Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,47
Hopscotch: back up a little, cover the same ground again. My father had died while traveling on the other side of the world in the first days of 1987, and with his death it became safe enough to thaw out a little and to open up what had been closed. I was finally having emotions in response to events from long before, as if they had been something frozen into the ice in that bleak earlier era, and because I could finally classify the events on my own terms as cruel and wrong. Later that year, my longtime boyfriend moved to Los Angeles, the rest of my family was particularly difficult for me, and I was living off unemployment insurance from the job I’d been laid off from after I left the art magazine, some savings, small sums dribbling in from reviews and essays in local magazines, and some work as an office temp in businesses around the city.
I decided that when you had nothing left to lose you were free, and that what I wanted to be free to do was write a book about the community I had discovered—and many of whose members I had met—when writing that graduate-school thesis about Wallace Berman four years earlier. I sent a book proposal to City Lights Books and it was accepted in early 1988, and I got my first book advance, for $1,500. I had wanted to write books since shortly after that first-grade anti-marriage essay, because I loved books more than almost anything, because I regarded them as a kind of practical enchantment, and the only way to be closer to that enchantment than reading them was writing them. I wanted to work with words and see what they could do. I wanted to gather up fragments and put them in new patterns. I wanted to be a full citizen of that ethereal otherworld. I wanted to live by books and in books and for books.
It was a lovely goal or rather orientation when it was far away throughout my childhood and teens and college years, but when it came time to do it—well, the mountain is beautiful in the distance and steep when you’re on it. Becoming a writer formalizes something essential about becoming a human: the task of figuring out what stories to tell and how to tell them and who you are in relation to them, which you choose or which choose you, and what the people around you desire and how much to listen to them and how much to listen to other things, deeper in and farther away. But also, you have to write. I had published a lot of essays and reviews by that time, but a book—it was like going from building toolsheds to a palace.
That first book began with that work of art I had seen one day in 1982 on a wall by the staff offices of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was a square black-and-white collage by Wallace Berman, a grid of sixteen images of a hand holding a transistor radio, four across, four down, the same hand and radio each time with a different image where the speaker should be on the radio. Among the images were human figures, including a nude, a football player, a frail figure that might be Gandhi, a human ear, a bat hanging upside down, a hypodermic, a gun, and the same sinuous snake twice on the bottom row. They were negative images, so that everything seemed a little dreamily unnatural. It was as though each image was a sound translated into sight, as though each was a message, a warning, a proclamation, or a revelation. Or a song. A few Hebrew letters written in white on the black background insisted that the mystical and esoteric could coexist with pop culture, that some of the old divides were unnecessary or illusionary. It had been made with an early version of a photocopy machine called a Verifax. It was titled Silence Series #10.
Berman was, like my father, the child of immigrant Jews, raised in Los Angeles. Unlike my father, he was slight, subtle, choosing to live a life on the margins of society and the economy, first in the swing and jazz scene in L.A., then among mystics, dropouts, artists, and rebels. He had, as he’d predicted, died on his fiftieth birthday—been hit by a drunk driver in