Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,22

now rare would be so common, and a weight would be taken off half the population that has made many other things more difficult to impossible.

I tell it too because when I wrote about all these things in general—in the objective voice of editorials and surveys of the scene—I didn’t represent enough of the way it harms you, or rather the way it harmed me. There’s a passage in Sohaila Abdulali’s book on surviving rape about a kind of voice—“a way of telling the story in a smooth arc; matter-of-factly, with intonation but no real emotion. . . . No matter how many details we share, we leave out the unbearable ones that nobody wants to hear.” In my book on walking I wrote, “It was the most devastating discovery of my life that I had no real right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness out of doors, that the world was full of strangers who seemed to hate me and wished to harm me for no reason other than my gender, that sex so readily became violence, and that hardly anyone else considered it a public issue rather than a private problem,” but that too didn’t quite plunge into what it was like inside my head.

Danger wracked my thoughts. Scenarios of attack would arise unbidden, and sometimes I addressed them by imagining winning the combat, usually by means of martial-arts moves I’m not really capable of, and so I killed in order not to be killed over and over during the grimmest years of that era, in imagined scenarios that were intrusive, unwanted, anxiety-driven, a kind of haunting and a way of trying to take control of being haunted. I realized then that making you think like a predator was one thing predators could do to you. Violence itself had penetrated me.

I had more ethereal ways of coping. Casting about for strategies to be safe, I imagined protective clothing, and if you imagine clothing sufficient to stop harm, you imagine armor, and then, if you were me, you’d end up with the full medieval metalware pile. I became preoccupied with armor for a few years and visited it in museums and read up on it in books, imagined being inside it, aspired to try it on. Toward the end of this time a friend of mine became a studio assistant to a New York artist, Alison Knowles, whose husband, Dick Higgins, was from the wealthy family that had established the Higgins Armor Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts. I wrote him a letter asking if he could arrange for me to try on armor, making the request cheerful, cerebral, an interesting experiment rather than a fantasy born out of agony.

I never got closer to the armor, and it was an imaginative and not a practical solution. What is armor after all but a cage that moves with you? But maybe being in that cage would have freed me in some way. Or maybe I was in it and both freed and stifled by it: when I think of who I was then and often am now, the hard reflective, defensive surface of armor seems like a good image for it. There’s a way you can throw all your consciousness into that surface, into being witty, vigilant, prepared for attack, or just so stressed out your muscles lock up and your mind locks down. You can forget your own tender depths and how much of life that matters takes place there beneath the surface and the surfaces. It’s still easy to be the armor. We die all the time to avoid being killed.

Images of levitation also arose unbidden as I revisited or imagined attacks; I dreamed often of flying, but I wasn’t asking for that full freedom, just imagining lifting out of reach, however many feet that might be above the head of a pursuer. If I could not have a body too solid to be harmed, an armored body, could I have one too ethereal to be part of the clashes on the surface of the earth?

I imagined that so earnestly that I can still feel and see myself rising up to the level of the street lamp outside my apartment, hovering there in the halo of light in the night, safe not just from predators but from the laws of physics and the rules governing human bodies and perhaps from the

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