Ideas: Spaces Book

Solnit is a hero to me; she defines what activism can mean and accomplish. I read these essays, and I get the message: not all you do will change the world dramatically, but you have to at least care, at least FEEL some sort of passion for the planet we live on, and then do something about it! I have never been willing to be arrested for protesting, but I imagine I might be on a FBI list for emails against Bush's policies... and circulating a Swiss German poster of Bush... Her main focus is environmentalism, but she writes about the antislavery movement, immigrant rights, and protests against the evils of capitalism with the same focus and clarity. Besides that, she is a great, great writer.

With Solnit, there are always coincidences in my own life that make me even more in awe of what she has to say. For example, one night I had a crazy dream of a tsunami, and the next morning, over breakfast, I read her essay, Sontag and Tsunami (2004). "We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only faintly political in the economics and indifference...the relief will be very political, in who gives how much (Bush offering 15 million, then 35 million under pressure, the cost of his inauguration adn then 350 million under strong international pressure)...but the event itself transcends politics, the realm of things we cause and can work to prevent. We cannot wish that human beings were not subject to the forces of nature, including the mortality... we cannot wish for the seas to dry up, that the waves grow still, that the tectonic plates ceast to exist, that nature ceases to be beyond our abilities to predict and control... But the terms of that nature include such catastrophe and suffering, which leaves us with sorrow as not a problem to be solved but a fact. And it leaves us with compassion as the work we will never finish."

"A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country. The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Brit said he was "comfortable" with Britain, the expatriate American said no. And I said yes. Driving across the arid lands, the red lands, I wondered what it was I loved. he places, the sagebrush basins, the rivers digging themselves deep canyons through arid lands, the incomparable cloud formations of summer monsoons, the way the underside of clouds turns the same blue as the underside of a great blue heron's wings when the storm is about to break. Beyond that, for anything you can say about the United States, you can also say the opposite: we're rootless except we're also the Hopi, who haven't moved in several centuries; we're violent except we're also the Franciscans nonviolently resisting nucelar weapons out here; we;re consumers except the West is studded with visionary environmentalists...and the landscape of the West seems like the stage on which such dramas are played out, a space without boundaries, in which anything can be realized, a moral ground, out here where your shadow can stretch hundreds of feet just before sunset, where you loom large, and lonely.

I had that same conversation in Zurich with expat American friends, native Swiss, a German, and a Spaniard. We had just walked by the poster with a picture of George W. Bush in Swiss German and they translated it as "Wanted for crimes against humanity; considered armed and dangerous." And I may not be proud of the things my country does, but I love it, for its people and its nooks and crannies I have spent so much time exploring. That is part of what makes up a country also, its geography and landscapes, not just its terrible politics and foreign policies.

I have been in awe of all the constellations I have been seeing lately here in Denver, Orion and the Pleiades are amazingly bright right now; another little convergence with Solnit and her esay about constellation as metaphor: "The desire to go home that is a desire to be whole, to know where you are, to be the point of intersection of all the lines drawn through all the stars, to be the constellation-maker and the center of the world, that center called love. To awaken from sleep, to rest from awakening, to tame the animal, to let the soul go wild, to shelter in darkness and blaze with light, to cease to speak adn be perfectly understood." She writes about how many of us have never seen the Milky Way, "which showed up in San Francisco only during the velvety darkness of the blackout brought on by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake..or that in the great blackout of 1977, the Milky Way presided over Manhattan for the first time in perhaps a century."