Dear Readers, I’ve long been an admirer of Rebecca Solnit’s writing – it’s difficult to sum up someone who’s a cultural historian, an environmentalist, a political writer, an art critic and a feminist – her piece ‘Men Explain Things to Me’, in which a man at a party patronisingly advises Solnit to read her own book in order to grasp the subject that he’s lecturing her about, thrust the notion of ‘mansplaining’ into common usage (though she didn’t actually use the term in the essay). ‘A Field Guide to Getting Lost’ is a wide-ranging look at the many, many different ways in which we can get lost, but it isn’t at all a sad book, just a thoughtful one, full of interesting facts and the most extraordinary stories.
Take the Wintu people of south-eastern California, for example. Solnit explains how they don’t use words like ‘left’ or ‘right’ to describe their own bodies, but the cardinal directions – north, south, east and west. She goes on:
“As Dorothy Lee wrote, “When the Wintu goes up the river, the hills are to the west, the river to the east; and a mosquito bites him on the west arm. When he returns, the hills are still to the west, but, when he scratches his mosquito bite, he scratches his east arm.” In that language, the self is never lost the way so many contemporary people who get lost in the wild are lost, without knowing the directions, without tracking their relationship not just to the trail but to the horizon and the light and the stars, but such a speaker would be lost without a world to connect to, lost in the modern limbos of subways and department stores. In Wintu, it’s the world that’s stable, yourself that’s contingent, that’s nothing apart from it’s surroundings'”.
Solnit writes of being physically lost, but also of her friend Marine, dead of a drug overdose at 24, of lost love, of the failure of memory. She writes about Alfred Hitchcock, her fondness for country music, and the artist Yves Klein, who once painted a gallery pure white and left it empty. Even so, thousands of people came to see it, and the blue cocktails served at the opening event made people pee blue for days.
Why should you read it? Well, the prose is so beautiful. Take this evocation of the desert, where Solnit lived with a man she calls ‘the hermit’, and where she returned after they had split up.
“Heartbreak is a little like falling in love, in the way that it charges everything with a kind of incandescence, as though the beloved has stepped away and your gaze now rests with all the same intensity on all the items of the view that close-up person blocked. Out in the small house in that desert one of the insects called walking sticks took up residence on one of the windows, and after I poked it to make sure it wasn’t a stray bit of straw, I took to talking to it occasionally, so companionable was it. A spider with an image like a foolishly smiling face on her big white abdomen dwelt in the eaves over the door I passed through to write. Paper wasps built nests in those eaves. All around the little house Mexican grasshoppers flung out their wings, black. yellow and scarlet, vivid like butterflies while they flew, drab again when they landed. Bumblebees landed on coneflowers that dipped halfway to the ground under their weight. Occasionally a velvet ant upholstered in red or yellow plush walked by, and black beetles with a forward tilt left tiny trails in the dust.
There were lizards in abundance, and when they climbed the screens of the windows, I was delighted as I’d always been by the azure stripes on the undersides of the species we always called blue bellies. they kept drowning in the horse trough under the drainpipe, where they would float pale and hapless like sailors in a Victorian shipwreck poem. In the distance was the celestial drama of summer thunderstorms, clouds assembling in vast arrays that demonstrated how far the sky went and how high, that shifted from the bundled white cumulus into the deep blue of storm clouds, and when we were lucky, poured down rain and lightning and shafts of light and vapor trails like a violent redemption. It was as though the whole world consisted of the tiny close-up realm of these creatures and the vast distances of heaven, as though my own scale had been eliminated along with the middle ground, and this too is one of the austere luxuries of the desert”.
Of course, I would love this, with its close observation of the insects and the lizards, but there is something about that sudden opening up to the grand scale of the thunderstorm that takes my breath away. And how enigmatic those drowned lizards are!
And sometimes there’s something transcendent about Solnit’s writing. She has a way of opening up an idea, of making me think about something that I’d never thought about before. Here’s my final extract.
“Movies are made out of darkness as well as light; it is the surpassingly brief intervals of darkness between each luminous still image that make it possible to assemble the many images into one moving picture. Without that darkness, there would only be a blur. Which is to say that a full-length movie consists of half an hour or an hour of pure darkness that goes unseen. If you could add up all the darkness, you would find the audience in the theater gazing together at a deep imaginative night. It is the terra incognita of film, the dark continent on every map. In a similar way, a runner’s every step is a leap, so that for a moment he or she is entirely off the ground. For those brief instants, shadows no longer spill out from their feet, like leaks, but hover below them like doubles, as they do with birds, whose shadows crawl below them, caressing the surface of the earth, growing and shrinking as their makers move nearer or farther from that surface. For my friends who run long distances, these tiny fragments of levitation add up to something considerable; by their own power they hover above the earth for many minutes, perhaps some significant portion of an hour or perhaps far more for the hundred-mile races. We fly; we dream in darkness; we devour heaven in bites too small to be measured. “
This is a book to be ‘devoured in small bites’ too, because there’s much to think about and consider. It feels worth it though, to me at least. If you see someone on the Tube wearing a red coat, holding a copy of this book, furrowing their brow and then occasionally gazing into space, that’ll be me.
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In Chapter Two, Khadija Saye is shown at the centre of an energy force. She holds an andichurai (a Gambian incense pot) to her ear – the pot was precious to Saye, as it belonged to her mother. Ofili tells us that it symbolises Saye’s dual faith heritage of Christianity and Islam, and invites us to imagine the sound of calm solace here.
In Chapter Three, the spirit of the souls emerge from the sky and the water to arrive in a paradise-like landscape, where two mythical beings play a hopeful melody on their instruments. The colours of the burning tower turn into a sunrise. The water links collective grief to both Venice, where Saye and Ofili met, and Trinidad, Ofili’s home.
The artwork will be in place for a decade. Will the survivors of Grenfell see justice before the mural is painted over? I’d like to think so, but I somehow doubt it. It’s good to have a reminder, though, that no one has been held to account for the death of 72 people in the Grenfell fire.
