The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness
A Geographical Index
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TROUBLE AND SPACIOUSNESS
Published by Trinity University Press
San Antonio, Texas 78212
Copyright © 2014 by Rebecca Solnit
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CONTENTS
Introduction: Icebergs and Laundry
ACyclopedia of an Arctic Expedition
BThe Butterfly and the Boiling Point
Reflections on the Arab Spring and After
CRattlesnake in Mailbox
Cults, Creeps, California in the 1970s
Concrete in Paradise
Some Pictures of Coastal California
Climate Change Is Violence
Dry Lands
The Colorado River and Hydrological Madness of the West
DDetroit Arcadia
Exploring the Post-American Landscape
EOne Nation under Elvis
Environmentalism for Everyone
GWinged Mercury and the Golden Calf
Heavy Metal Histories
Oil and Water
The BP Spill in the Gulf
HIn Haiti, Words Can Kill
Icebergs and Shadows
Further Adventures in the Landscape of Hope
IInside Out, or Interior Space
(and Interior Decoration)
Notes from Nowhere
Iceland’s Polite Dystopia
The Volcano Erupts
Iceland in Upheaval
JThe Great Tōhoku Earthquake and Tsunami
Aftermaths in Japan
Arrival Gates
The Inari Shrine in Kyoto, Japan
Journey to the Center
(on Elín Hansdóttir’s Labyrinth Path)
LLetter to a Dead Man on the Occupation of Hope
MApologies to Mexico
The Drug Trade and GNP (Gross National Pain)
NReconstructing the Story of the Storm
New Orleans Five Years After
We Won’t Bow Down
Carnival and Resistance in New Orleans
SThe Google Bus
Silicon Valley Invades
We’re Breaking Up
Noncommunications in the Silicon Age
Pale Bus, Pale Rider
Silicon Valley Invades, Cont’d
TOn the Dirtiness of Laundry and the Strength of Sisters
Or, Mysteries of Henry David Thoreau, Unsolved
URevolutionary Plots
On Urban Gardening
VThe Visibility Wars
ZRevolution of the Snails
Encounters with the Zapatistas
Acknowledgments
Index
INTRODUCTION
Icebergs and Laundry
That thing we call a place is the intersection of many changing forces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a fixed location. To write about a place is to acknowledge that phenomena often treated separately—ecology, democracy, culture, storytelling, urban design, individual life histories and collective endeavors—coexist. They coexist geographically, spatially, in place, and to understand a place is to engage with braided narratives and sui generis explorations.
This is a book about places, which is to say it’s about those many forces in combination. About Shinto landscape in Japan, about yearnings for and intermittent realizations of justice and democracy in northern Africa and Iceland and the United States, about the way Yankee drug consumption is devastating Mexico (in an essay that I first pictured as a map showing pain being outsourced the way labor and toxic waste are outsourced to poorer countries), about why we are obsessed with gardening right now, about what environmentalists got wrong about country music and nearly everyone got wrong about Henry David Thoreau’s laundry, about technology and amnesia in San Francisco. And it’s about the places themselves: the orange of those Shinto gates, the blue of icebergs, about dancing in the streets of New Orleans, and occupying in the streets of New York.
I think of myself as a San Franciscan, a Californian, and a Westerner, three concentric rings that have enclosed many of my earlier projects. But when I put together the essays in The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness, I was surprised to survey the breadth of my travels: I’d been reporting from the Arctic to Mexico, from Japan to Detroit to Occupy Wall Street. A few things led me out of my region.
One was that in the Bush era, every American seemed saddled with the weight of the world; our country was in Afghanistan and Iraq (and had, as it did before and does now, about 1,000 military bases around the world and a disproportionate role not only in climate change but also in sabotaging international agreements to do something about it). I was compelled to become a public citizen and to think about broad issues—hope, civil society, revolution, climate—and the questions these subjects raised had answers and ideas cached across the globe.
But it wasn’t only responsibility that took me afar; it was invitations and curiosity. I had always wanted to go to the far north, and invitations to go to Iceland in 2008 and Svalbard in the farthest north in 2011 were taken up with alacrity. The latter place fulfilled my wildest desires for northernness, but Iceland turned out to be a complicated political powder keg that would explode not long after I wrote about it. (My first piece on Iceland included in this anthology appeared about two weeks before the country’s economy collapsed and its population rebelled. During those two weeks I was told that I’d been harsh on a country that had managed to craft a very pretty image of itself; afterward I never heard that again. I only regret that I wasn’t able to cover Iceland’s next five years of glorious political experimentation—which faded in spring of 2013, when Icelanders reelected the neoliberals who destroyed the economy in the first place, like a wife going back to her abusive husband.)
I wondered about Detroit for a long time before my Detroit-born friend Sam Green and I decided to go visit in 2005, and when I got there, I realized that the widespread idea that Detroit was about ruins was out of date; I needed to inquire into what comes after ruin, as I did in the 2007 essay “Detroit Arcadia,” one of the earliest pieces in the book. In that period I was much preoccupied with disaster—it began locally, with a project in preparation for the centennial of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which reawakened my interest in how people behave in disaster. The co
nclusions were astonishing, and that became an extension of my project on hope—which is a project on how we tell stories about our history, our powers, and our possibilities. Disaster revealed to me that much of what we’ve been taught about human nature is not true, and so I began the research that became my 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell.
Early in the research, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. The colossal social disaster that resulted got me involved with that city, which I have visited about two dozen times since and written about in two books and various essays (including two here). I didn’t go to Haiti; I didn’t have to in order to see the media make the same horrific mistakes there they made in New Orleans in 2005 and San Francisco in 1906. Disaster was also what took me to Japan, and I wrote about the triple disaster of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident in Japan and then later wrote about the lagniappe of the expedition, my day in the Inari Shrine outside Kyoto.
My definition of disaster became broader and broader, and I now see much of our everyday life—for its alienation and its destruction of souls and memory, as well as natural and social places—as a kind of disaster we escape temporarily in those golden moments of uprisings and carnivals. Or reclaiming the story. I see disaster everywhere; I also—as the essay “Icebergs and Shadows” in particular discusses—see generosity and resistance everywhere.
We talk about people coming together, but we sometimes forget that that’s a spatial, geographical business: we are civil society when we go out into the streets to be together, when showing up and standing up becomes free speech, when we live in the plazas and squares, from Tahrir Square in Egypt to Mexico City’s Zócalo to Liberty Plaza near Wall Street in New York. This is civil society in political engagement, the Apollonian form of being in the streets. New Orleans showed me some of the possibilities of the Dionysian version, as the essay “We Won’t Bow Down” points out. There isn’t a virtual equivalent of it, which is why (with essays such as “We’re Breaking Up: Noncommunication in the Silicon Age”) I worry about the withdrawal from public space and public life. Democracy was always a bodily experience, claimed and fought for and celebrated in actual places. You must be present to win.
Wherever I went, I remained preoccupied with democracy and justice and popular power, with how change can be wrought in the streets and by retelling the story, with the power of stories to get things wrong as well as right, with the pleasures and possibilities each place holds, and with the beauties of light, space, and solidarity.
From all this wandering I came home every time, but home began to leave me as San Francisco became Silicon Valley’s bedroom community, the subject of three of the essays in this book. My own dear city had long been the far edge of the country, not merely in geography, but in possibility, the left coast that presented alternatives and refuges from the mainstream; when Silicon Valley became a—and in some ways the—global power center, it became something else.
Centers are supposed to be good things, but I prefer edges. That’s in part because wealth and power are also often disasters, with casualties and wreckage. Maybe what often gets called wealth in booms should mostly be imagined as impoverishment of the majority who don’t become wealthy and often become displaced or priced out locally, served up with the collateral damage from the concentration of power, resources, and the control of place.
I have been in recent years the author of a bestiary and director of some atlas projects; I’ve written criticism, editorials, reports from a few front lines, letters, a great many political essays for Tomdispatch.com in particular, more personal stuff, essays for artists’ books, and more. As nonfiction—that leftover term apotheosizing fiction—gets defined down as only memoir and essay, I’ve wanted to open it back up again, to claim it as virtually everything else.
Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to prose poems, from manifestos to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists. This territory to which I am, officially, consigned couldn’t be more spacious, and I couldn’t be more pleased to be free to roam its expanses. And maybe the variety of forms here is part of the book’s breadth along with its geographical range.
Calling this anthology an encyclopedia was a way to call attention to its range and maybe imagine these almost thirty essays as entries in an extremely incomplete encyclopedia. Essays explore; they also define; every essay is an entry in the author’s personal encyclopedia. Here is the latest volume of mine.
CYCLOPEDIA OF AN ARCTIC EXPEDITION
for Mike D.
Anchor Chain. The hideous, booming clatter that awoke me our first morning out was, I thought at first, the warning bell that announced we should all assemble on the foredeck and perhaps prepare to zip ourselves into survival suits—those bulky, lurid orange jumpsuits in which you could, they say, float and survive in an arctic sea for up to six hours. Happily, it was the anchor chain going out, meaning that we were at our first destination and that I did not yet have to try out that orange jumpsuit or those arctic waters. The chains were huge beasts in the stern of the boat that rattled like the end of the world on their way up and their way down.
Animals. There was no wait. The morning of the day of departure, a white arctic fox with a limp and a young gray fox cub came begging at the kitchen of the funky hostel-like hotel in Svalbard’s small capital, Longyearbyen, and all the animals showed up earlier than expected, all being a term that encompasses the fox, the walrus, the seal, the reindeer, and the polar bear—that being all the wingless beasts to be found onshore in this landscape that feels like creation on day two, not day seven or year 4 billion. Except for some tiny gnat-like creatures, and spiders.
Antlers. A skull with antlers was onshore by a rock at the first landing in Magdalenafjord, the antlers whipped back with the particular line that reindeer have and deer lack, a beautiful artifact that seemed to have been placed there as an accent. The skull was bleached white but a bit damp-looking, not like the dry white bones of the desert, and it looked as though it had been planted, an accent piece, a focus for the foreground. Further up the rocks was the lower jaw of an arctic fox. Over the ridge was a school of seals basking, arcing themselves into curved forms, occasionally swimming in the shallow bay, otherwise napping. Later there were more antlers, and occasionally reindeer. (See also Reindeer) Around the bend were three polar bears. See Sleep (Bear)
A crowd of reindeer together in the seasons when their antlers are fully grown—this must be the forest of this Arctic place far north of treeline.
Arctic Terns. Their Latin name is Sterna paradisaea; they are somehow birds of paradise or so named in 1763 by Erich Pontoppidan, the Pietist Danish prelate and contemporary of Linnaeus who wrote a natural history of Norway and an atlas of Denmark in the eighteenth century. He could not have known that of all living things on earth the arctic terns live in the most light and least darkness, but they work for it, flying 70,000 kilometers a year as they migrate from near the north pole to near the south, and when they are not nesting, live almost constantly in flight, like albatrosses. Theirs is a paradise of endless light and endless labor like angels (though they cross the band of day and night on their migration, and the tracking devices set up to plot their migratory course did so by measuring light and darkness). And their scimitar-sharp wings, their fierce cries, their hummingbird hoverings, their swallow-like tails, their gull-like dives.
Cold. Very. Well, pretty.
Color. When the sky is not blue, when moss and grass have not accumulated on the land (which is only 10 percent vegetated, 30 percent being rock and 60 percent glaciated), the world here is shades of gray verging toward brown, blue, and black, and it’s white: ice, snow, glacier, cloud. It often looks as though it’s heading into being a black-and-white photograph of itself or rather a Chinese ink painting on watered silk. And then come the tufts of moss like landscapes in miniature, various shades of vivid green and brown-green, here in this landscape where grass less than a foot high is the tallest plant around, and only a few thing
s flower. Indigo evening, water and sky. White morning. Gray world out the porthole. Black land with white ice. Glowing gray nights. The water, liquid pewter and iron, with gentle ripples rather than white-crested waves.
And the smeared red of a polar bear’s meal on blue-white ice. The cream of a polar bear against the white of ice—our chief guide says at one point that the tiny blob on the hillside is not a polar bear because it’s the wrong shade of white. Shades of white: snow, clouds, glaciers, bones, polar bears, quartz rocks.
Expedition. Sets out to accomplish, discover, claim, explore. Sets out with an agenda. Sets out often in these regions in earlier times to fail, to get lost, to suffer frozen blisters, frostbite, cannibalism, forms of poisoning and starvation, discord, blame, remorse, death, being frozen for decades until another exploratory party comes across the remains, undamaged by decay but sometimes snacked upon by bears, as was the case of the small Andrée ballooning party—failed in 1897, discovered in 1930—one man in his grave and two who’d died in the tent become gnawed bones in disarray. The Andrée party’s photographs and journals survived intact, and some of the embroidered linens made it to a museum. They planned, but did they anticipate?
Far. That first morning, out the porthole of my cabin there was a little blue iceberg. We were in Magdalenafjord, the bay at the end of the earth, the northwest corner of Svalbard in the high Arctic, more than a dozen degrees north of the Arctic Circle. Beyond it were stony gray hills with glaciers curving down the valleys in between most of them. The idea of being so far north was exciting enough, and then there were all those things I always wanted to see: icebergs, reindeer, polar bears, along with all the things I’m always happy to see: water, sky, spaciousness, landforms, light, scale. More than anyplace I’ve ever been, this one imposed a dependency: there was no way out except by this boat, and no way to communicate with the outside world except by this boat. Which was also an independency, from the rest of the world. Times when the view went all the way to the horizon and no land was visible on that side of the boat, when the sea was a delicate blue-gray and the sky was the same color, the sea smooth with billowing ripples that did not break into waves, the sky smooth, and only seabirds coasting along the surface of the sea, coming close to their own reflections, bending but not breaking the smoothness and vastness.