A Book of Migrations Read online

  REBECCA SOLNIT is author of, among other books, Wanderlust, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, the NBCC Award–winning River of Shadows and Infinite City. A contributing editor to Harper’s, she writes regularly for, among others, the London Review of Books and the Los Angeles Times. She lives in San Francisco.

  A Book of Migrations

  Some Passages in Ireland

  REBECCA SOLNIT

  First published by Verso 1997

  Paperback edition first published by Verso 1998

  This revised paperback published by Verso 2011

  © Rebecca Solnit 2011

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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  Verso

  UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

  www.versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  e-Book ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-814-3

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Typeset in Minion by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in the US by Maple Vail

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Preface

  Preface to the New Edition

  1 The Cave

  2 The Book of Invasions

  3 Noah’s Alphabet

  4 The Butterfly Collector

  5 The Beggar’s Rounds

  6 Anchor in the Road

  7 Wandering Rocks

  8 Articles of Faith

  9 A Pound of Feathers

  10 And a Pound of Lead

  11 The Circulation of the Blood

  12 Rock Collecting

  13 The War between the Birds and Trees

  14 Wild Goose Chase

  15 Grace

  16 Travellers

  17 The Green Room

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  This book goes out with thanks to the people who laid its foundations—my uncle, Thomas Davis Allen, whose identification with Ireland and genealogical research there provided me with the cypher of Irish citizenship; my mother, Theresa Allen, who was, during my childhood, working for civil rights and urging me to draw oak trees; and Lee Snodgrass and Paddy O’Leary, whose friendship and storytelling verve on my first visit to Ireland were among the strongest inducements to return—as well as to Verso’s American editors, Mike Davis, who was encouraging about this book when it was nothing more than ideas and notes, and Michael Sprinker who was there throughout the writing. I also thank Sister Kathleen and the Portumna Sisters of Mercy and Cathleen MacDonagh and her family for their hospitality on my journey; Ray Ryan of Cambridge University Press who read the manuscript and made valuable suggestions; Bonnie Nadell and Irene Moore of Frederick Hill Associates Literary Agency; Alice O’Malley; Lucy Lippard, for whom I housesat while writing the first chapters in late 1994 and some others in the summer of ’95; Bill Studebaker and Brenda Larsen; Pame Kingfisher and Kiya Heartwood who, in an early version of my travel plans, were to accompany me and who had much to say about ethnicity, music, and memory; and various others whose conversation and friendship have been important: Lewis deSoto, Tim and John O’Toole, Sono Osato, Sarah Wright, Dana Schuerholz, Dianne Driscoll Nepali, Valerie Soe, my brothers Stephen and David who were, respectively, organizing for immigrants’ rights and the rights of the homeless as I wrote, and, last but most, the lovely Pat, snake charmer and hillwalker, formerly of Joshua Tree. Finally, I have been meaning since my first book to credit the city of San Francisco’s rent control policy, which has helped secure for me the increasingly rare circumstances in which independent research and writing can be done.

  the past is a country from which we have all emigrated

  Salman Rushdie

  Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

  Basho

  Preface

  On the last day of 1986, I became an Irish citizen. My newfound status as a European has not yet ceased to bemuse me—my purple passport with its golden harp seems less like a birthright than a slim book on the mythologies of blood, heritage, and emigration. And so a few summers ago I went to this foreign country that claims me to think about these things. This is not a book about Ireland so much as it is a book about a journey through Ireland. I hasten to disclaim any great authority on the subjects of Irish history and culture, though my literal, geographical journey was overtaken by two longer journeys: though readings in Irish history and literature and through the writing itself (to say nothing of a follow-up trip to round out my researches). This is likewise no core sample of contemporary Ireland; in the same spirit Irish tourists may head straight for Graceland, I took off for the places that appealed to me and let attraction and invitations stitch together the rest of my route.

  Ireland delighted me by offering so many stories and circumstances in which individuals and populations were fluid rather than ossified, undermining the usual travelers’ dichotomy of a mobile figure in an immobile landscape. It was this play between memory, identity, movement, and landscape that I wanted to explore, and the ebb and flow of populations that constitutes invasion, exile, colonization, emigration, tourism, and nomadism. In other terms, this excursion offered me a whole set of linked possibilities: to muse about the identity politics raised by my American activism and my Irish passport; to rethink my education in English literature—to separate the status of great literary works from that of great landmarks of civilization, for which Ireland as a kind of backstage to the drama of imperial Britain is ideal; to look at a place where the tidy phrases of contemporary conversation—terms like native and white and Europe and first world—begin to fray and come apart.

  Travel is also a psychic experiment. In different places, different thoughts emerge, and this too I wanted to trace. I tried to use the subjective and personal not to glorify my mundane autobiography but as a case study in how one can explore the remoter reaches of the psyche by wandering across literal terrain. This book is itself not a travel book in the usual sense, but a book of essays sequenced and shaped by my journey. That journey is the continuous thread running through the chapters, which can be regarded as variously faceted beads, each one made differently from the raw materials of landscape and identity, remembering and forgetting, the fixed and the fluctuant, and out of travel itself—out of my own modest passage and all the great tides any such journey echoes.

  Preface to the New Edition

  The stream of consciousness most famously caught in Joyce’s Molly Bloom soliloquy at the end of Ulysses is a coming home to the internal self, and in throwing myself into the unknown of another country, I wanted to also explore that territory of associations.

  You walk through almost any but the most urgent and overwhelming landscape immersed in your own thoughts, a little atmosphere of home and self that surrounds you like mosquitoes, armor, perfume, or blinders, a second layer of self. When I wrote A Book of Migrations I wanted to include this inner layer of experience and to dismantle the conventions of travel writing, as in my previous book, Savage Dreams, I had tried to undo the limited and depoliticized scope of nature writing. I was prompted to go to Ireland for pleasure, and I hope that some of that pleasure comes through, but also for an inquiry on foot into a question that had arisen for me in the American West. There, a lot of Native Americans liked to assert that just as they were pure North American, not hybridized, so were people like me pure European. I doubted it, but I thought I should take my
European passport and go fish. Or my sort of European passport, because Ireland is now a European Union member but was long where the idea of Europe got frayed and tattered around the edges, along with the ideas of white and of First World. I went not to confirm but to complicate and dissolve the definitions I’d been handed, about Europeanness, whiteness, Irishness, about travel, place, and time. Which sounds serious, but it was a great excuse to wander around and pay attention to interior and exterior geographies, to the ways people read me, and to the way my readings inflected my adventure.

  Since then I have tried to define a place as a stable location where unstable forces converge from without, and certainly to trace the tropical butterfly in the Irish Natural History Museum leads you to its Putamayo jungle in Peru, and to its captor, the queer independence hero Roger Casement. Whatever leads you to a place, when you get there other things lead you elsewhere on earth and in time.

  Shortly after I wrote this book, the so-called Celtic Tiger came to Ireland; lots of money sloshed around, some people got rich; quite a lot of people found themselves poorer in various ways; the great Irish outmigration reversed itself, and the country got an incursion of foreigners. The motion reminded me of the moment in an atomic explosion when it implodes. And Ireland imploded. When I went to Sligo in 2001, I gave a talk based on another Verso book of mine, Hollow City, about how wealth destroys cities in ways poverty does not, and was swarmed by Dubliners eager to articulate how just that was happening to their city. They gave me tours, and the Ireland I traveled through at the beginning of the millennium had more fast-food restaurants, more buildings going up, more bustle, and more displacement than the Ireland of A Book of Migrations.

  But then the tiger choked from greed, or if you prefer, from reckless bankers, real-estate speculation, and irresponsible elected officials. Ireland has been savaged from outside, mostly from England, over and over again, but this is the first time it has done such a spectacular job of destroying itself—if bankers constitute “self” and not some sort of stateless neoliberal virus, and “destroyed” is the term for a country that’s gone back into the old familiar poverty in which it’s spent most of the past several hundred years. Only this time it’s gone back in fury. Nothing ever returns to quite its previous state, but I write this as I prepare to head back to a Dublin that should be different yet again from the cities I saw in 1987, 1994, and 2001, poor again in the old ways, and maybe rich in them too.

  Rebecca Solnit

  2011

  1

  The Cave

  She grasped the windowsill and leaned across me to look down, and the veins on the backs of her hands looked like earthworms, the ones that on the rainy days of my childhood swam to the sidewalks and lay there exhausted and rosy gray. Thirty thousand feet below, beneath torn veils of cloud or fog, a wild landscape full of pale blue lakes stretched, some portion of what we surmised was northeastern Canada. Gazing out of the windows of airplanes, I always try to memorize the shapes of the bodies of water that lie below, but if I ever get to an atlas at all, the strangely alluring forms I saw never resemble the neat, familiar world of maps.

  The woman with the veiny hands talked to me on and off all the way from San Francisco to London, and her even more weatherbeaten husband with his crewcut and trembling hands never spoke at all. He’d been silenced by a recent stroke and needed help getting up and manipulating all the paraphernalia of airline journeys, the seatbelts and headphones and trays, so I was boxed in by them for twelve hours. He had settled into his inarticulateness like a dog among people and watched us as elements in a life that no longer included him. She had that garrulous sweetness so many women of her generation do, as though they were still waiting for life to begin, fresh, eager, and sheltered. They were going to London to join a tour of England; I was going to catch another plane to Dublin as soon as ours landed and spend my time in Ireland. Snatches of a movie about innocent Irish Catholics framed, tortured, and imprisoned by the British government not very long ago drifted into our conversation from the tiny televisions mounted in the backs of the seats, an odd choice for a flight to London, more warning than invitation.

  She wanted to know if I had a dream to fulfill in Ireland. I thought of all the complicated things I could tell her and said I was going to walk across its west. By yourself, she exclaimed, and By myself, I replied, and turned the conversation back on her. She told me that if I ever came across any churches of the Latter Day Saints on my pilgrimage, I should go in and have another kind of adventure, about as polite a gesture of evangelism as I’ve ever encountered. When she let on they were Mormons, things began to fall into place. Although she had first said they were from Berkeley, it turned out they were originally from the Great Basin, as their faces and manners suggested. I wanted to hear her talk about it; I like to hear people talk about certain places the way some people like to hear their beloved mentioned; even the names of secondary highways and small towns can summon back the place itself. She added that there was no place on earth so beautiful as Logan, Utah, in the spring, although that was perhaps because she was twenty then, and I could guess at the lilacs and frame houses and wide streets and wider sky. I like Mormons too, as the only immigrants to love the northern deserts of the United States and to truly settle the West at all. They did it by fantasizing the place as the new promised land and themselves as the new Israelites at the end of their exodus, so an Old Testament, old world veneer lay over the Utah they settled in 1846 and thereafter—but they stayed and made a home of it, which is more than one can say of most white people in that West.

  This old woman traveling to green England and yearning for arid Utah seemed, when I thought back later, to be where my journey began. Or it began earlier that spring near Twin Falls, Idaho, not far from Logan, Utah, in the kind of sagebrush prairie that I pictured when she spoke to me of Logan. When the philosophy professor at the College of Southern Idaho had called me up to ask me to come to Twin Falls and talk about landscape, she was audibly surprised that I had been there before and would be happy to return. The Snake River’s Shoshone Falls, right outside town, is one of the country’s more spectacular waterfalls. The black volcanic canyon of the Snake forms the northern boundary of the Great Basin, though the same terrain of huge, drab expanses, bathed in the incomparably clear and constantly shifting light of the arid West, stretches further north. Had the falls been somewhere else, they might be a major tourist attraction, another Niagara, but the Snake is used instead as a giant irrigation ditch, and when I’d passed through the summer before, most of the water had been diverted to crops, and the black rocks beneath the whitewater jutted out like beggar’s bones. When I returned, there was still snow on the ground, and coyotes frolicked with each other on the edge of the local airstrip.

  I stayed an extra day, and Bill Studebaker, the honors program chair, and Brenda Larsen, the philosophy teacher, took me out to see the sights. Had the dry air and easygoing voices not told me I was far from the urban centers of the coasts, the fact that these two professors had time and hospitality enough to spend a whole day driving a stranger around would have been enough. Brenda and I had a conversation to resume: she wanted to compile a collection of philosophical paradoxes, and I saw in it some affinity to my concern with metaphors. The day before, as we picked our way among the iced-up pools along the banks of the Snake, we had begun to approach some definitions that made us happy, and we refined them over a tomato curry she cooked me that night, this pretty woman whose appetite was equally sharp for food and ideas. Our metaphors and paradoxes seemed like ways of being in two places at once, and we had begun to suspect that the philosophical desire to reach some final destination is, finally, a humorless attempt to be in only one place, the unreachable vanishing point of literal truth itself. Arrival, like origin, is a mythical place.

  Brenda and Bill came and got me early in the morning, and we went eastward past the farm fields, through the town of Eden with its inexplicable First Segregationist Fire Department, to th
e open rangeland. A local joke had been trotted out for my benefit the night before, about Twin Falls being situated halfway between Bliss and Eden; and Bill had published a book of poetry called North of Bliss. He was weatherbeaten with a crewcut, a younger version of the man on the plane, and he had the wary quality of creatures who aren’t sure they want to come in from the wild. He had a wife too, a Mormon Shoshone woman from the nearby Fort Hall Reservation, and four children, but he still seemed with drawn and private somehow, one of those autodidacts who will tell stories, suddenly and unpredictably, but don’t exactly converse. That day, out of the blue, he said, “One Hunter and Jaguar Deer,” the names of the twins who defeat the old gods of Xibalba in the Mayan creation epic, the Popol Vuh, adding that he’d like to be named One Hunter. Another book of his had been on the petroglyphs of the region, which is the northern end of the vast Shoshone homeland, and, as we drove down long straight numbered roads and snaking dirt roads on the high bowed plateau, sometimes slanting downward into farm crops and sometimes upward to crests from which the distant ranges that framed the horizon could be seen, he talked about it.

  When the potholes got too deep for the lowslung university car, we left it in the middle of the dirt road—no one else was likely to come by that day, maybe that week—and walked in the cool clean air, with old snow and clumps of still-gold grass and black lava outcroppings scattered across the land on either side. We saw a cow pie in the road with a coyote turd on top of it, a territorial marker like a checkmate in chess, and a golden eagle sitting atop one of the volcanic piles not far away in this treeless landscape. Eventually Bill spotted the cave, which looked like just another lava outcropping on this arid prairie. Its rough roof tufted with scrubby plants provided a long view in all directions, and the little hummocks of rock that made it up fit together like the cells of a honeycomb or rolls in a pan. A depression like a streambed led down to a small opening, covered by a cyclone fence that had been burst open. Inside, the cave was a single hemispherical lava bubble, an ancient fiery gasp of the earth turned to a perfect stone dome perhaps forty feet across and nearly twenty at its highest point, dimly lit by the daylight. The ceiling was rough, but lacked those deep recesses, irregularities, and extrusions that make most caves so unnervingly mysterious, with passages that could harbor anything. Most caves feel awkward and alien and perilous, but this one—I could imagine living in it. In fact I found myself picturing how I’d arrange my furniture in it, with a fire venting at the mouth and the magnificent landscape outside as the new center of a starker, more serene world.