Burning down the house

    - A Field Guide to Getting lost (cont.)

In her fourth chapter Solnit writes about people getting lost, and children being captured by strangers. There is the story of the Spaniard de Vaca who got lost on his expedition to the Americas in 1527, about Eunice Williams who got captured by Indians in 1704, and Cynthia Ann Parker captured by Comanches in 1836.

All these people got lost, but survived. Solnit is interested in why, in how they managed to survive in a totally new environment and culture. And also why some of them didn’t want to return to the life they led before being captured. She writes:

Reading these stories, it’s tempting to think that the arts to be learned are those of tracking, hunting, navigating, skills of survival and escape. Even in the world of the present, an anxiety to survive manifests itself in cars and clothes for far more rugged occasion than those at hand, as though to express some sense of the toughness of things and readiness to face them.

But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next.

These captives (the above mentioned) lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transition whereby you cease to be who you were.

…

There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch - …

This long quotation from Solnit exemplifies in a very clear and fine way what I like about her way of writing. She jumps easily from major to minor stories, showing us how the personal experience of living our everyday life is as interesting and strange as stories we read about in novels and the history books. But she also shows us how reading, how gaining knowledge about “the others”, can make us better in seeing and understanding our own private life. 

Today I will visit Peter Handke in der Niemandsbucht

When not writing I read (or knit: to give my spinning thoughts a rest). I read Mircea Cartarescu, Peter Handke, Natalia Ginzburg and Mette Moestrup.

Arbeitsmappe “Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht”

And I read the brilliant Norwegian author Tomas Espedal, who says:

Jeg skriver for andre som skriver. Det er ingenting forfattere liker bedre enn å få vite hva andre forfattere arbeider med og hvordan de gjør det. Vår pornografi er jo å se Marguerite Duras ved skrivebordet og konstatere at hun har to penner, at hun har papiret sånn, at hun skrev mellom to og fire, osv. Det er dette jeg leser mest av selv. Å lese om arbeidsprosessene til andre forfattere er noe av det beste en forfatter kan gjøre. (…) Jeg tror ikke lenger på fortellingen og fiksjonen. Jeg er glad for at det finnes noen som skriver gode fortellinger, men det interesserer meg ikke.

Blir du noen gang misunnelig når du leser? Jaja! Virkelig! Jeg blir faktisk ofte knust. Peter Handkes ”Mitt år i ingenmannsbukten” (1994) tok nesten livet av meg. Jeg forstår den dag i dag ikke hvordan han klarte å skrive den boken. Den gjorde meg så misunnelig at jeg holdt på å gi opp som forfatter –

fra Bokvennen 2.10

This is my world. Today I will visit Peter Handke in der Niemandsbucht

dagens post

Jeg planlegger mitt neste essay, her er:

Alison Smith om Agnès Varda &

Geetha Ramanathan om Feminist auteurs

Essayet skal ta utgangspunkt i Agnès Vardas film Vagabond, og særlig se på Mona som spiller hovedrollen i filmen. Jeg har en hypotese om at hun kan leses som en anti-helt. Et første spørsmål er derfor spørsmålet om hvordan en antihelt kan defineres, et neste er om det finnes forskjeller mellom mannlige og kvinnelige antihelter.

- Og selvfølgelig; hva sier antiheltinnen Mona oss om konvensjonelle kvinneroller...?