Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,41

behind which lies a question of self.

I went back to di Prima’s declaration in her famous “Rant.” Further down, the poem continues:

There is no way out of the spiritual battle

There is no way you can avoid taking sides

There is no way you can not have a poetics

no matter what you do: plumber, baker, teacher

you do it in the consciousness of making

or not making yr world

The voice that came out of me when I spoke in social settings and often even to a single friend wore a thousand pounds of armor and was incapable of saying anything direct about emotions, which I was barely feeling or feeling through so many filters I hardly knew what was spinning me around. But the voice: it was the voice I’d grown up around and learned to emulate and then to promulgate, a voice that strove to be clever, cool, sharp, and amused, to shoot arrows with precision and duck the arrows that came back or pretend they hadn’t stung. It relied on jokes and quips that were often cruel in a game where anyone who was hurt or offended by those jabs was supposed to be lacking in humor or strength or other admirable qualities. I didn’t understand what I was doing, because I didn’t understand that there were other ways to do it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t mean-spirited at times. (Later, I discovered that scathing and mocking reviews were the easiest and most fun kind to write, but I tried to write them only about much-lauded successes.)

There was another kind of humor, or rather a ponderous wit, that was convoluted, full of citations and puns and plays on existing phrases, of circling around, far around, what was happening and what you were feeling. It was as though the more indirect and referential your statement, the further away from your immediate and authentic reaction, the better. It would take me a long time to understand what a limitation cleverness can be, and to understand how much unkindness damaged not just the other person but the possibilities for you yourself, the speaker, and what courage it took to speak from the heart. What I had then was a voice that leaned hard on irony, on saying the opposite of what I meant, a voice in which I often said things to one person to impress other people, a voice in which I didn’t really know much about what I thought and felt because the logic of the game determined the moves. It was a hard voice on a short leash.

That voice isn’t just in your conversations, it’s inside your head: you don’t say that hurt, or I feel sad; you run angry tirades about why the other party is a terrible person over and over, and you layer on anger to avoid whatever’s hurt or frightened underneath, until it’s certain that you don’t know yourself or your weather, or that it’s you who’s telling the story that’s feeding the fire. You generally don’t know other people either, except as they impinge on you; it’s a failure of imagination going in and reaching out.

But that was just the stories within. The stories I wanted to write and the person who would write them were not yet born. I knew who I admired, but not who I was. You cannot write a single line without a cosmology. I had so much work ahead of me, and I did it slowly, in stages. I was many different writers along a road on which my various books and essays are milestones or shed snakeskins. In journalism school I learned to write straightforward reports, though my first teacher there resented my inability to write the flat prose that was often taken for journalistic objectivity, which even then I saw as a masculine voice. I could keep opinions at bay if I tried hard, but not adjectives.

The television show Dragnet, which was old even then, opened every episode with a hard-boiled man’s voice flatly declaiming, “The story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.” It was like the prose of Ernest Hemingway, which my first college English professor had insisted was the pinnacle of good writing, that stripped-back, clipped, terse language that