Staging the West

I've been reading Rebecca Solnit's Storming the Gates of Paradise recently. I'd first seen the book on the bedstand of my friend Jenny (who's doing fieldwork in Rwanda at the moment and writing a sumptuous and articulate account of her time there here). The book was subtitled Landscapes for Politics, which piqued my interest. I bought a copy of her Field Guide to Getting Lost for a friend before he left the country for parts unknown (really, Southeast Asia) and skimmed through that before I passed it on. I remember only parts of that book, a line about the blue of distances, a suggestion that children have to learn to see the world in depth.

But Storming the Gates of Paradise is the kind of book that demands a pencil in hand to bracket off a beautiful phrase, highlight a useful piece of Western lore, or note down my own responses. Reading the essays in here, I'm most often reminded of Joan Didion's work (especially these two books), and that comparison seems an apt place to begin. It's almost odd that for someone as well-read and generous a writer Solnit is (she drops names casually, but with purpose), Didion is not mentioned even in passing. The difference, perhaps, is in the way they stage themselves.

Didion, even when she wrote about the desert or the Pacific Ocean, was always writing from the city. She had a marvelous grasp of the strange ways in which urban life in California turned on natural phenomena, but in the end, her interest was in how people lived in the city. Solnit, on the other hand, is a writer of open spaces. The first essay in this book, "The Red Lands," is a meditation on the empty open spaces of the Great Basin, and much of her writing turns on the landscape of the desert. For her, it's a kind of dialectical space:

This country seems singularly dialectical, for its evils tend to generate their opposites. 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.

It's a beautiful passage, and a fitting conclusion to the brief essay, but I'd like to pick up on a couple of things. To call, as Solnit does, the landscape of the West a stage is to pick up on a much older tradition. The particular one I'm thinking of is that of Palladio, who both designed the landscaped gardens in the Veneto and designed stage sets. Both projects involved the same kind of thinking, mathematical appropriation and control of space, this issue of depth, perspective, and view. There are, perhaps, problems with calling the West a stage (who is the audience, after all?), but I think Solnit's image is a provocative one, both on its own terms and by virtue of the much older tradition in which it takes part.

It's interesting to me, however, how much broader that metaphor of the stage is. A recent New York Times article described the towns of Winthrop and Concrete, Washington, north and east of Seattle, just over the Cascades. The article's ostensible event is comparing the Depression-era guides written by out-of-work writers to the towns' present situation. There have been changes since then - Highway 20 chief among them - but the towns are still at the edge of things.

Still, Concrete had its Hollywood moment. The words "Welcome to Concrete" where painted on the most prominent silos in town as a backdrop for the movie "This Boys's Life," based on a memoir by the writer Tobias Wolff, who spent part of his youth here.

Winthrop, too, once a mining hub, is something of a stage set. Its declining main street was re-themed with Old West storefronts and wooden sidewalks in hopes of a boom after the highway's completion. Locals suggest the change was more of a restoration.

Again, the metaphor of the stage. And again (perhaps), the problem of audience and the problem of depth.

There's more to write about Solnit, but I'll leave things here for the moment.