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Men Explain Things to Me
Rebecca Solnit
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eBook - ePub
Men Explain Things to Me
Rebecca Solnit
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About This Book
- Collection is based around an essayâ Men Explain Things to Me âwhich was shared virally in 2008
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chapter 6
Woolfâs Darkness:
Embracing the Inexplicable
âThe future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think,â Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal on January 18, 1915, when she was almost thirty-three years old and the First World War was beginning to turn into catastrophic slaughter on an unprecedented scale that would continue for years. Belgium was occupied, the continent was at war, many of the European nations were also invading other places around the world, the Panama Canal had just opened, the US economy was in terrible shape, twenty-nine people had just died in an Italian earthquake, Zeppelins were about to attack Great Yarmouth, launching the age of aerial bombing against civilians, and the Germans were just weeks away from using poison gas for the first time on the Western Front. Woolf, however, might have been writing about her own future rather than the worldâs.
She was less than six months past a bout of madness or depression that had led to a suicide attempt, and was still being tended or guarded by nurses. Until then, in fact, her madness and the war had followed a similar calendar, but Woolf recovered and the war continued its downward plunge for nearly four more bloody years. The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think. Itâs an extraordinary declaration, asserting that the unknown need not be turned into the known through false divination or the projection of grim political or ideological narratives; itâs a celebration of darkness, willing â as that âI thinkâ indicatesâto be uncertain even about its own assertion.
Most people are afraid of the dark. Literally when it comes to children, while many adults fear, above all, the darkness that is the unknown, the unseeable, the obscure. And yet the night in which distinctions and definitions cannot be readily made is the same night in which love is made, in which things merge, change, become enchanted, aroused, impregnated, possessed, released, renewed.
As I began writing this essay, I picked up a book on wilderness survival by Laurence Gonzalez and found in it this telling sentence: âThe plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.â His point is that when the two seem incompatible we often hang onto the plan, ignore the warnings reality offers us, and so plunge into trouble. Afraid of the darkness of the unknown, the spaces in which we see only dimly, we often choose the darkness of closed eyes, of obliviousness. Gonzalez adds, âResearchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is. And under the influence of a plan, itâs easy to see what we want to see.â Itâs the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open.
Not all of them aspire to do so or succeed. Nonfiction has crept closer to fiction in our time in ways that are not flattering to fiction, in part because too many writers cannot come to terms with the ways in which the past, like the future, is dark. There is so much we donât know, and to write truthfully about a life, your own or your motherâs, or a celebrated figureâs, an event, a crisis, another culture is to engage repeatedly with those patches of darkness, those nights of history, those places of unknowing. They tell us that there are limits to knowledge, that there are essential mysteries, starting with the notion that we know just what someone thought or felt in the absence of exact information.
Often enough, we donât know such things even when it comes to ourselves, let alone someone who perished in an epoch whose very textures and reflexes were unlike ours. Filling in the blanks replaces the truth that we donât entirely know with the false sense that we do. We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we donât. Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation. Woolf was unparalleled at that latter language.
What is the value of darkness, and of venturing unknowing into the unknown? Virginia Woolf is present in five of my books in this century, Wanderlust, my history of walking; A Field Guide to Getting Lost, a book about the uses of wandering and the unknown; Inside Out, which focused on house and home fantasies; The Faraway Nearby, a book about storytelling, empathy, illness, and unexpected connections; and Hope in the Dark, a small book exploring popular power and how change unfolds. Woolf has been a touchstone author for me, one of my pantheon, along with Jorge Luis Borges, Isak Dinesen, George Orwell, Henry David Thoreau, and a few others.
Even her name has a little wildness to it. The French call dusk the time âentre le chien et le loup,â between the dog and the wolf, and certainly in marrying a Jew in the England of her era Virginia Stephen was choosing to go a little feral, to step a little beyond the proprieties of her class and time. While there are many Woolfs, mine has been a Virgil guiding me through the uses of wandering, getting lost, anonymity, immersion, uncertainty, and the unknown. I made that sentence of hers about darkness the epigram that drove Hope in the Dark, my 2004 book about politics and possibility, written to counter despair in the aftermath of the Bush administrationâs invasion of Iraq.
Looking, Looking Away, Looking Again
I began my book with that sentence about darkness. The cultural critic and essayist Susan Sontag whose Woolf is not quite my Woolf opened her 2003 book on empathy and photography, Regarding the Pain of Others, with a quote from a later Woolf. She began this way: âIn June 1938 Virginia Woolf published Three Guineas, her brave, unwelcomed reflections on the roots of war.â Sontag went on to examine Woolfâs refusal of the âweâ in the question that launches the book: âHow in your opinion are we to prevent war?ââwhich she answered instead with the statement, âAs a woman I have no country.â
Sontag then argues with Woolf about that we, about photography, about the possibility of preventing war. She argues with respect, with an awareness that historical circumstances had changed radically (including the status of women as outsiders), with the utopianism of Woolfâs era that imagined an end to war altogether. She doesnât only argue with Woolf. She argues with herself, rejecting her earlier argument in her landmark book On Photography that we grow deadened to images of atrocity and speculating on how we must continue to look. Because the atrocities donât end and somehow we must engage with them.
Sontag ends her book with thoughts about those in the midst of the kind of war that raged in Iraq and Afghanistan. As she wrote of people in war, ââWeââthis âweâ is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went throughâdonât understand. We donât get it. We truly canât imagine what it was like. We canât imagine how dreadful, how terrifying, war is; and how normal it becomes. Canât understand, canât imagine.â
Sontag, too, calls on us to embrace the darkness, the unknown, the unknowability, not to let the torrent of images that pour down on us convince us that we understand or make us numb to suffering. She argues that knowledge can numb as well as awaken feeling. But she doesnât imagine the contradictions can be ironed out; she grants us permission to keep looking at the photographs; she grants their subjects the right to have the unknowability of their experience acknowledged. And she herself acknowledges that even if we canât completely comprehend, we might care.
Sontag doesnât address our inability to respond to entirely unseen suffering, for even in this era of daily email solicitations about loss and atrocity and amateur as well as professional documentation of wars and crises, much remains invisible. And regimes go to great lengths to hide the bodies, the prisoners, the crimes, and the corruption: still, even now, someone may care.
The Sontag who began her public career with an essay she entitled âAgainst Interpretationâ was herself a celebrant of the indeterminate. In opening that essay, she wrote, âThe earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magicalâŚ.â Later in the essay, she adds, âToday is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactive, stifling. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish.â And of course she then went on to a life of interpretation that, in its great moments, joined Woolf in resisting the pigeonholes, the oversimplifications and easy conclusions.
I argued with Sontag as she argues with Woolf. In fact, the first time I met her I argued with her about darkness and, to my astonishment, did not lose. If you go to her last, posthumous essay collection, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches, you will find a small paragraph of my ideas and examples interpolated in her essay, like a burr in her sock. Sontag was writing her keynote speech for the Oscar Romero Award in the spring of 2003, just as the Iraq War broke out. (The award went to Ishai Menuchin, chairman of the committee of selective refusal of military service in Israel.)
Sontag had been about nine when Woolf died. I visited her when she was seventy, in her top-floor apartment in New Yorkâs Chelsea neighborhood, with a view of the backside of a gargoyle out the window and a pile of printed-out fragments of the speech on the table. I read them while drinking a dank dandelion-root tea I suspect sheâd had in her cupboard for decades, the only alternative to espresso in that kitchen. She was making the case that we should resist on principle, even though it might be futile. I had just begun trying to make the case for hope in writing, and I argued that you donât know if your actions are futile; that you donât 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.
Here we are, after all, revisiting the words of a woman who died three quarters of a century ago and yet is still alive in some sense in so many imaginations, part of the conversation, an influence with agency. In Sontagâs resistance speech published at TomDispatch that spring 2003 and in At the Same Time a few years later, you can see a paragraph in which Sontag refers to Thoreauâs posthumous influence and to the Nevada Test Site (the place where more than a thousand nuclear bombs were detonated, and where for several years, starting in 1988, I joined the great civil-disobedience actions against the nuclear arms race). The same example ended up in Hope in the Dark: it was about how we antinuclear activists did not exactly shut down the Nevada Test Site, our most overt goal, but inspired the people of Kazakhstan to shut down the Soviet Test Site in 1990. Totally unforeseen, totally unforeseeable.
I learned so much from the Test Site and the other places I wrote about in my book Savage Dreams: The Landscape Wars of the American West, about the long arc of history, about unintended consequences, delayed impacts. The Test Site as a place of great convergence and collisionâand the example of authors like Sontag and Woolfâtaught me to write. And then, years later, Sontag leavened her argument about acting on principle with my examples from that kitchen conversation and some details I wrote down. It was a small impact I could have never imagined, and it took place in a year when we were both invoking Virginia Woolf. The principles we both subscribed to in the books that cited her could be called Woolfian.
Two Winter Walks
To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we donât 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 Gonzalezâs resonant phrase. Optimism is similarly confident about what will happen. Both are grounds for not acting. Hope can be the knowledge that we donât have that memory and that reality doesnât necessarily match our plans; hope like creative ability can come from what the Romantic poet John Keats called Negative Capability.
On a midwinterâs night in 1817, a little over a century before Woolfâs journal entry on darkness, the poet John Keats walked home talking with some friends and as he wrote in a celebrated letter describing that walk, âseveral things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature.⌠I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.â
Keats walking and talking and having several things dovetail in his mind suggests the way wandering on foot can lead to the wandering of imagination and to an understanding that is creation itself, the activity that makes introspection an outdoor pursuit. In her memoir âA Sketch of the Past,â Woolf wrote, âThen one day walking round Tavistock Square I made up, as I sometimes make up my books, To the Lighthouse; in a great, apparently involuntary, rush. One thing burst into another. Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind, so that my lips seemed syllabling of their own accord as I walked. What blew the bubbles? Why then? I have no notion.â
Some portion of Woolfâs genius, it seems to me, is that having no notion, that negative capability. I once heard about a botanist in Hawaii with a knack for finding new species by getting lost in the jungle, by going beyond what he knew and how he knew, by letting experience be larger than his knowledge, by choosing reality rather than the plan. Woolf not only utilized but celebrated the unpredictable meander, on mind and foot. Her great essay âStreet Haunting: A London Adventure,â from 1930, has the light breezy tone of many of her early essays, and yet voyages deep into the dark.
It takes a fictionalized or invented excursion to buy a pencil in the winter dusk of London as an excuse to explore darkness, wandering, invention, the annihilation of identity, the enormous adventure that transpires in the mind while the body travels a quotidian course. âThe evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow,â she writes. âWe are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of oneâs own room.â Here she describes a form of society that doesnât enforce identity but liberates it, the society of strangers, the republic of the streets, the experience of being anonymous and free that big cities invented.
Introspection is often portrayed as an indoor, solitary thing, the monk in his cell, the writer at her desk. Woolf disagrees, saying of the home, âFor there we sit surrounded by objects which enforce the memories of our own experience.â She describes the objects and then states, âBut when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central pearl of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter!â
The essay found its way into my history of walking, Wanderlust, that is also a history of wandering and of the mind in motion. The shell of home is a prison of sorts, as much as a protection, a casing of familiarity and continuity that can vanish outside. Walking the streets can be a form of social engagement, even of political action when we walk in concert, as we do in uprisings, demonstrations, and revolutions, but it can also be a means of inducing reverie, subjectivity, and imagination, a sort of duet betwe...