Trauma & Art

Art and Writing: Books and Portraits of Writers                              Edited 6/5/2024

“Why tell stories if they will only bring forth a new round of punishment or disparagement? Or if they will be ignored as if they meant nothing? This is how preemptive silencing works. To have a voice means not just the animal capacity to utter sounds but the ability to participate fully in the conversations that shape your society, your relations to others, and your own life. There are three key things that matter in having a voice: audibility, credibility, and consequence.” Rebecca Solnit

“I connected the dots, saw an epidemic, talked and wrote about the patterns I saw, waited three decades for it to become a public conversation…” Rebecca Solnit

“It’s often assumed that anger drives such work, but most activism is driven by love…”Rebecca Solnit

As I mentioned in the last post, one basic underlying thread or theme of Rebecca Solnit’s book, Recollections of My Non–Existence   /   Αναμνήσεις της ανυπαρξίας μου, is about who gets to tell stories, who listens to them, who gets discredited and silenced, whose stories are erased and disappeared, and the stories that are missing that we are not even aware of. Solnit situates herself  culturally, historically, geographically, and in doing so becomes part of all the women who have tried to find their way and a voice to tell stories that would otherwise have been muted. She writes: “… half the earth is paved over with women’s fear and pain, or rather with the denial of them, and until the stories that lie underneath see sunlight, this will not change.” Finally, even though her narratives are mostly embedded in a particular geographical space the insights and arguments in the book can resonate for many people, especially women, across many geographical and cultural contexts.

Of her younger years, Solnit writes: “In those days, I was trying to disappear and to appear, trying to be safe and to be someone, and those agendas were often at odds with each other. And I was watching myself to see if I could read in the mirror what I could be and whether I was good enough and whether all the things I’d been told about myself were true. To be a young woman is to face your own annihilation in innumerable ways or to flee it or the knowledge of it, or all these things at once…….. I was trying not to be the subject of someone else’s poetry and not to get killed; I was trying to find a poetics of my own, with no maps, no guides, not much to go on. They might have been out there, but I hadn’t located them yet.”

Often in our youth we may be aware of the need to resist, but without clear realization of what we are defying or fighting against or what we are conforming to out of fears – named and unnamed. Our earlier years and the battles we won and the fights we lost, leave scars and define a lot of what is to come and of what we are to become. Solnit says: “I was often unaware of what and why I was resisting, and so my defiance was murky, incoherent, erratic. Those years of not succumbing, or of succumbing like someone sinking into a morass and then flailing to escape, again and again, come back to me now as I see young women around me fighting the same battles. The fight wasn’t just to survive bodily, though that could be intense enough, but to survive as a person possessed of rights, including the right to participation and dignity and a voice. More than survive, then: to live.”

This business of becoming an adult is complex and the path is often strewn with inner and outer obstacles of all kinds. In addition, it is implied that adulthood is a coherent and uniform category that one will enter simply by reaching a certain age or accomplishing certain things, which is far from the truth. For one, becoming an adult is a lengthy process and it may be a lifelong one. It may also look different for different people in different cultures, and it requires a lot of energy, creativity, knowledge, work and support. Solnit writes: “The word adult implies that all the people who’ve attained legal majority make up a coherent category, but we are travelers who change and traverse a changing country as we go. The road is tattered and elastic……   It’s not just that you’re an adolescent at the end of your teens, but that adulthood, a category into which we put everyone who is not a child, is a constantly changing condition………You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally. Youth is a high-risk business.”

Solnit writes about places, houses and their interiors, how geography and dwellings become part of us and allow us to grow and become or stifle the process, and how we and places and dwellings grow into each other.  How places and spaces shape, define and colour our perception has always interested me, and I have often returned to it and to relevant literature, in more recent posts, as well.  Of an early apartment, which she inhabited for decades, which in some sense became tattooed on her psyche, she writes:  “I lived there so long the little apartment and I grew into each other….. When it was still my home, I dreamed many times about finding another room in it, another door. In some way it was me and I was it, and so these discoveries were, of course, other parts of myself.”

Solnit also talks about the freedom of inhabiting places and moving in them.  She writes about walking and inhabiting public spaces, detailing the obstacles that women face in walking out in the world, the subtle and not so subtle harassment, stalking or other unpleasant or threatening behaviours that young girls and women of all ages often face. She provides accounts of her own experience and those of others. Some seemed so familiar, almost identical with my own experiences even though I have inhabited different geographical spaces.  Her love for walking and being out in open spaces also resonated with me. I pondered a bit on whether to refer to some of my own experiences of stalking or harassment of varying degrees of intensity: on means of transport; in the street, in public spaces and buildings, and other contexts. The more I pondered on this the more instances came to my mind, the more of the book I read, the more incidents I was reminded of.

She writes:

“Walking was my freedom, my joy, my affordable transportation, my method of learning to understand places, my way of being in the world, my way of thinking through my life and my writing, my way of orienting myself. That it might be too unsafe to do was something I wasn’t willing to accept, though everyone else seemed more than willing to accept it on my behalf. Be a prisoner, they urged cheerfully; accept your immobility, wall yourself up like an anchorite” and later in the book…”and “….it seemed sometimes as though it was all meant to wall me up alone at home like a person prematurely in her coffin.”

And elsewhere, she writes: “One day when I was walking past a small park just east of the neighborhood, a passerby I’d never seen before spat full in my face without stopping. Even with other people around, I was alone: I was harassed more than once on the bus home while everyone pretended nothing was happening, perhaps because a man in a rage intimidated them too, perhaps because in those days people more often considered it none of their business or blamed the woman.” Once, after an incident I experienced on a bus, a school friend who had witnessed it, told me that things like that never happened to her, which was an effective means of silencing and of accepting that was the way things were. One soon learnt not to talk about certain things. Solnit comments: “We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak. In my case, it wasn’t a silencing because no speech was stopped; it never started, or it had been stopped so far back I don’t remember how it happened.”

Another time in my late teens a man, maybe in his thirties, followed me all the way home. At some point I asked him politely to leave me alone. He laughed it off and walked close behind me until my front door, and then held the front door open. He walked in behind me and into the elevator with me. I remember vividly that at some point my fear turned into astonishment at his unbelievable nerve.  Solnit writes:  ”It was culture, it was particular people and a system that gave them latitude, looked the other way……  Changing that culture and those conditions seemed to be the only adequate response. It still does.”

And the irony was that one felt that the only way to be safe or to avoid escalation is to keep quiet, to try to disappear, even physically, Solnit comments, on thinness and frailty and not taking up space. She writes:  “It’s no wonder I was thin, no wonder women were so praised for being thin, for taking up as little room as possible, for hovering on the brink of vanishing, no wonder some of us vanished through under-eating like a country ceding territory, an army retreating, until it ceased to exist.”

Solnit refers to the cultural reasons and societal factors that contribute to this reality, factors like race, class, financial status, gender, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, chronic violence and trauma, but also, conviction or faith in one’s self ….“Faith in yourself and your rights. Faith in your own versions and truth and in your own responses and needs. Faith that where you stand is your place. Faith that you matter.” She also refers to the undermining process of denying people their truth, denying the facts of their experiences. She writes: “One thing that makes people crazy is being told that the experiences they have did not actually happen, that the circumstances that hem them in are imaginary, that the problems are all in their head, and that if they are distressed it is a sign of their failure, when success would be to shut up or to cease to know what they know. “

The book contains many themes and threads of a bigger tapestry, and of course one is her love of books and reading. I think her ideas and insights may resonate and feel true to those who are attracted to books and reading or writing, at least to some extent or other. I used to have recurring versions of the same dream, in which all the books I had ever read were the building blocks of a house, sometimes the house was closing in on me and sometimes it was opening up to a beautiful vista. Solnit describes a book as both a brick and a bird: She writes: “Closed, a book is a rectangle, thin as a letter or thick and solid like a box or a brick. Open, it is two arcs of paper that, seen from the top or bottom when the book is wide open, like the wide V of birds in flight. I think about that and then about women who turn into birds and then about Philomela, who in the Greek myth is turned into a nightingale……” In describing the interior of her flat and her mind, in relation to the accumulating books, Solnit adds: “My birds flocked, and eventually a long row of shelves narrowed the hallway and half filled the main room and piled into unstable pillars on my desk and other surfaces. You furnish your mind with readings in somewhat the way you furnish a house with books, or rather the physical books enter your memory and become part of the equipment of your imagination.”

In relation to reading she talks about the suspension of one’s own time and place to travel into the writer’s, and through this engaging with the writer’s mind something arises between one’s own mind and the writer’s.  Solnit says: “You translate words into your own images, faces, places, light and shade and sound and emotion. A world arises in your head that you have built at the author’s behest, and when you’re present in that world you’re absent from your own. You’re a phantom in both worlds and a god of sorts in the world that is not exactly the one the author wrote but some hybrid of her imagination and yours. The words are instructions, the book a kit, the full existence of the book something immaterial, internal, an event rather than an object, and then an influence and a memory. It’s the reader who brings the book to life.”

The drawings accompanying today’s piece are portraits I’ve been making of writers whose books I have inhabited in the distant past, and more recently as I’ve been listening to some of their work while making their portraits.

As I’m currently reading another book by Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, I may be returning to her work in future posts. In this book she writes about loss and grief and about reading and books as portals and doors that open up to other worlds like in children’s books. Meanwhile, throughout the book presented here today she poses questions she has pondered on and written about and questions for the reader to consider and reflect upon:

In relation to aggression, violence and fear, she asks:

How much of this enters your consciousness before your consciousness is changed? What does it do to all the women who have a drop or a teaspoon or a river of blood in their thoughts? What if it’s one drop every day? What if you’re just waiting for clear water to turn red? What does it do to see people like you tortured? What vitality and tranquility or capacity to think about other things, let alone do them, is lost, and what would it feel like to have them back?

What’s yours? Where are you welcome, allowed? How much room is there for you; where do you get cut off, on the street or in the profession or the conversation?

Where do you stand? Where do you belong? Those are often questions about political stances or values, but sometimes the question is personal: Do you feel like you have ground to stand on? Is your existence justified in your own eyes, enough that you don’t have to retreat or attack? Do you have a right to be there, to participate, to take up space in the world, the room, the conversation, the historical record, the decision-making bodies, to have needs, wants,  rights? Do you feel obliged to justify or apologize or excuse yourself to others? Do you fear the ground being pulled out from under you, the door slammed in your face? Do you not stake a claim to begin with, because you’ve already been defeated or expect to be if you show up? Can you state what you want or need without its being regarded, by yourself or those you address, as aggression or imposition? What does it mean neither to advance, like a soldier waging a war, nor to retreat? What does it mean to own some space and feel that it’s yours all the way down to your deepest reflexes and emotions? What does it mean to not live in wartime, to not have to be ready for war?

Places and interiors                                                                                   Edited 07/ 04/ 2024

“There’s a mystery that can surround or locate itself at the center of a house’s life. It was there in my grandmother’s house, and I recognize it when I think of Father D. [priest] and his brother. The house’s very structure, the number or arrangement of its rooms, has a powerful effect upon the decisions people make by which they live and know themselves….”  From Seeing through Places  by Mary Gordon

“Every day silence harvests its victims. Silence is a mortal illness.” Natalia Ginzburg

Today’s post, more or less, centers on two women writers, their books and the places that shaped them.

Mary Gordon

“Memory is the tether that connects us to our past, it is what keeps us anchored and alive,” Mary Gordon

Mary Gordon’s book of essays, Seeing through Places: Reflections of Geography and Identity, first published in 2001, explores the role that places and interiors play in the formation of our identity. She weaves the connections between how we experience places, houses, objects and people and how we become ourselves. As we move with her– from her parents’ flat to her grandmother’s house, to a beloved rented house she inhabited in Cape Cod for eight years, about which she writes: “of the “washashores,” the non–Cape natives, she inhabited a marginal, almost but not quite secure place”, to Rome, to her houses in Barnard first as a young student and later as a mature writer, wife and mother– we  follow the different threads of personal narrative, social commentary and ideas on religion and other matters.  Gordon reveals the relationships between the emotional, intellectual and physical architectures of our lives. She demonstrates how places become the building blocks of our psyche, as they inform and shape our lives and who we become.

She begins her book with her grandmother’s house on Long Island because in many ways it became the centre of her childhood and adolescence, and seemingly this was the house that left a more lasting imprint on her.  Her grandmother’s house she says had nothing to do with postwar life in America, it expressed a historical era that the twenty-one grandchildren vaguely understood: “Each object in her house belonged to the Old World. Nothing was easy; everything required maintenance of a complicated and specialized sort. Nothing was disposable, replaceable…… My grandmother’s house had no connection to prosperity; it had righteousness instead…… Her house was her body, and like her body, was honorable, daunting, reassuring, defended, castigating, harsh, embellished, dark. I can’t imagine how she lived, that is to say how she didn’t die of the endless labor her life entailed. Nine children. It’s easy either to romanticize her or utterly to push her aside.”

Gordon grew up as the child of an Irish-Italian Catholic mother and a Jewish father, who had converted to Catholicism. Religion permeated her upbringing. She writes: “We didn’t have a television. To watch television, we went either to my grandmother’s or to my glamorous aunt’s. ……. On Tuesdays, we went to her house to watch Bishop Sheen. Those nights after the moon vanished and the screen filled in its image, what you saw first was an empty chair. His. The bishop’s.  And then himself…..  We watched as the bishop sat in silence, a few seconds before he spoke. His eyes seemed transparent. They knew everything. They looked into your sinful soul. There was a blackboard on which he drew diagrams and wrote key words……”

When she was seven her father died and she and her mother had to move in with her grandmother and aunt. She describes how words had failed her in expressing her grief over her father’s passing and how as a means of consolation or distraction she was allowed to choose the paint colour of the room she and her mother were going to occupy in the house. This, Gordon says, allowed her to enter into a world without words, which had failed to explain the enormity of her loss and to console her. She writes: “Color did what words could not. I surrounded myself in questions of pure color……. First I had to decide what basic color I would choose. Colors, to me, were always people. My favorite color was blue (I was named for the Virgin, and it was her color) but I knew that blue was the favorite color of many people, and so I said my favorite color was orange, which I knew no one liked best. But this sacrifice made me hate orange, and from that day on I’ve never bought anything orange, except the fruit. I didn’t want blue for my bedroom, it was too much like the color of my inner world. I didn’t want green; green was efficient and official, committed to getting on with things. Red was dangerous, purple was too old, yellow was a blond. I wanted something entirely unlike my life, but representing what I wanted my life to be. I chose pink. But I felt, deeply, that some pinks were hateful….”

Through her descriptions of the various houses and places we learn about change and loss and about her childhood world and that of others. In one essay about another family and another house, that of her baby sitter’s, we catch glimpses of the role of religion in her upbringing, the dynamics of her parents’ relationship, and that of the baby sitter’s larger household and its influences on her. After her grandmother’s death she writes of her house, which now was her mother’s: “it was not a loving house; it was a house that required service from a devoted lover, and perhaps, the limits of devotedness having been tested and reached, it would return regard. But we failed the house and it punished us and we, like whipped creatures, huddled against it, trying simply to survive. We needed a protector, and it had to be a mother or a man.”

Gordon explores the role of reading and play in her early life. One chapter begins: “AS A CHILD, I was not good at playing, which means I was a failure at the duties of my state in life..The phrase “Go and play” had for me the ring of a sentence handed down by a mercilessly careless magistrate.” She explains that running tired her, climbing frightened her and she couldn’t catch a ball because she feared being hit by it.  Even her reading choices didn’t involve adventure stories, but consisted mostly of fairly tales and saints’ lives. Thankfully, she adds her parents never suggested alternatives to reading..“When I read,” she writes, “ it didn’t matter that I was only masquerading as a child. There was no falseness in my position as a reader. If I lost myself in the fates of virgin martyrs or fairy princesses……… there was nothing shameful in the shiftiness of my identity. It was expected that ordinary human beings lost themselves in that way, it was only the proof of a serious or ardent nature, not the evidence of a crook’s sleight of hand.”

However, in her chapter, Places to Play, Gordon writes about the playing activities that she did engage in with an amazing awareness of her young inner world. Her child self was entranced by her Sally doll and her paper dolls, that were called cutouts, rosebuds and crinolines, bonnets, pansies, frills and bits of silks, rejected from the linings of the coats that her grandmother made, which she transformed into veils and gowns.  She writes: “A china tea set, miniature, white with pale forget-me-nots. I became not a figure or a character, but a color and a texture, soft, edgeless, inviting. I became an atmosphere. I lost my history, my face.”

In describing her favourite play place in her father’s small study, we learn both about her relation to her father and her playing preferences. She writes that while her father was at his desk trying to write books that brought in no money, in a corner of his study was a space she loved to play:  “On the floor of the closet, alongside my father’s shoes, was my toy box: a tin rectangle, two feet by four, painted in a circus design in circus colors. That I was given only this inadequate space for play explains, perhaps, or at least provides a lively metaphor for, why I didn’t have more appetite for play, why I didn’t think it was important. It was because my parents didn’t think it was important.”

She would spread out pictures and objects to create a world where all was lightness and prettiness, ”a world impossible to my family’s imagination: a world without martyrdom. A world without heroics.  A world where nothing was at stake.” She returns to the theme of being afraid of being martyred. She writes that many of the Roman martyrs whose names they said each day at Mass, whom she imagined stood in rooms devoid of furniture, except for a chair, were women who met horrific deaths like being devoured by lions or being pierced at their breast by a sword.

Italy is a significant geography in Gordon’s psyche.  We witness the Rome and the Vatican of her childhood imagination integrated with her adult visits. The first time she went to Rome by herself was to interview Natalia Ginzburg, an Italian writer whom she much admired anδ believed was underappreciated by American audiences. I also read Natalia Ginzburg and other Italian writers in my late teens and twenties. I found some of these books on my bookshelves, 1970s and 1980s editions. I re-read Caro Michele and The Dry Heart in one sitting. Memories came up, and the language and the ambience of her stories became known to me again.

Natalia Ginzburg

From The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg

In her book of essays, The Little Virtues, that I’m currently reading, novelist Rachel Cusk has written that her voice “comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Writings from more than half a century ago read as if they have just been—in some mysterious sense—composed…. This voice emerges from her preoccupations and themes, whose specificity and universality she considers with a gravitas and authority that seem both familiar and entirely original. It is an authority grounded in living and being rather than in thinking or even in language, an authority perhaps better compared to that of the visual artist, who is obliged to negotiate first with the seen, tangible world.” And in her book, The Dry Heart, Hilma Wolitzer writes: “The raw beauty of Ginzburg’s prose compels our gaze. First we look inward, with the shock of recognition inspired by all great writing, and then, inevitably, out at the shared world she evokes with such uncompromising clarity.”

Although the essays in her book, The Little Virtues, were written separately and in distinct circumstances between 1944 and 1960, they read as a memoir of sorts. In many of these essays Ginzburg writes about places and interiors and through these accounts her circumstances and the historical background become visible to us.

In her first essay Winter in the Abruzzi, written in 1944, Ginzburg writes: “We were in exile: our city was a long way off, and so were books, friends, the various desultory events of a real existence. We lit our green stove with its long chimney that went through the ceiling: we gathered together in the room with the stove – there we cooked and ate, my husband wrote at the big oval table, the children covered the floor with toys. There was an eagle painted on the ceiling of the room, and I used to look at the eagle and think that was exile. Exile was the eagle, the murmur of the green stove, the vast, silent countryside and the motionless snow.”

In her essay, Worn-out shoes, written in 1945 in Rome, where she temporarily lived with a friend, after her husband’s tortuous murder, two unembellished sentences reveal her circumstances and the times she lived in: “We have a mattress and a bed, and every evening we toss up for which of the two of us shall sleep in the bed. When we get up in the morning our worn-out shoes are waiting for us on the rug.”

In Portrait of a Friend, written in 1957, Ginzburg describes the shifts that have taken place in her sense of a place, which we see can be both home and not simultaneously: “Now, we live elsewhere in a completely different, much bigger city, and if we meet and talk about our own city we do so with no sense of regret that we have left it, and say that we could not live there any longer. But when we go back, simply passing through the station and walking in the misty avenues is enough to make us feel we have come home; and the sadness with which the city fills us every time we return lies in this feeling that we are at home and, at the same time, that we have no reason to stay here; because here, in our own home, our own city, the city in which we spent our youth, so few things remain alive for us and we are oppressed by a throng of memories and shadows.”

“Writing is an act of courage – it is a way to dive into the depths of oneself……. Writing is a way to make sense of the world, to find meaning in the chaos.”  Mary Gordon

In the last chapters Gordon ponders on the distance she has travelled and asks: “How has it happened that I have become someone who, as a child, I would never even have thought of? Someone I would not have seen on holy cards or in movies. Someone I might not even have read about.”

First she imagines what could have been her destiny.  Then she explains how she got to this very different and desired place. She contributes, who she has been able to become and the place she inhabits and feels she belongs,  to many things, including “a great good luck that has allowed [her] to be back where [she] belongs” and her love for great public buildings. She goes back in time and describes how her love for these was born:  “It was on these trips, especially the ones with my father that I learned to love great public buildings. They came into my life naturally in that we didn’t visit them especially, we were on our way to someplace else, to see someone else and the buildings just happened to be there.”

She is where she wants to be and for that she feels gratitude. She writes: “I am where I want to be, where I have always wanted to be. I might have longed for temporary sojourns in one or another of the great capitals of the world, but this is the place I’ve always wanted to call home.” And elsewhere she says: “I am where I am because of the benevolence of an institution. The same one that admitted me as a student and opened the world to me hired me later to teach young women like my former self, and provided me with a dwelling so that I could afford to live in this place.”