were framed as things she was inflicting on him.
 
When Tulane University reported in 2018 that 40% of female and 18% of male students had been sexually assaulted, almost nothing was said about the fact that this meant that they not only had a campus populated by victims, but by perpetrators. In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put out a chart warning women that alcohol consumption could result in being raped, impregnated, battered or infected with an STD, as though alcohol itself could and would do all these things, and women alone were responsible for preventing them. Once again men were extracted from narratives in which they are the protagonists.
 
There are more subtle forms of blaming the victim, including all the ways that people impacted by abusive and discriminatory situations are portrayed as disruptive or demanding at one end of the spectrum and mentally ill at the other. This happens, of course, when those in charge of the status quo decide to protect it rather than those it harms and marginalizes, a decision that makes reporting harm or marginalization likely to lead to more of same.
 
Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey wrote in February: “Impostor syndrome directs our view toward fixing women at work instead of fixing the places where women work.” That is the diagnosis is too often “has subjective feelings of not being deserving or qualified” when it should be “works in a place that treats her as undeserving or unqualified”. The headline of a 7 March related story shows how this plays out: “Google advised mental health care when workers complained about racism and sexism” and describes how employees making those complaints were pushed out, the people who gave them grounds to complain apparently left unchecked.
 
Writing perpetrators out of all these narratives means that while the narratives pretend to have concern for victims, victims are not who they’re protecting. Perpetrators are, both as individuals and as a class. This is a problem and even a crisis in all of the situations I’ve described, but in the bloodbath in Georgia it was deadly: a young man learned from his Southern Baptist subculture that sex was a sin and women were temptresses and seductresses, held them responsible for his inner life, and punished them with death.
 
Women are harmed every day by invisible men. By Rebecca Solnit. The Guardian , March 19, 2021.

A friend gave me a desk not long after I moved into the apartment, a woman’s small writing desk or vanity, the one I am writing on now. It’s a dainty Victorian piece of furniture, with four narrow drawers, two on each side and a broader central drawer above the bay in which the sitter’s legs go, and various kinds of ornamentation— dowelled legs, each with a knob like a knee, knobby ornaments, scallops on the bottom of the drawers, drawer pulls like tassels or teardrops.
 
There are two pairs of legs on the front, two on the back, set beneath the side drawers. Despite all the frills, the old desk is fundamentally sturdy, an eight-legged beast of burden whose back has carried many things over the decades, or two beasts of burden side by side, yoked together by the desktop. The desk has moved with me three times. It’s the surface on which I’ve written millions of words: more than 20 books, reviews, essays, love letters, several thousand emails to my friend Tina during the years of our near-daily epistolary exchange, a few hundred thousand other emails, some eulogies and obituaries, including those of both of my parents, a desk at which I did the homework of a student and then a teacher, a portal onto the world and my platform for reaching out and for diving inward.
 
A year or so before she gave me the desk, my friend was stabbed 15 times by an ex-boyfriend to punish her for leaving him. She almost bled to death; she had emergency transfusions; she was left with long scars all over her body, which I saw then without response because whatever capacity to feel had been muffled, maybe when I got habituated to violence at home, maybe because it was something we were supposed to be nonchalant about, back when few of us had language to talk about such violence or an audience ready to listen.
 
She survived; she was blamed for what happened as victims often were then; there were no legal consequences for the would-be murderer; she moved far from where it happened; she worked for a single mother who was evicted, and who gave her the desk in lieu of wages; and then she gave it to me. She moved on and we lost touch for many years, and then re-established it, and she told me the full story.
 
Someone tried to silence her. Then she gave me a platform for my voice. Now I wonder if everything I have ever written is a counterweight to that attempt to reduce a young woman to nothing. All of it has literally arisen from that foundation that is the desktop.
 
Sitting at that desk to write this, I went to the online photography archive of the city that my public library maintains, hoping to recall a little of what the old neighbourhood looked like. The fourth photograph for the street I lived on was from June 18, 1958, of a house a block and a half away, and it bore this caption: “Curious passersby peer down an alley, alongside 438 Lyon Street, where the body of Dana Lewis, 22, nude except for a black bra, was found today. Police, after a preliminary examination, said bruises on the victim’s throat indicated that she might have been garroted by a length of rope.” It’s clear her death is a spectacle for the newspaper as well, which describes her in titillating terms.
 
She was also known as Connie Sublette, and it turns out her death got a lot of attention in the papers at the time. Mostly, the accounts blamed her for it, because she was a sexually active young bohemian who drank. “Seaman describes casual slaying,” said one headline. “Slaying closes sordid life of playgirl,” said another, in which sordid seems to mean that she had sex, adventures, and sorrows, and playgirl means she deserved it. Her age is given as 20 or 24. Dana Lewis or Connie Sublette’s ex husband was said to have lived at 426 Lyon, where she went seeking comfort with him after her boyfriend, a musician, fell to his death at a party.
 
Al Sublette wasn’t home or didn’t answer, so she wept on his front steps until the landlord told her to go away. A sailor, by his own account, offered to get her a taxi and killed her instead. The newspapers seem to have taken his word that the killing was an accident and that while devastated by loss she had agreed to have sex with him in an alley. “Beatnik girl slain by sailor looking for love,” said one headline, as though strangling someone to death was an ordinary part of looking for love.
 
I didn’t know what had happened at 438 Lyon Street, but I did know that the poet and memoirist Maya Angelou had lived not far to the northeast during her adolescence, not long after the end of the five years of muteness that was her response to being raped repeatedly at age eight. And I knew about the apartment a few blocks in the other direction from my own, at 1827 Golden Gate Avenue, into which 19-year-old newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was brought in a 30-gallon garbage can after her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a small delusional would be revolutionary group, in early 1974. She was, she testified, kept blindfolded and bound for weeks in a closet in this location and a previous one and raped by two of her kidnappers. These two stories found their way into the news. But most never did.
 
Some I witnessed. Once late at night, out the window of my apartment, I saw a man with a huge knife in one hand cornering a woman in the doorway of the liquor store across the street. When a police car drifted up silently and the officers surprised the knife wielder, he slid the weapon away along the sidewalk and claimed, “It’s okay. She’s my girlfriend.”
 
The writer Bill deBuys began a book with the sentence “A species of hope resides in the possibility of seeing one thing, one phenomenon or essence, so clearly and fully that the light of its understanding illuminates the rest of life.” And then he begins with the pine desk at which he’s writing and travels from a description of the grain and color of the wood to trees and forests and keeps going into love, loss, epiphanies of place. It’s a lovely journey. I can imagine many forests into which I’d rather go from my own desk, which was made of trees that must have been cut down before my grandmothers were born, than into the violence against my gender.
 
But the desk I sit at is a desk given to me by a woman who a man tried to murder, and it seems time to tell what it meant to me to grow up in a society in which many preferred people like me to be dead or silent and how I got a voice and how it eventually came time to use that voice— that voice that was most articulate when I was alone at the desk speaking through my fingers, silently— to try to tell the stories that had gone untold.
 
Memoirs at their most conventional are stories of overcoming, arcs of eventual triumph, personal problems to be taken care of by personal evolution and resolve. That a lot of men wanted and still want to harm women, especially young women, impacted me in profoundly personal ways but the cure for it wasn’t personal. There was no adjustment I could make that would make this problem nonexistent.
 
The problems were embedded in the society in which I found myself, and the work to survive it was also work to understand it and eventually work to transform it for everyone, not for myself alone. There were, however, ways of breaking the silence that was part of the affliction, and that was rebellion, and a coming to life, and a coming into power to tell stories, my own and others’. A forest of stories rather than trees and the writing a charting of some paths through it.
 
[ extract from her memoir ‘Recollections of My Non-Existence’]
 
Rebecca Solnit: ‘The desk I sit at was given to me by a woman a man tried to murder’ By Rebecca Solnit.  I news, February 26, 2021.

 

Over a year ago and before the pandemic locked away the world, I steered Rebecca Solnit towards Liza Lou’s intricately beaded and large-scale recreation of a kitchen at the Whitney Museum, aptly titled Kitchen. She slapped her palms together and said, “Ouch!”
 
“Housewife beads the world,” she read the headline from the beaded newspaper that sat on a beaded dining table amongst beaded Frosted Flakes and beaded toast, milk, and bowl. All bright and painfully, laboriously, accurate. “It’s interesting seeing something big made out of an exhausting quantity of little gestures,” she said. “A kind of self-punishment to say, I have to use this feminine means and I have to labor so intensively to create a representation of limitations in a way.”
 
Her first memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, out in paperback on March 9, is not dissimilar. The book is a feat of exacting labor, with places from decades ago remembered in their tiny details alongside a constant, simmering anger at how those same places were ordinary war zones for women. Solnit acts as historian, record keeper, and chronicler—of simultaneously herself, the places that formed her, the voice she had to grow into, her longing for dead eras, what it means for women to live in a society that wants them dead and how deeply ordinary it is to be rendered voiceless.
 
With her prose style that uses abstract vignettes (“each death was a little wound, a little weight, a little message that it could have been me”), anchoring the reader through the different states of her interior world, she reminds us all that our collective trauma does indeed keep score. “The single most central desire is to testify,” she told me, “I am a person who’s had an extremely ordinary experience that is not recognized, of living in a world where a lot of people want to kill me, and a lot of other people want to deny that that is the nature of the world.”
 
Solnit has written 21 books on feminism, American urbanism, human migration, the politics of inhabiting lands, the ecosystem of native California animals, the secrets maps and cartographies reveal about cities, ecofeminism and environmental dissent, the status-quo of white men and more. But what she’s largely known for on the internet (and by her more than 150,000 active followers on Facebook) is her ability to relate a very accessible version of feminism.
 
There’s an affirming wholesomeness to Solnit’s writing. It offers good truths, slipping and sliding around any points of discomfort. Her memoir draws our gaze to what is commendable and right to look at. There’s violence and trauma in the world for women that robs them of their voice, as bystanders and victims both, she says again and again. We know, we say.
 
Or do we?
 
“We overestimate what people know and the act of violence against women has infinite details,” she reminded me. “Not everybody has acknowledged the reality of it.” MeToo cracked the door open for some acknowledgement to finally trickle through. But Solnit found it interesting, the number of men who expressed shock and surprise at what had been happening around them. Where had they been, she wondered? MeToo “will have gone too far when this stuff no longer happens, and until then, it hasn’t gone far enough,” she said.
 
She tells me about an assumption of conversion, where our tales and trauma are shared to convert: “An evangelical model.” Instead, she’s been repeating herself since she was a young woman to reaffirm and ground through terrible and healing conversation that we’re not crazy. That this is real. That this happens, all the time.
 
“I’m going to talk about it until it’s over,” she said.
 
We were deep into identical breakfasts over tepid coffee in Chelsea, on a frigid January Monday, and Solnit was telling me about her desk. The place was largely empty at 9 a.m., but Solnit still made us hop tables, twice, in extreme deference to my recorder’s tape quality and the chipper couple we were first seated next to. She was dressed in all black, not a nod to her early punk-rock days. (“Punk is the apotheosis of a certain kind of hypersexualized, tough masculinity. I had a kind of purging myself from punk, I wore mostly white clothing for a while as the most unpunk thing I could do,” she said, laughing at the memory. “As you can see, I’ve reverted to type.”)
 
So, this desk. Solnit opens an entire section of her book with a description of it, a gift from a friend not long after a 19-year-old Solnit moved into the San Francisco apartment where she’d spend the next 25 years. A year before Solnit’s friend gave her the desk, the friend was stabbed 15 times by an ex-boyfriend for leaving him. She almost died, wore long scars all over her body, and moved away.
 

 
 “It felt in some ways like everything I’d ever written is making a voice to counter that horrific act of voicelessness,” Solnit said. “It either happens to you or it doesn’t happen to you, but that’s an isolation we’ve been trained in, in telling our stories.” Solnit reminded me that we’re a country that’s officially against rape and violence towards women. But privately? We’re all co-conspirators and complicit. “Violence against bodies has been made possible on an epic scale by violence against voices,” she writes.
 
Solnit’s recognition of the collective female trauma and grief might be why the writer has so readily found an audience in younger feminists when many of her contemporaries failed. Being a keen observer of a writer and possessed by an archivist’s spirit, her prolific body of work is rooted in observing how a movement or event intersects with its time and space. She first explored the form of women’s lives with or without motherhood in The Mother of All Questions (2017). While Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2000) was a love letter to walking and its relationship to gender politics and our culture.
 
A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005) is an art of losing and finding one’s self through abandoned plays, dreams of protected tortoises and the careless fury inside fathers. Finding herself being “mansplained” to about her own book, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003), gave birth to the essay and coined the term that introduced Solnit to a younger generation of feminists: Men Explain Things to Me.
 
Older feminists have pride in surviving a spectrum of offenses because there was little other choice. You either got a thick skin or you laughed it off. It’s the whole “not-that-bad thing,” Solnit said. The elasticity required to pull that off became a badge of honor. It’s also become a point of contention, with younger feminists merely saying, What if we don’t want to laugh it off anymore? Solnit said that she too fights against that coding all the time. She occasionally still hears the whisper inside to just “toughen up” and look away.
 
“Weinstein existed,” she said, because, “it takes a village to rape a woman.”
 
Solnit as a young woman, as depicted in the book, doesn’t give the impression of being too attached to existing. She dreams often of leaving her body behind and taking flight. “My body was a lonely house. I was not always home; I was often elsewhere,” she writes in the chapter “Disappearing Acts” before describing the photo on the book’s cover photo: she’s wearing a man’s vest backwards and singing “Ready for War,” pressed up against the wall, back to the camera. “The posture speaks of an attempt to elude and melt away. I’m trying to appear and to disappear at once.”
 
It’s when she’s writing about place that her book comes alive. Her existence feels a little more contained, a little more filled out in the places she defines herself through. While there’s an occasional glimpse of her before the San Francisco apartment, and later after, her memoir largely begins there. It’s almost as if she didn’t exist before this apartment with a secret wallpaper she had to peel into, corked ceilings, and framed windows from the 1920s that let in wet ripples of light. It was “a chamber-less nautical shell and it helped me. I literally took form inside it. It was really beautiful, and it’s still so deeply imprinted on me,” she said. “I still have accidental moments where if I think of the bathroom, I think of that bathroom. I had that moment where I gave the taxi driver that address even though I’d left…what is it now, 13 years ago.”
 
Solnit refers to her childhood as “inside out.” Everything dangerous was inside the house (“My mother’s nose was rearranged by my father,” she said) and outside (animals, library, landscapes) was safe. The only sister of two older brothers and a younger one, she grew up in a very male house where being a boy was “the norm.” She describes her mom as being difficult and having “internalized misogyny deeply,” while still doing civil rights and fair-housing work, subscribing to Ms. magazine and having a clear sense of using one’s voice for good. And yet details about her interior familial life or trauma are sparse and not shared. “I don’t think my experiences are particularly interesting, and I’m not that interested in them,” she said. “I felt really satisfied to do a book that was both deeply personal and neither about family or romance.”
 
She calls herself middle of the spectrum of how gendered violence impacts someone: “I’m far from the best but I’m far from the worst case.” While later living alone in San Francisco in the ’80s, she experiences a series of night stalking and violent street harassment—which she calls the norm then. There were also dead women everywhere; in the news, in alleyways she lived close to, in the TV she had to give away because a woman was “murdered on each channel.”
 
“Women imagine being killed every day,” said Solnit. She lists the number of ways, innumerable, in which we are told to avoid being killed. “Without acknowledging that we live in a world that’s murderous towards women.” She finds that contradiction unbearable. It’s mass gaslighting where the choice is between acquiescing that none of it happened, which guarantees you re-integration into power structures and institutions, or clinging to your truth as a “Cassandra and Thorn.”
 
“Both of those are terrible choices,” she said, “and we all navigate a little of X and a little of Y.” She’d hoped in writing her memoir that it would be useful for younger women to see not that she was “exceptionally oppressed,” but how ordinary it is to be made voiceless.
 
“I am a woman who has been told at crucial times that I was not believable and that I was confused and that I was not competent to deal in facts. And in all that, I am ordinary. After all, I live in a society where rape kits and campus-stalking awareness month and domestic violence shelters in which women and children are supposed to hide from husbands and fathers are normal fixtures,” she writes in the chapter “Audibility, Credibility, Consequence.”
 
Recollections is also drenched in longing. An impressionist painting, hazy and dreamlike at first, gaining shape and form as the chapters go on, Solnit pines after a city and time that essentially don’t exist anymore. She writes in the chapter “Foghorn and Gospel”: “The texture of that bygone life seems hard to convey now: we were prepared for encounters with strangers in ways that the digital age would buffer a lot of us from later. It was an era of both more unpredictable contact and more profound solitude.” I told Solnit I distrust nostalgia. Why yearn after an imperfect era?
 
“I think you can describe what was poetic, lyrical, magical about something without wishing that it still existed,” she said. “To say something’s beautiful is not necessarily to say that you wish you had it now.” She still loves the San Francisco she grew up in. The city of the Sierra Club, Harvey Milk, and experimental poetry—now, as she put it, a tech dystopia. But there was also a richer inner life then, when “solitude was profoundly solitary.” Solnit left home in her late teens (doing a brief stint of modeling in Paris, which she wrinkled her nose at now), with doors slammed shut behind her and no help from her family. But low tuition, rent control, and later freelance paychecks being enough allowed her to run wild as a writer with a new voice. The different economy of our times, and careers, means that some of that wildness will never be seen again—not when media jobs are few, freelancing checks are paltry, and most have to juggle multiple jobs.
 
What are the conditions then in which culture flourishes? she asked me. “New York and San Francisco will have old poets, but will they have young poets?”

“Weinstein Existed Because It Takes a Village to Rape a Woman”: Rebecca Solnit on the Ordinary Voiceless.  By Maham Asan. Vanity Fair , March 9, 2021.