Rebecca Solnit and "The Blue of Distance"

At first glance, the title of Rebecca Solnit's A Field Guide to Getting Lost might confuse. My advice to any reader: embrace the confusion. I first read this book, shortly after dislodging from the familiar confines of city life, while both relishing in the calm of the northeastern woods and bewildered by the transition. Solnit was a welcomed guide. After all, her collection of nine essays is, at its core, more than a “field guide;” it is a celebration of the origins of disorientation.

Painters and pilots, early pioneers and punk rockers, all have staked their place in Solnit’s prose, her wingspan as an essayist ranges far enough to encapsulate a grand portrait of things lost: of the lost history of her family, of 19^th century travelers lost in a desert in search of gold, of Yves Klein’s disappearance after his great leap into thin air. She offers a eulogy for lost creatures. She writes of lost objects, of lost memory, of lost love, and though she bears a sincere melancholy for the past, her stories are laced with a precious optimism.

In both form and content, A Field Guide to Getting Lost traipses over topics so vast that it almost threatens to lose readers in its tangled thread, but with a veteran spirit of adventure, Solnit exudes an assurance such that we feel safe wandering through her prose. When she strays into long anecdotal passages, she brings us back to familiar landmarks. When she dips into lengthy historical explanations, she resurfaces with an eccentric image, a classic song, a statement that leads like a riddle to points of interest, common attractions, as if guided by an invisible map.

Yet the most persistent theme throughout Solnit’s collection is not maps, geography, or epic journeys of lost souls—though they all have their place—but the color blue. “The Blue of Distance” is a term Solnit uses as arecurring title to link several of her essays and create a thread of color throughout the collection. Through Solnit’s own curiosity, we learn of artists in the 15^th century—the first generation of painters concerned with verisimilitude, with the way the world appeared before the eye—who used the color blue in their paintings to connote distance, “the color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away.”

Like an artist, Solnit utilizes the urban and cultural world around her: the architecture of San Fransisco, the stories of Nabokov, Borges’s “endless labyrinths,” Hitchcok’s Vertigo. She creates gestural portraits and surreal landscapes of how we search for, discover, and ultimately lose again and again our places in the world.

In one essay, Solnit reflects on the associative power of music as she recalls making mix-tapes for road trips, each a compilation of songs that got at “The evocation of place and its emotional resonance in that music.” For example, Geography Lessons, Mostly Tragic or “The Entirely Liquid Mr. North… a compilation about rivers and drinking, about drowning from the inside out,” which consisted mostly of southern tunes. She explains that many country singers—Patsy Cline, Bobby Gentry, Tanya Tucker among them—sang songs about anonymous protagonists, with vague descriptions of improbable loves, all filled with drama. “But the territory in which these dramas played themselves out were evoked in detail over and over again, and if they were tragic songs about the failure of human love,” she writes “they were also love songs about places.” Sometimes, landscapes, after all, offer a deeper anchor to our experiences than a melodious storyline of what occurs there. We may not turn back time, but we can return to the places of meaning to us.

And in such places, Solnit’s essays take a closer look at the natural side of things: the nature of hermit crabs, daisy chains, terra incognita—once featured on maps as a mark of “unknown land.” Which Solnit claims is no longer a legitimate label.But it oncewas. Or is it still? Might one say that all land is terra incognito to somebody? And that even when maps were labeled as such, all unknown land was in fact known, to someone?

In another essay, Solnit tells the story of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish adventurer who lost his bearings in the Mississippi Delta and was captured and enslaved by natives. After ten years learning the native customs and languages, Cabeza de Vaca “had so adapted to this new life he had fallen into that he no longer considered himself lost” until he walked west, as far as New Mexico, where he found himself back among his once-fellow conquistadores, only to struggle to regain the old customs and habits he once knew well. “He was of the first of the Europeans lost in the Americas,” Solnit writes, “and like many of them he ceased to be lost not by returning but by turning into something else.” This metamorphosisis akin to that of other creatures, “The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and re-form more than once in its life cycle.”

And still, Solnit returns again and again to the concept of blue: its color, its connotations, its etymological history. “The term blue comes from an old English word for melancholy or for sadness,” she explains, “blue moods, blue devils, the blues… The world from which the blues came is largely vanished.” She tells the story of the French artist Yves Klein, whose obsession with the color blue marked many of his most prominent works: a blue that represents “the spirit, the sky, and water, the immaterial and the remote,” a blue that “however tactile and close-up it is, it is always about distance and disembodiment.”

Through her examinations, Solnit comments on the fear of not knowing where we are, which has, based on innovation in technology, become virtually impossible in modern times. Likewise, perhaps it has even grown difficult to navigate anew through our own ideas, for “Some ideas are new, but most are only recognition of what has been there all along, the mystery in the middle of the room, the secret in the mirror.” Solnit suggests, but not without a glimmer of hope, faith even, that it is in the art of exploring that “Sometimes one unexpected thought becomes the bridge that lets you traverse the country of the familiar in an unprecedented way.”

An important theme, in many ways the bloodline of Solnit’s essays, like the story of Cabeza de Vaca, is the idea that getting lost means accepting change. Yet as I read A Field Guide to Getting Lost—the same days I set off, in my own way, to navigate through the blue of distance—I quickly realized, too, that pursuing change sometimes means accepting the sense of being lost, if only for a while.

~ Jericho Parms

Mark Doty's Still Life

“I have fallen in love with a painting… and the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into its brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.”

So begins Mark Doty’s book Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, as he explores the rhapsody of viewing a still life painting by the Dutch artist Jan Davidsz de Heem exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. More than an essay, though not quite a memoir, the book is an extended meditation on art and life, full of lyric observation and free association sure to carve a place for Doty in the history of writers drawn to the visual expressions of art.

The relationship between writers and the visual arts is nothing new. For Mark Doty it is the 17^th century Dutch still life painters that hold his rapture. Before him John Updike contemplated the Americans—Wyeth’s realism, Hopper’s light, Jackson Pollock’s frantic grace. Ralph Ellison wrote of the triumphant color of Romare Bearden. The modern German poet Rainer Maria Rilke completed many of his best works under the influence of Rodin’s bronze sculptures and was later awed by the paintings of Cézanne.

When Rilke encountered the work of Cézanne exhibited at the Salon d’ Automne during his stay in Paris in 1907, the poet visited the galleries day after day for months and wrote letters home to his wife. In those letters, later published as Letters on Cezanne, the poet ruminates on the artist’s paintings—still lifes, reclining nudes, landscapes—and the ways, like language, they communicate to the viewer. Like Rilke’s collection, Mark Doty’s book bears the intimacy of a letter home while it explores the boundaries of observation, considers the representation of objects, and exemplifies to what degree one artist’s eye can penetrate the essence of another’s art.

Though Doty’s observations on art are widely applicable to still life painting, it is Jan Davidsz de Heem’s “Still Life with Oysters and Lemon” and Adriaen Coorte’s “Still Life with Asparagus” that garner most of Doty’s reverence. While sparing readers much of the art history and context for the 17^th Dutch genre painting, Doty focuses his lens on the depiction of objects and the intimacy they maintain on an aging canvas, like the memory of objects in one’s own life. Of still life painting, he writes, “It is an art that points to the human by leaving the human out; nowhere visible, we’re everywhere.”

Like Doty’s poems, Still Life With Oysters and Lemon is full of exquisite detail. Doty articulates the spiritual nature of artistic encounter. “In the light that has come toward me through a canvas the size of a school notebook,” Doty writes, “we are all walking in the light of a wedge of lemon, four oysters, a half-glass of wine, a cluster of green grapes with a few curling leaves still attached to their stem.” Ultimately, he casts his attention on intimacy, memory, death, and the human condition.

In this sense Doty creates his own still life, weaving the memory of objects from his past, like the “red, pinwheeled peppermints” he remembered among the contents of his grandmother’s purse when he was a boy in rural Tennessee in the 1950s, “each wrapped in a shiny square of cellophane which twists at the ends into little flourishes.” The blue and white china platter among the vast collection of objects obtained at antique auctions and flea markets with his late partner, Wally, amidst other objects filling the rooms of the house, that amass to “tableaux and still lifes of old things spilling over, one season’s purchases crowding out the last’s.” With refreshing willingness to share these moments sparingly, Doty allows objects to create deeply moving illustrations of the larger concept at hand while allowing space for dialogue with a reader’s own thoughts on art and intimacy—informal invitations to join the great correspondence des arts. In writing, like in painting, there seems a sort of aesthetic mysticism that accompanies the act of creating from observation. Description is “an act of interiorizing what we see,” Doty writes. “Description delineates the world, yes, but in doing so it informs what’s seen with ourselves.”

It is through such suggestions, understated yet consistent, that Doty upholds his thread of spirituality, the transient nature—and ultimate continuity—of life and, furthermore, suggests a connection between elements of human existence and the depiction of objects in a still life painting, all of which contain a history of their own significance. They did, after all, belong to someone. “The paintings seem to refer to this life of ownership,” he writes, “and to suggest something of the feeling attached to things, while withholding any narrative.” Antiques acquire beauty as they mature. The same is true of paintings—their glazes crack, their coloration ages. Art is itself imbued with its own life, and in its greatest manifestations, it serves to bind us to the world. Through his poetic eye, Doty bestows the grace of still life and “the deep pun hidden in the term: life with death in it, life after the knowledge of death, is, after all, still life.”

~ Jericho Parms

Nabokov's Pale Fire

Nabokov’s Pale Fire is like nothing I have ever read, so fully realized are the dark mysteries of human experience within the magical world of his creation. Audre Lourde said that we cannot take apart the master’s house, using the master’s tools, and Nabokov brings this concept to fruition in Pale Fire. We must find a different way of seeing, of speaking as well as structuring, if we are to know and think about what we sense and feel but can’t seem to articulate. This is always the challenge we face as writers: how to craft work that speaks to that otherness that encapsulates each of us. The otherness of believing we are separate, that our experience is in some ways isolated and disconnected, when in truth we live lives of incredible similarity. Just as Charles Kimbote believed that his story of the fall of Zembla was so spectacular that John Shade was a fool not to use it in his great masterpiece, so too do we see ourselves at times—our great particularity. And yet in reading Pale Fire, as one comes to recognize the duel beauty of the magical world of Zembla and the world of the Shades, each seeking to recreate the pain and beauty of their histories in the aftermath of loss, we are given the experience …

We cannot help but scoff at Kimbote’s arrogance in his notes on the poem, even while we take great pleasure in the world of Zembla, and in fact eventually begin to forget the Shades as we more and more want only to return to the world of kings and adventure. This is Nabokov’s goal, to allow his readers to navigate an experience that we might come out of it with a different understanding of who we are. To be clear, I believe Nabokov is poking fun at his readers, but greater than that at our way of creating the world in our honor, or seeing it from the central focal point of “me”. Kimbote makes Shade’s poem into his own personal story of adventure, and even though we know all along that he is doing this, we are drawn so fully into Kimbote’s Zembla that we take more interest in it and in fact while giggling to ourselves about Kimbote’s interpretations of his interactions with the Shades, we allow the poem and the Shade’s to slip into the background, hoping that we’ll get our fill of Zembla and not have to think too often of the Shade’s. Yet, in the end, our great narrator begins to crumble, and we feel that perhaps we’ve been duped by a crazy, estranged professor making up fancy stories about himself¹.

How does this then affect us, the reader? In a way it reads like a poetic metaphor that must eventually be slaughtered if the poem is to manifest itself fully: we must kill the metaphor. Shade is dead and Kimbote’s credibility is destroyed, and we are left with ourselves, wondering what it all means, thinking a bit about whom this Nabokov guy is and what he’s up to? Is he taunting us?

Beyond the obvious beauty of Nabokov’s gorgeous sentences, which can be held up to those of Woolf, both sometimes so rich and exact that one wants to stop reading after a paragraph because so much is given in just that short space, Nabokov crafts this work with a duel plot meant bridge the world of the everyday with that of fantasy. I assert that the poetic rests only in both these worlds in that as Shade’s poem anchors itself in the familiar world of object and place through which we enter the fantastical realm of the poetic—a beyond of created perceptions—that we might then return to the familiar upon exiting the poem with an altered sense of what is, and what is possible. Similarly, we enter Zembla through Kimbote’s analysis of Shade’s poem, where we then become lost in the narrative of Zembla, in fantasy. But, what is changed of the reality of the Shade’s? What do we come to understand? If we see at the center of Shade’s poem, the suffering of the loss of his daughter Hazel, and his attempt to reconcile her tragedy, then perhaps we understand the truth behind Kimbote’s statement that he is rather like Hazel Shade. Rejected and socially marginalized, Hazel lived in the fantasy of her own creation, a place as beautiful (we might imagine) as that of Zembla. Her date, unwilling to waste his time getting to know her, makes an excuse to depart early, is this unlike the excuses made by the Shade’s when Kimbote came to call? Nabokov crafts his characters so that we cannot write them off as good, bad, honest, or ignorant, and when we think we’ve captured a character, Nabokov destroys our illusions, refusing to give us easy answers.
by Emily Casey

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Jenny Boully Bon Voyage

Absent in Jenny Boully's book The Body An Essay is the actual text. Her book is composed of footnotes to a missing text. Boully's work is challenging in a frustrating yet delirious way; she sees the book as an open form, a kind of living body. It's not the kind of book you can sit down and read through. You find yourself skipping around, stalling, daydreaming, flipping back to recover the fragment that keeps resurfacing in your mind. The question then that every reader asks is how do I read this book? The answer is, I have no idea. Yet, what Boully has done is force her readers (her contemporaries) to question the idea of a book, and also, considering her title, an essay.

     Boully's work is missing its body, the body has gone missing, or the body was erased, the body is void. The blank space above her footnotes reminds us that something is missing each page of the book. One page in the text is blank (p.56). One footnote is left blank (p.49). Blank space varies in size depending on the length of the footnotes. So what is the blank space or why is it there and what are we to do with it each page? What does Boully mean to say about the book with all this empty space?

     Reading the footnotes to the missing text, out of habit and a desire to connect, one attempts to find patterns and to link together multiple stories, or create stories. For example the “Great Poet” is referenced multiple times, enough so that we might begin to feel her as a character, if only vaguely and loosely created. The footnotes range from personal notes about the author to dense philosophical notes. Notes such as 153, “62° 17' 20”, 19° 2' 40” and 37.29 N, 79.52 W respectively” remind us that we are reading a work of art in which such coordinates can only signify something to the one who knows, much like an address only means something to the family who calls it home. At times I wonder if these notes are to be seen as a series of signifiers failing to signify, language breaking down, but then there are places when Boully offers fragments such as the quote in footnote 131, “...all women secretly desire to be sacrifices; they long to be 'the chosen one'” where I am struck, I smile, I say yes, I understand you/this. But, this is me, not everyone will respond to that footnote.

     What I begin to understand about this book comes from my desire to connect with a book, to feel at home there. We do this by following the established rules set out by the book at its start. Without such rules we feel adrift, uncertain of what to expect in the story or plot of the work. Boully challenges this concept of the book as having a set form, a way to enter and a way to exit, a plot that pushes us along in a highly formulaic manner. The essay more than other forms of writing, questions this already, but Boully's “essay” pushes these questions to a place of extreme perhaps to reset the scales a little.

     The form of a story, perhaps an essay as well, but more so a story, embraces and propels the idea of experience having a form, and thus we could also say of life having a story—a beginning, middle and end. Wherever there's an “end” we risk the loss of the “middle” which of course in books forms the majority. Not only that, the form of the story has for at least the last century embraced the idea of epiphany. We are now reading for an end and for the experience of epiphany. Now I'm being a bit dramatic here, but clearly contemporary trade fiction systematically attempts to hook its reader at the start, setting the hook with enticing bits about the plot, maintaining the catch with its character development and plot twists, only to dramatically release the reader with its grand finale or resolution. At the end, the reader closes the book with gusto, eager to do it all over again. But, do what? We aren't reading for language, we aren't really reading for meaning, we do gather information, and we feel a certain prescribed way. The overwhelming consensus about a good book is “I can't put it down,” because I've got to get to the end. What does this mean about the experience of books?

     If writers are given the task of showing readers how to read their work, then writers are responsible for how we read. From what I have begun to gather in this semester of learning about and exploring creative nonfiction, the essay is the avantgarde literary form. The question for me is, as always, will readers (not just writers) be up for the likes of the Jenny Boully-esque bon voyage?

by Emily Casey