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