Rebecca Solnit: Metaphor And Migration

I'm very much drawn to the mind and writings of Californian author, activist, feminist, environmentalist and cultural historian Rebecca Solnit, and her way of seeing the world. If a book is extra-special, I often find myself marking passages, taking notes, copying out quotations. The reason is: I don't want such exciting thoughts and ideas, such arresting tropes and expressions, simply to disappear into the ether. I want my memory to be jogged; and these joggings prompt me back into the lush experience of the whole book.

Recently I read through some notes I'd made on A Book of Migrations, Solnit's book about Ireland. You can't really call her travel books 'travel' books; they are an uncategorisable pot pourri of history, geography, politics, anthropology, ecology, environmentalism, personal anecdote and first-hand experience — so different from the gimmicky, laugh-a-minute, populist travelogues of the Bill Bryson school. A Book of Migrations is full of penetrating insights, sharp and fresh observations, imaginative connections. She writes beautifully, finding metaphor in everything. Her phrases and figures of speech can be lyrical and poetic, though she also has her feet placed firmly on the ground. And sometimes she reveals a wry sense of humour, casting an owlishly beady eye on the world.

Here are some of my marginalia and brief jottings; I hope they stimulate you too.

Arrival, like origin, is a mythical place.

One climbs the mountain to see the valley.

Walking round the Dublin Natural History Museum, Solnit sees the stuffed animals as imperial souvenirs, and calls the museum itself a lexicon of form.

She calls metaphors the transportation systems of the mind (brilliant, this, I think). Metaphors are the way we make connections between disparate things, the way we make creative sense of the world. Machines can not make these intuitive, aesthetic connections. We make contact with Creation through metaphor. The first symbols were animals, then plants, then words. Human beings first as nomads (birds), then settlers (trees).

Every cell in the human body is renewed every seven years.

Travel: a series of discomforts in magnificent settings.

Contrast between Academia and New Ageism: the Academic accentuates too many distinctions between cultures; the New Ager blurs too many differences between cultures. Solnit seeks the middle ground between what she terms the fuzzy (New Age) and the icy (Academe).

Nietzsche says that truth is a metaphor we have forgotten is a metaphor.

Wilderness without wildlife is just scenery. (An American wildlife expert.)

Two things are alike up to the point of their differences.

Masculine England and feminine Ireland (Ireland raped by England).

The freemasonry of the road.

Things seen to rise gradually out of their surroundings are infinitely more real than things which suddenly bump up in front of one.

She is not taken in by the folksiness, the shamrock image, the professional charm of the Irish. She is refreshingly realistic about landscape, doesn't write about it in clichés as 'pretty' etc. She sees landscape as it properly is — in the context of people, geology, history, politics, culture.

Reversing the popular view, she hates B & Bs, viewing them as an enforced intimacy, a miniature 'colonization'!

She likes recounting short chance meetings, impressionistic personal encounters — then interpreting them, contextualising them. Every chance encounter is the beginning/middle/end of a story only glimpsed incompletely.

Identity as destination not origin (an anti-Eden myth). (NB This echoes the Existentialist position of existence before essence.)

National identity is based as much on forgetting as remembering.

Walking — or upright bipedalism — is the common point of origin for all human beings.

She describes tomb uprights with a slab on top as being in defiance of gravity or celebration of balance.

Every place is both exotic and local.

The Irish: 80% drunk and 20% depressed (cheeky!).

Efficiency is an unfriendly virtue, and no one I met in Ireland seemed afflicted with it.

The mobile person sees the landscape as static . . . but the stationary person sees that everything around is changing.

Ireland is not rocklike or static, but is always changing itself.

Birds are rooted in Irish culture: swans are incarnations of human souls. The symbology of birds: the soaring imagination, freedom, escape, spiritual energy, song.

The Irish exile (e.g. James Joyce): no longer belonging to where one comes from, yet unable to become part of where one has ended up.

This may be one of the under appreciated pleasures of travel: of being at last legitimately lost and confused.

I like inconclusiveness, like a conversation that will always need more to be said . . .

Solitude And Communion

Previous technologies have expanded communication. But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the unnuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat. I think of that lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. It is a shallow between two deep zones, a safe spot between the dangers of contact with ourselves, with others.

I live in the heart of it, and it’s normal to walk through a crowd — on a train, or a group of young people waiting to eat in a restaurant — in which everyone is staring at the tiny screens in their hands. It seems less likely that each of the kids waiting for the table for eight has an urgent matter at hand than that this is the habitual orientation of their consciousness. At times I feel as though I’m in a bad science fiction movie where everyone takes orders from tiny boxes that link them to alien overlords. Which is what corporations are anyway, and mobile phones decoupled from corporations are not exactly common.

REBECCA SOLNIT Diary from London Review Of Books Vol. 35 No. 16

. . . now it's hard to get through a meal with friends without somebody reaching for an iPhone to retrieve the kind of fact it used to be the brain's responsibility to remember.

JONATHAN FRANZEN Saturday Guardian Review 14-09-13

Nice, Solnit's word 'shallow'.

Are we in danger of losing access to the humanly important, life-enhancing states of 'solitude and communion'? We certainly have to work harder to achieve them. And they are, in my view, deeply necessary.

Just a few observations.

I know someone who walked the Pennine Way with his earpiece incessantly feeding mediaspeak for the whole trip.

The other day, as I strolled round a beautiful nearby town on a gorgeous sunny afternoon, I tried to estimate how many people were smartphoning and iPadding. My guess was 70%. They were doing it alone, in couples and in groups, in shop doorways, sitting on benches in parks and railway stations, standing, walking, running.

And am I the only person who thinks it's rude to tweet and text at mealtimes and in intimate company? (I may be quite out-of-date here, as I've noticed how many people now seem able to integrate the new technologies with ease into social situations, multitasking quite naturally.)

Three Or Four Hills And A Cloud

In my room, the world is beyond my understanding. But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud. WALLACE STEVENS Of The Surface Of Things

Why do we go walking? It's an interesting question. We start to walk as soon as we wake up in the morning. We walk to the bathroom. We go downstairs. We visit the shops to buy groceries. We drag the dog round the block. We walk to our friends' houses and post Christmas cards through their letterboxes. In other words, we walk all the time, without thinking about it. It's a natural, practical way of getting from A to B, and we do it automatically.

But we may also have a regular walk we take each evening, say, when we 'beat the bounds' of our neighbourhood. Or we may even have a longer 'constitutional' stroll we perform ritualistically every Sunday. Some of us may take it much further - go on more demanding two day hikes through the whole weekend, book walking holidays, or undertake strenuous, multi-week treks over difficult terrain. This type of walking is different in kind from our normal, practical, functional walking activities.

So why, in a deeper sense, do we go walking? The question is more profound than it might at first appear, and the answers sweep us up into vast realms. In fact these answers cover all subjects and all experiences. They cover the whole world, like footprints stretching endlessly through Arctic snow or desert sand. Walking can be seen as pilgrimage, therapy, exploration. It can be a means of reflection and meditation. Astonishingly it's also a path through history, philosophy, art and metaphor. Above all it's a gateway to freedom. And, as Rebecca Solnit says in her book Wanderlust: The history of walking is everyone's history. The world of walking is one of the few democracies in which we may all truly and equally share.

I'd like to take you on a ten-part journey through the limitless country of walking. This sequence will reflect on Walking as Exercise, Walking as Therapy, Walking as Meditation, the Simplicity of Walking, Walking as a Portal to Discovery and Freedom, the Spiritual Nature of Walking, Walking as Pilgrimage, Walking as Art, and the Zen of Walking.

I look forward to your company on this physical, mental and spiritual voyage ...

Wild Creatures

Wilderness without wildlife is just scenery. Quoted of an American wilderness expert by REBECCA SOLNIT in her book Wanderlust: A History Of Walking

So few wild creatures, relatively, remain in Britain and Ireland: so few, relatively, in the world. Pursuing our project of civilisation, we have pushed thousands of species towards the brink of disappearance, and many thousands more over that edge. The loss, after it is theirs, is ours. Wild animals, like wild places, are invaluable to us precisely because they are not us. They are uncompromisingly different. The paths they follow, the impulses that guide them, are of other orders. The seal's holding gaze, before it flukes to push another tunnel through the sea, the hare's run, the hawk's high gyres: such things are wild. Seeing them, you are made briefly aware of a world at work around and beside our own, a world operating in patterns and purposes that you do not share. These are creatures, you realise, that live by voices inaudible to you. ROBERT MACFARLANE The Wild Places

The Way, The Word And The World: The Language Of Walking

The history of walking is an unwritten, secret history whose fragments can be found in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as well as in songs, streets, and almost everyone's adventures. REBECCA SOLNIT Wanderlust.

Thoreau once wrote somewhere that walking inevitably leads to other subjects. He was right. The subject of walking itself is a vast one, but the paths upon which it takes you circumscribe the whole physical and mental world.

One of my favourite books on walking, and, I think, one of the best and most eclectic ever written on the subject, is Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History Of Walking. This book crosses so many boundaries, it's uncategorisable. Walking's the theme, but it encompasses so much else - poetry, philosophy, anatomy, history, religion, politics, psychogeography, mountaineering, landscape gardening, personal confession. All the things you encounter while walking. And consider while walking.

Solnit believes the culture of walking has evolved out of the disembodiment of everyday life resulting from automobilisation and suburbanisation. She also uncovers a long historical association between walking and philosophising. When walking, she says, the mind, the body and the world come into alignment. She points to a strong sympathy between writing and walking, between language and the path: Language is like a road; it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read.

The photo below shows some of my 'walking book' shelves. The books assembled there are wide-ranging in their scope, 'fragments' of a 'secret history'. For walking is the starting point for a thousand byways, a thousand ideas, a thousand connections. There are all sorts of subjects here - social history, landscape history, nature writing, travel, adventure and exploration, farming and agriculture, autobiography, mythology. All these things are written into the landscapes and mindscapes through which we walk...

Discomfort In Paradise

Perhaps people travel for pleasure because the visual is much more memorable than the tangible, the seen than the felt. At the time, traveling may be nothing more than a series of discomforts in magnificent settings: running for the train to paradise in a heat wave, carrying an ever heavier pack in alpine splendor, seeing sublime ruins with stomach trouble.Yet it is the field of images and not the body of sensations that lingers. My mother once remarked that if women remembered what childbirth felt like, no one would have more than one child. And so I, third child of a third child, owe my existence to forgetting and my taste for travels to the dominance of the eye. I got up in Kenmare to find that a knee, a muscle, both feet were inexplicably wrecked as no no previous walk had ever wrecked them, and they told me of it with every step. The marvelous walk over the mountains to Killarney which I had anticipated for three days turned into a bus trip. Small waterfalls tumbling over rough rocks and into sinuous streambeds flashed by, shadowed by oaks whose branches spread at the same abrupt and undulating angles, invaded by rhododendrons, all among a complex of passes that shifted the view around in unexpected, abrupt ways. The whole landscape had in its very lines a kind of intricate, tangled wilderness I saw nowhere else in Ireland, and I had no chance to sort it out.

From A Book Of Migrations by Rebecca Solnit