City Arts & Lectures presents Rebecca Solnit & Brit Marling

hello everybody thank you for coming to join us in the virtual version of City Arts & Lectures at San Francisco's magical an amazing Sydney Goldstein theatre where we hope to see you in person before long so I'm here with writer actor director Brit Marling one of the most brilliant and amazing people I know and I am so excited to talk to her I'm so grateful to all of you who showed up and I'm so happy to be with City Arts & Lectures again so welcome and thank you and hello Britt how are you hi Rebecca how are you how are you doing in this time right now how are you finding yourself I am searching for the phrase we can all use who are in my situation which is the sense of personally fine deeply distressed and preoccupied by all the people who aren't and we're here in our homes and our livings go on our homes are comfortable and I just want to acknowledge that this is a terrifying and difficult time for so many people facing financial freefall and the collapse of the economy unemployment people who aren't in comfortable homes who have no homes or have abusive partners or just difficult situations and there are just so many different situations people are in now and so many of them are so difficult so I want to acknowledge all the people in those situations and I don't know if we can dedicate this to them I wrote about other kinds of difficulty in the book we came to discuss originally but and speaking of that I'm kind of one of the things I wanted to ask you Britt at first how are you and second of all is what's going on right now season 3 of the Oh a I am okay I think I feel a similar I'm having a similar experience to you which is that as a writer I am often in a way just at home but simultaneously trying to process this experience we're all collectively inside you know I saw on Instagram somebody posted an image of a graffiti work that said corona is the virus capitalism is the pandemic and I saw that and it was kind of just like doesn't that say everything that this experience is kind of just revealing how many things within our system are broken and how many people are made so vulnerable and have no safety net so it's a challenging thing like you're saying to navigate trying to figure out how to be of use in that way while also being stuck at home and I think the thing it's done the most for me is it puts a kind of pressure on the writing to really think about not like what story do I want to tell next or you know what am i liking or what am i into it's more like what story must I tell like what stories can be useful now and going forward and it's funny that you bring up the Oh a actually because I don't know if you know this but Ryan Heffington the choreographer who created the brilliant movements that were in the show he's been doing these fantastic live dancing sort of tutorials on Instagram live and people all over the world who never thought they would find themselves dancing and moving in new ways before in their living rooms or their kitchens or their bedrooms you know with their phones on learning to move their bodies and move in strange ways and even embarrass themselves and but sweat and have fun and let go and I think it's really interesting because I think it's a moment when we're seeing new responses to trauma like the realization that part of MU part of recovering from trauma healing from trauma might be about moving through it embodying it and letting it go as much as it is about thinking or talking through it and I think that's really what the Oh a as a narrative was all about was trying to look at these more feminine technologies like movement and think about how we can use them as survival skills so yeah but you know it's interesting for me is that your book recollections of my non-existence had been my deep companion during this time I've been reading it and reading it slowly and savoring it and for me I found so many tools in here for navigating this moment one of the major tools that I found was just collective the power of the collective you talk so much in this book about being interested in a group of artists and then going to meet them and following them and and then finding safety in a tribe and and learning how to blossom yourself as a as an artist inside you know that cocoon or your brother's work as an activist drawing you out to the Nevada Test Site and finding a collective of activists there and how much was possible when groups of people came together and you write so much about that in all of your work that brilliant essay you wrote for lit hub about abandoning the myth of the singular hero and thinking about what people can achieve together and that seems like such a useful message to me at this point in time I wonder if you could just talk a bit about that and about how it plays such a strong role in the recounting of your life and your journey to make thing art what a great place to start thank you so much so wonderful climate activists in Fiji who said to me as we're talking about mutual aid and its many manifestations in this crisis she said the way we get through this is together and I loved it and then somebody posted something I said so that I saw it and was reminded of it yesterday that for years and years we were told that human response to danger is fight or flight but there's actually a feminine response which I think the Oh a is all about which is the third way tendon befriend and how people have tended befriended in this time when we cannot be physically together for the most part has been fascinating and moving and profound you have your friend doing dance I my friend Wendy MacNaughton is doing drawing classes for kids but I've seen just so much important and creative stuff and maybe I'll give an example I've fallen in love with a group called the anti sewing squad started by la performance artists Kristina Wong which is now more than 500 people mostly women mostly women of color who decided to produce masks for frontline and vulnerable communities and produced more than 20,000 masks of this wonderful Dior decentered kind of horizontal organizing system to meet the needs of communities they're sending three serger sewing machines and a ton of masks to the Navajo Nation this weekend and just doing so much amazing stuff and there a lot of them a few of them didn't know how to sew most of them had kind of dusty sewing machines in the closet and they just set out to make this a lesson equal situation by providing masks for people who needed them and weren't gonna get them and there's just so much stuff like that that's so incredible and of course the greed and selfishness of the powerful is also on display you know I wrote another book about it I have here four other moments of paradise built in hell which is exactly about how civil society meets the moment of disaster with generosity improvisation solidarity but recollections is also about that in a way in a lot of ways I was a deeply solitary isolated kid I was from abuse and other things just deeply withdrawn and also just an introvert in love with books but this was a book both about the interior world of reading and writing but also learning from the communities around me it begins when I'm 19 I move into the black community of the Western Addition at the invitation of a wonder full old building manager who invited me to move into his building first white person there in 17 years in 1981 and what I learned from that community what I learned from the gay community that was a short walk away in the Castro district what I learned from the western shoshone and native land rights movement I joined in the early 90s and you know and so it really is about learning learning from the communities around me and how we liberate each other even when we're not in the same category you know I learned some and you know I am tragically straight but I learned so much from gay men in particular by lesbians and trans people as well growing up in this wonderfully queer City this and they gave me this Liberatore sense that if they can reject the rules of gender and if you find it worthwhile to face the consequences than I can too and so I so I think feminism at its best has always been implicitly and often explicitly queer positive and who your rights have always been feminists and re-evaluating what masculinity is and what the hierarchy is and so those things were so much part of growing up and I did join groups notably activist groups that were some of the first communities I felt safe and at home in and you know and ultimately the victory in this book isn't that I became a writer and wrote a lot of books it's that a feminist movement gave me the conversation I so yearn for when I was a young woman facing menace and harassment and nobody wanted to talk about it and then really I feel what happened in 2012 or 13 as we began to talk about violence from workplace sexual harassment in campus rape to domestic violence to street harassment to femicide in ways that had an impact that they never quite had before and feels revolutionary to me and part of why I'm so happy to be talking to you and asked for you to be part of this event is because it's something you've addressed in so many ways in the Oh a in other movie projects you've taken on and in some of the things you wrote at the beginning of me too and so thank you for that oh my goodness yeah I mean thank you for you know you talk in this book a lot about that it's not just about having a voice but then being met with the feeling of credibility that your voice is credible that that somebody should listen and you gave me that so much before I before I knew you just in reading your work I felt this sense of you can write elliptically you know you call it hop hopscotch in this yes I love the idea of advancing forward in a narrative and then going back to the beginning and retracing your steps deeper learning more or trying something else going a little further and I remember when I first read a field guide to getting lost I was like ah I didn't know you could write like this and it moved me and informed my writing and then later when we knew one another and you encouraged me to keep writing nonfiction that was huge for me I mean I I think I felt and you talk a lot in this book about the struggle of doubt of you know in some ways this this book tells the story of a woman finding her voice and becoming an artist but it can't tell that story without telling the companion tale of a woman just surviving you know in a culture that wants to annihilate her with her sanity and her her body and her imagination intact and not fractured you know and and then trying to make art from that place and so you really gave me so much of that sense of hope first in your work and then just in your encouragement to to keep writing nonfiction and that my voice could be credible and that I did have something worth saying and those things were all so hard to find that in the beginning of my career and are still sometimes hard to find and I wonder if you taught would talk a bit about that when you set out to write this memoir did you realize how much of it was gonna be about that twins journey of both yeah coming of age as an artist but then how much of that is also just about surviving and the threat against your body did you know when you thought I'm gonna write this memoir did you know that that would be its nature or structure or was that a surprise as you were revisiting your experience as a young woman it really felt like that was the story I set out really around 19 was when I really began to write in earnest I decided to be a writer when I learned how to read in first grade but I didn't write much outside school assignments but you know at 19 it was time to get real about it and it was also the point at which I realized the street harassment and Menace that had been around me for a while it really and maybe it was because I opened up a little bit I was such an a shutdown person one of those people kind of goes catatonic to survive trauma as a child just to be surrounded by the reality that men wanted to harm me maybe unto death in hideous and degrading and intrusive ways and that that was entertainment and it was in Hitchcock and David Lynch and everybody else and it was in pop songs and I was a young woman when the Rolling Stones advertised their black and blue album with a bruised woman tied to a chair saying I'm black and blue from the Rolling Stones and I loved it and that was billboards and advertisements everywhere and there was just this atmosphere and still is everywhere people glorying and gloating in the destruction and humiliation of women it's what drives a lot of mainstream straight porn and nobody was talking about it so of course that was something I had to contend with both in terms of just surviving when I walked down the street and what it does to your consciousness and I wanted to write this book because I've been writing about feminism really since 1985 when I did a cover story for a punk rock magazine about violence against women my preoccupation has a history but I also felt that I've been writing about it in a kind of objective at Troi away in a report oil way and those things were useful putting things in context talking about statistics and general patterns but what I missed in all that is what it does to you because in those early years I had pretty much classic PTSD symptoms I was hyper vigilant I had intrusive thoughts I was so anxious and tense and it really impacted me but also what we don't talk about is this is not just violence against the body it's specifically violence against the voice and we so often talk about voices like it's just the capacity to make a noise which we share with animals and squeak toys and blenders and washing machines and and but what it really is is not something that's inherent in yourself because we often say like oh she was voiceless and almost nobody is truly voiceless people often don't use their voice because they know the punishment for it or the refusal to hear and believe would make it pointless or worse than pointless to speak and so I wanted to write also about that voiceless honest because that was part of my experience of violence against women was that things kept happened to happening to me and to women around me and nobody took it seriously I recount in this book a number of experiences where people essentially told me that they didn't believe me it didn't happen I'm is Amen explain things to me which I was creation and consequences I recount in this was really about what happens when you don't have a voice when you say something happen in somebody says you are not confident you know to just to speak and that's really annoying when it's your professional expertise whether it's filmmaking or microbiology or medicine or astronomy or you know plumbing for that matter but when you say as somebody does in that essay my husband is trying to kill me and people think that you're just you know to use the grossest stereotype about women in distress you're crazy and this of course so much with the OAS about unbelievab ility you know that that lack of voice becomes something that can cause your death and actually early in the book I quote this passage from you when you wrote early in the me2 era which was not a whole new thing it was just another chapter in the long book of feminism but you wrote an essay about that about encounters with Harvey Weinstein and what was so compelling about those things when he finally went to jail something I don't think we ever thought was going to happen was realizing everything he did to women and tried to do to you banked upon an inequality of voices that women would not be able to speak up because people wouldn't believe them because he could render punishments that would make it not worth it to them that he could terrorize them that we had a whole society and discrediting women's stories since Freud decided to deny his patients experience of being molested by their fathers and long before so everything Harvey Weinstein did banked on an inequality of voices the opposite of a democracy of voices and you had a direct experience of that and I wonder if you want to talk about your own trying to be an artist trying to have a voice in you know something even worse than the publishing industry which I snark about a fair bit the film industry and may be said about that essay you know your audition for wasn't bikini girl number two and blog number three and things like that um yeah you know I think it in the beginning you just have this deep desire to create and probably that comes from the place of a instinct to heal yourself from trauma like when you were just just describing now the feeling of feeling a constant sense of anxiety I was thinking about how at the younger woman and still now I you know if I'm in a new space a new hotel room or a new I still do this thing where I think about what are all the exits like what are all the ways I can run if I have to run if I'm on the second floor is there like a drainpipe I can slide down is there which is an absurd preoccupation and I used to think you know I'm just sort of crazy that I do this but when I started talking with other women about it it's like a lot of women actually plan these kind of escape scenarios even much later in life when they're not in really any imminent danger and that that is taxing and has a weight on you and I think the journey towards wanting to be an actress or be a writer and a filmmaker and a storyteller was about trying to eviscerate that trauma and heal from that trauma and in the beginning of course you're met with you know the opposite of be of that sort of pure intentions behind that pursuit you you're auditioning in this town for roles and you're being slotted into narratives that are just continuing to perpetuate the status quo that is a kind of annihilation against women you have this amazing line in here that I have I just kept returning to over and over again where you talk about you talk about the idea of thinking through stories and deciding what will actually serve you see if I can find it I know I'm just reading you back to you but I'll take it it was it was really a profound moment for me because it kind of coalesced out you said becoming a writer formalizes the task that faces us all in making a life to become conscious of what the overarching stories are and whether or not they serve you and how to compose versions with room for who you are and what you value I might drop the mic drop the book to me it's like I read that sentence and I was like that's it to me that's everything I think I got to a point in my career where I realized that to survive I was going to have to abandon all of my values and then what vessel of any use could I be on the other side of that you know I would have broken my soul and so it became so clear to me that the only way out was to make my own work and then quite like you I really the only way to do that if you're in any oppressed group is to band together with other people you know is all about Mangla jus co-created the Oh a who's been my best friend since college Mike Cahill who we also met there John Mulaney was doing comedy at the time and Nick Kroll everybody that met at Georgetown just started making this stuff and then went on to continue making stuff in these collaborative forms and I think that that I think you really need a collective because while the rest of the world is telling you know you can't have this part know that short film doesn't work it's too feminine it's too strange it's too sweet it's a surrealism we haven't seen before from a feminized imagination you need people around you that are saying no keep going you know and you have you have been that force for me to like when I wrote the essay about the economics of consent and the experience with Harvey and the systemic underlying causes of that situation I felt really embarrassed about it and ashamed and also like I might never work again but it was your letter to me that where you said no this matter is keep going and and I then felt in turn from that gift you gave me that I needed to turn around and say to other women around me no keep going this is good because we have to make each other feel credible and heard before the world will and so that was another part of the memoir that was so moving to me was towards the end when it coalesced into the realization that it isn't just about speaking you know it isn't it just about the auditory experience it's does it land is it valued and then is it encouraged you know that feels like the the main thing is does the audience say yes and give me give me more I mean I want you know you talk in the book about early experiences where people gave you that can you say more about what that was like the how necessary the encouragement was or how it how it kept you going in times when you know so many doors were being shut in your face or publishers were saying I'm not giving you the added phony has a young woman there's the people who are in you know particularly for somebody who's older like me who grew up in a much less feminist era not that things are great now but more women and other people who've absorbed feminism and believed in it are in charge of things more things and more arenas but I felt like I had a double existence I had a lot of female friends and gay friends and we have these wonderful deep long phone conversations in a way the best part of the pandemic for me is returning to the kind of phone life I used to have then when people would just call each other up you know cell phone use is so transactional it's so you know lousy sound quality distracted people briefly scheduling you know or you know imparting data but we used to have these deep conversations I one of the arguments I sons have with my partner is comes out of I think he thinks that language is transactional that were either you know instructing arguing imparting data etc and I think it's just connective and you know I wrote an essay and praise of preaching to the choir about because the phrase preaching to the choir is such negative phrase and as like people come to the church for the preaching the singing and the hanging out on the church steps language does so many other things and there's so many ways we connect that matter and I felt like what I did with those young women friends of mine in the same boat was what we were just saying to each others we told these endless stories about whether the boy liked us and how things were going south and how difficult our mothers were is we're saying I hear you your feelings are legitimate I value you your perception of reality is legitimate and you are entitled to it despite the fact that you're in a world full of people who want to tell you otherwise and so though so I was living with those conversations in my most personal life with the people I chosen as friends and then in the professional world I was dealing with a lot of different forms of misogyny and so you know and in me and my family and different ways in public life and stuff with people who are like you are not qualified to speak I don't care what you think and of course street harassment is about the experience of voice listen your voice cannot set boundaries I can say this stuff to you I'm the you know if I can say smile and then men threaten you if you don't obey me I commanding obedience from a stranger or I can say something really nasty to you and so often those guys would just default into rage they had a threat of violence nor slims an explicit threat of violence or the violence itself and just this sense that you are so voiceless you cannot set your personal boundaries and you know which is what rape is about the denial of the voice that says no and then the second wave that's so important the voice that says I don't believe you you are not a credible witness to your own life when you then you go say I was raped or I was threatened or I was assaulted or you know or this is what happened and that sense of constantly being subject to being overruled so I was living this kind of binary you know this sort of to channel life with the channel of support and solidarity from people who believed and who communicated and who we shared that you know that reality with and then the people who are like you are not qualified to speak and you know so that was such my formative experience and it feels so peculiar in retrospect I've set out to become a writer in a world where people were telling me I wasn't even competent to say what happened yesterday you know that I was going to write history knows but it was actually the writing of that history that gave me the confidence I had these two really interesting encounters with men who did awful things and then told me they had not just done those things I was when my fourth book had come out my book wanderlust a stir walking I was almost 40 and it's kind of appalling to relate that this is how it happened because I'd like to think it was I had inherent confidence and was you all the way but I was in my 40s I was getting close to 40 and I just thought I am a writer of history I am a person who has capably and professionally sorted data I am NOT gonna let you Gaslight me out of what just happened which was about the fact that I backed down so many times and from Harvey Weinstein to the office creep they'll count on woman backing down because they know because when you're told a million times that you're not a credible witness often you lose that faith in yourself and I think that's part of what you're talking about do I actually trust myself and is it worth it to come forward and will I be punished for coming forward and that creates the conditions for silencing that have been so powerful I'm creating an anti democracy of voices and I feel like what feminism is is part of a larger human rights struggle to create among other things that democracy of voices and yesterday now because were recording last week the two white supremacists who murdered a young black man who was just out running were finally arrested because enough people raised their voices in outrage but and they told this completely preposterous story full of racist cliches and why did they murder him because they were confident they would get away with it they were confident they were in a system where their story would be believed over even physical evidence and and cents so somebody died of an inequality of voices and you know and only because other people raised their voices in and insisted on the new versions of reality we have where a black man is allowed to go running empty handed unarmed in his own neighborhood that maybe the story will have a different ending than the one they were counted counting on which is that they would get away with it no it's what you're as I'm listening to I was just thinking about how so it's both about voice and then about credibility and then about people listening and then I think there's this other layer that you get to which is about what do you give yourself permission to say you know I was reminded when I was reading your memoir of did you ever read Joanna Russ this book how to suppress women's writing she read oh my god Betty - oh you I think well you'll die when you're pissin your because it's so there's something about it that makes you feel for the first moment truly not gas-lit like somebody has turned off the gas she writes about it at this one point and I might get some of the details wrong but she writes about being in a position as a professor at a finer literary fine arts program at a college and she writes about the submissions process and she says that you know she was the lone female and then there were three male professors and the four of them together would decide who was going to you know be given permission to join the program and this story has stuck with me because she talked about how they would rank the submissions one through 25 and she said that she and her male cohort courts would rank the submissions of the male writers the same so who she ranked as the number one male writer they ranked as the number one her - was there - on and on down the list almost perfectly corresponding - and of course the people on the top of the list you know get into the program with the female writers who had applied their lists for almost the inverse so who she the submissions enlisted as the strongest female applicant they ranked as 25 and who she ranked as number two that should get in they ranked at the bottom of their list of 24 and on an Abba to complete inverse list and when I read this system it made so much sense to me because she said what I as a woman want to hear from other women right where they were subject matters there were styles of writing that were inherently feminine and I was so excited to receive these new ideas this new way of looking at things the sort of paradigm shift but a poem that I might read that a woman is writing about an experience in her kitchen where she takes a cabbage out of the refrigerator and as she's peeling back the layers she's thinking of her womb and her mother's womb and her grandmother's womb and the Russian doll of wombs that to a male audience was completely uninteresting and and so the women who ended up getting into the program were the women who had changed their styles maybe or who had absorbed more of the dominant culture and were reflecting it back to the male gatekeepers who were saying like yes this story is permissible or credible or good and I thought that there were moments in your in your memoir when you really touched on that idea of like you authorized yourself to insist on a forum and a style and a way of thinking about things that was really different from other people and and in some ways I would may be described as inherently feminine like not necessarily logical or linear sometimes elliptical and revisiting the same place you know talking about fogs and moods and yeah so I wonder if you could speak to that at all I guess how how much of a struggle it is to give yourself permission to excavate those more unknown aspects of making art as a woman like what comes internally not what you absorb from the external world and how you've been able to give yourself the permission to bring that out even though you know you can meet with a lot of resistance for a really long time and people still do you know it's a tricky thing i I think I benefited in his way from isolation and I was a person with not many friends when I was really young I was not good at connecting to other human beings and in some ways the isolation and the fact that what I wanted to do which was essentially to be a kind of essayist nonfiction writer above and beyond journalism at a time that nonfiction wasn't taken very seriously in the literary establishment the fact that I was on the west coast and didn't move to New York to be in the center of things that I benefited in a way from benign neglect I was a weed and not a hothouse orchid and and I worries Williams both about the way that a lot of young people particularly young women live in this sort of constant bath of social media you know where you constantly learn to present versions of yourself that will be validated and rewarded you know whether it's looking pretty and can in a conventional way on Instagram or say agreeing with the group I even think in writing programs about some of those workshopping things where you get to hear what everybody else thinks and there's just times where I'm really glad I didn't know what everybody else thought I've had a few bad later in life workshopping moments from like y'all don't understand what I'm trying to do and it doesn't really matter because I don't actually need everyone's approval and permission to do it so I think there was a real benefit to isolation in some ways but as for the elliptical miss the week after we lost two of the Bay Area's greatest poets Yvonne blonde the irish feminist then head of Stanford's writing program who was a benefactor to me and a friend and somebody admired it immensely and Michael McClure the poet often connected with the beeps although he connects to so many other things who was a beautiful human being and poet and one of the few powerful famous adult men who encouraged me when as a young woman in my 20s and took me seriously but I learned also a lot about writing nonfiction from reading poetry which takes for granted because that is the nature of contemporary poetry the right to be elliptical to make leaps to suggest rather than comprehensively definitively describe but I think it was only in fully dword with field guide in 2005 that I gave myself the permission to follow a kind of poetic logic of intuitive associative ideas rather than a linear narrative in a more logo centric way and it was really interesting to do that and one of several times why I went beyond what I had been doing before and didn't know whether and I that book I didn't know if I would finish it if I would show it to anyone of when I showed it to people whether I wanted to publish it when I published it whether anyone would read it and really and it wasn't and it was also about the fact that sometimes you have to make art without an assumption that there's an audience for it because once you imagine an audience you kind of imagine their implicit rules and what they're gonna like and not like and so I think that there was a kind of deep solitude that's hard to have now when we all want to check the internet every 39 seconds and you know are constantly being course corrected by what other people think and I just look now and how you write something and you can get all the likes and feedback but you can also get the death threats on Twitter for dissenting and you know I almost feel and like human beings when I was young many of us we were like Wolverines or something you know Wolverines are these solitary animals in the mountains that occasionally see each other and come together to meet and then the females raise their young for a while since they are mammals and now I feel like we're ants we live in a nest and we kind of touch antennas to share information and have kind of group mind all the time and I think that there's a kind of isolation that's really useful and I'm happy now I'm on chapter seven of a book that only my editors and a few my wonderful agent Francis Cody and a few other human beings know about Wow and it's kind of great not having any feedback on it from anybody else and just being kind of alone with the material and my ideas about it and God knows when it comes out it's a it's about as some of my other books have been things that might be considered masculine territory like when I did my book on Eadweard Muybridge a lot of men assumed I'd gotten the technological history wrong which which is in in men explain things because they didn't know what the hell they were talking about but they assumed they did so but I like and I think I kind of advise everyone to do that make sure part of your life is private part of your part of your life is off-limits from the feedback of every passing stranger and casual acquaintance it's really important to not give a damn about what other people think about some of what you do because they will approve what they know and are comfortable with and that's not necessarily what you need in what we need and so I think solitude I was lonely some of the time but it was also my friend in a lot of ways and in some ways it was reinforcing so you know this makes me think of there's you know you there's a wonderful book that you did the Atlas Infinite City yeah looking at San Francisco I was so moved by that book and when we shot part 2 of the Oh a we actually is all and I gave that book to many members of the crew as a way of getting to know the city because there are the this fantastic maps that will show you where monarchs nest and then on the next page you're looking at the military industrial complex and where's Bechtel and where are all the centers of the naval yards and then then it's exploring you know all the women who did the work to protect the green spaces of of San Francisco and how all these trees were protected and it's such an interesting layered way of thinking about place as a kind of metaphysical concept and when I hear you talking about and I'm thinking of it again because in the beginning of your memoir you talk about that first apartment and also your first desk and the idea that like I just get the sense that when you talk about those things you're talking not just about geography you know you're also you're talking about some I don't know for lack of a better word a spiritual sense of things absorbed or that certain spaces can unlock something within you as an artist that might not be in LA unlocked if you did not find that space or like the desk that your friend gifted you you almost describe it as a kind of like haunted object that that terminated your writing and I just love that sense of things can you can you talk about how you developed it and how it has informed your work have you always had that kind of sense of place as porous and like interacting with with your being in your mind and I one of the funny things about the life I'm leading is that it doesn't feel like I actually grew up even before I learn how to read I was passionately in love with two things which was kind of landscape and place and the natural world on the one hand and stories on the other and like nothing has changed and you know and then also when I said I was solitary and lonely I think I've misspoken away and I'm so glad you said what you did because I want to go back and say what were my most important friends in this period when I was 19 and I moved into that apartment that I would live in for 25 years of course mr. James Young James V Young to whom the book is dedicated more than anyone else my building manager a black sharecroppers son World War two vet who was also lovely to have in the narrative as the the kind and protective man in a book that talked about so many men who were the opposite but the apartment I moved into was you know I was like a hermit crab in a chambered nautilus shallows Oh little place the city was my friend the hills were my friend Ocean Beach at the end of the city was my friend and I still have such a strong sense that places we always talk about how we love place but I think if you you can develop a deep relationship to a place to constancy by attentiveness by going to it again and again and they reassure you they ground you your friends will die but the mountains will outlive all of us the river will outlive all of us the ocean no matter even what happens to the climate the ocean will rise but the tides and the sea will be there I had a very difficult mother and I one day and this is gonna come out just after Mother's Day one day looking at Ocean Beach I just thought everything was my mother except my mother that I was nurtured by books that I was nurtured by the city that I was nurtured by feminism that I was nurtured by activism that I was nurtured by you know people I met and most of all and I was nurtured by places and by Ocean Beach in particular which I still maybe the most magic place in my life that I go to as often as I can and so there and it's something I you know I think there's a sense but for people who don't spend a lot of time outdoors and don't spend a lot of up time out life alone that we are purely social animals and that everything we need must come from other human beings which it generally doesn't but if you recognize you know for a lot of people the love that comes from animals and the understanding and the kinship and all other forms of connection but also I think the membership that's not just men being a member of a romantic relationship or a biological family or a small group of friends but being a member of civil society a member of movements has also been really important to me so I think if somebody who wasn't good at that kind of close to middle scale of conventional human relationship family stuff all these other things were and so that and this somebody said that the city is like a character in your book which I loved so when I wrote my history of walking I looked at the male surrealist who described Paris as this kind of beautiful seductive woman that he who was mysterious you know in some ways they could literally enter her in some way she was always elusive and of course what is a gay man's or straight woman's relationship to the city you know what are these other places and but I think that was a really important part of it so thank you for bringing it up and Atlas was also I I felt during the Bush era as I do in this era a kind of moral obligation to write about these public international issues of democracy feminists and human rights justice rule of law and of course climate change that list came at the beginning of the Obama era where I felt like I could come home again and localize again and it was also a super gregarious project in a way notebook I had done was before the first Atlas had more than 30 people working on it and so I got to tap into people with skills I didn't the cartographers including ishizu Siegel and Benjamin peace and Molly Roy the designer Leah Chandra and all these people who had deep knowledge I didn't and it was also and this might be fun to just tap into while we're quarantined how much you how much there always is to know about a city how in that's the realist sense the city always contains more than we will ever know how no two people live in the same city because are so many versions of it going on that the old Chinese immigrant woman lives in a different place than the young software engineer who was born in the suburbs nearby how the game in whose black traverses the city in a different way than the straight woman who's white how do you know the Latino immigrant kids often live in this kind of hyperlocal densely meaningful territorial neighborhood where's a lot of other people kind of float through without ever knowing their neighbors or who where the hell they are in any deep sense and it's actually you don't actually I think it's one of the beautiful things about the Oh a is the sense of these really different characters with really different senses of their place in the world and the meaning and the things they're looking for so that even as people might come together as a group in an intersectional way they do it from really different needs and backgrounds and experiences and just understanding that that multifaceted nasai think is so much what we've tried to do in this era of trying to let more voices in listen more broadly find what has been shut out and invited in have these braided and inclusive and multi vocal narratives as opposed to the dominant hero narrative that is so violent and destructive that Ursula kala queen and her wonderful the carrier bag theory in fiction compares to like a spear point you stab things work with as massive are two verses the carrier bag narrative that is you know kind of a grab bag of many things there might be another way to think about what you've done in the OE and I tried to do in some of these books with many other voices in them that you know I loved so much when you just described Ocean Beach as the mothering force like the idea of finding in nature this other mother or this sense of nourishment because I think that's happening for a lot of people right now you know you had this wonderful metaphor at the end of the book about the Japanese practice of pouring liquid gold lacquered gold into the cracks of a broken pot and then the gold actually adheres the pot back together and so the cracks the brokenness become becomes a source of beauty and it - me that Leonard Cohen line there's a crack in everything and that is how the light gets in and I've been thinking about that a lot that metaphor of your book inside this pandemic and this experience because of course it's revealing so much brokenness and there's so much pain and loss and struggle and yet I am also seeing these moments that feel like the liquid gold poured into the cracks and and one of those is the sense of a kind of return to nature or as a source of nourishment people tearing up their backyards and learning to grow vegetables and teaching their children and learning about companion planting and and realizing that nature actually isn't survival of the fittest at all nature is survival of the most cooperative like if you plant the right things together the the insects that one flower lures in will help you know kill the caterpillars that are gonna devour you know your squash plant at all all the ways in which nature is so divinely interactive and ecosystems thriving in concert and I've just been hearing a lot of things from different people trying this you know trying to grow things trying to get out in nature finding the time or space to rescue a dog and learning from that relationship how much we are of course animal and and like the dog is connected to the earth and how these realizations and just the clean air we have right now in Los Angeles and the Dolphins that are jumping in the canals of Venice that nobody's seen for decades there is some sense that that perhaps we are allowing ourselves a little bit to reconnect with as you so beautifully said you know Ocean Beach or nature as as the mother that we've been missing you know that we have abused and and of course then this just folds back into so many of the themes of your narrative about you know our desire to annihilate the feminine and how how ultimately dangerous that is in the face of the climate crisis and and everything else no you've touched on so many interesting things in this moment one of the things that came to mind is how many people are reporting hearing birdsong in ways they didn't before and we are quieter now that people aren't rushing around the way they usually are there aren't so many airplanes overhead etc but it's interesting to think of how much it's that the birds were always there but people are listening better than they were before and that's so interesting that kind of quality of stillness some people have and ways they didn't before including me I think including you and what comes out of that I'm one of the things I'm most committed to is climate activism and trying to address the climate crisis and the stillness is about the facts so much of our carbon emissions are about production consumption and rushing around and the fact that you know you can see the Himalayas from northern Indian cities when they haven't been seen in decades from there is kind of amazing the fact that air pollution from LA to New Delhi is kills hundreds of thousands from actually millions of people I think it's about eight point eight million worldwide every year the fact that I one of the things that's a staggering for me to talk about climate for a minute is two things one of which is that fossil fuel will well the Texas I forget the exact term Port Brent crude or something hit negative $40 a barrel a couple weeks ago because demand is so far down that is not anything I ever imagined I would see in my lifetime negative $40 a barrel the fossil fuel industry is really hard up in ways that we could really take advantage of but that's you know to make the climate transition we need to but that's part of what's coming out of this and by that I don't mean to ignore all the suffering and loss and despair and financial freefall people are in but you have to you have to look you know you have to grab the opportunities when they rise the other thing that's happening that really matters for the climate movement and other economic changes for pursuing a green new deal medicare-for-all may be universal basic income is that all so many things we've been told for decades are impossible which was always argument why we can't address climate change it's impossible to make those sweeping changes we just made a bunch of sweeping changes we threw three trillion dollars out of thin air around we stopped whole industries we changed everything about how we live in a lot of ways so that's part of what's happening that I think is really full of possibility but also the way people have responded as I was talking at the beginning with the anti sowing squad and so many other forms of mutual aid in a way what the virus is telling us is that we're all connected we are not separate and there's much more pleasant ways to be told that including just paying attention to science and the good was and the good as well as the destructive aspects and science and nature in the world around us and the systems were all part of whether they're economic or social or how ideas move from the margins to the center and people you've never heard of formed your thinking but you know seeing how people oh-ah the kids next door are having a moment excitement excite us had Magnus Dorothy have connected my immigrant neighbors have made the loveliest sounds for the last seven years I've been here was the sound of girls with the kind of hard heels tapping and swirling skirts which wasn't much sound but the heels were yesterday and a boy playing a trumpet yesterday but okay it's subsiding so I can think think what a little bit more about this but I think also people are finding ways to connect and that's been really extraordinary in reaching out feeling that deep sense of connection and empathy and that's really important all the people making masks donating supporting projects just the fact that medical workers continue to go to work when might mean their lives is such a profound and beautiful and amazing thing it's not all volunteer work and donations as cement it's people just doing what they already do it's the kindness it's people singing from their balconies in Italy and reciting poetry from their balconies in Iran it's so many radical and creative reinventions of how we live and how we connect and what's been really interesting about it is that connecting is the life seen as feminine taking care is sometimes seen as feminine just as recycling and caring about climate by men suffering from tragic masculinity have been seen as too feminine to do wearing masks a scene has been seen as compromising masculinity which is outrageous because what Asian culture were mess have been used for a long time has always been trying to tell us is this is not about protecting yourself it's about protecting others but I think that one of the tragedies of masculinity is configured in West the Western world is that it is about isolation it is about being shut off it is about being separate it is about individuals and that its most deadened and miserable and indeed the capacity to harm someone is based on your lack of empathy for them the fact that you've cut off the feeling that would naturally connect you to to others and how that plays out in this pandemic as we see wealthy people women as well as men decide that the deaths of others are an acceptable cost for profit and business and its usual and banal comforts like haircuts and manicures is the other side of what we're seeing and so we're seeing this incredible conversation through actions and choices and gestures about our well-connected are we all in this together am i my brothers and sisters keeper or am i all about myself and the infinite rights I was telling someone last week that I grew up with a kind of American phrase I don't know if it's liberal conservative but it was like my right to swing my arm and where your nose begins and it was about the fact that there are limits on absolute freedom even expressed in a kind of punchy way like that and the argument we're getting from men with guns in the nation you know the nation's state capitals and etc is my right to swing my arm has no limits to hell with your nose and to hell with your you know your vulnerability to hell with not letting children starve to hell with meeting the needs of others to hell with protecting the vulnerable through our own decisions to stay at home to wear masks to be careful to wash our hands something that's also turned out to be gendered for a lot of people and so these questions about gender that I took up in the book have so many forms and permutations and tangents that are important to map and of course it's not all men I know heroic gay doctors and men and male nurses and very good hand-washing men and in male masked makers etc but the way that gender shapes our ideas of self and possibility and voice are as as due race as do class as do so many other things are so important to consider when we look at anything how writing and filmmaking have worked but also how a pandemic plays out and whose decisions and needs our paramount and you know there's so many you know it's an endless conversation I don't know if we're coming to the end of ours at this point I think we've been recording for about an hour should i should i slip in any of these questions for you or what about the ones for you i'm wondering if you or any of yours you wanted to answer or any for both of us you wanted to answer you know some of these we actually did cover interesting that's kind of what I thought when I read them is that a lot of them were implicit and explicit in the conversation yeah I guess the last question that that I would have for you is you know and you've touched on this some I think of you as this exquisite collector of stories you know not told or not heard or misunderstood or undervalued and also sometimes taking stories and being like hey what about looking at this myth from this perspective you know and it completely gives the story new meaning and I wonder in in this moment of of a pandemic if you have been collecting any little stories not unlike the one you told of the group of people making masks that sort of point to hope in the rugged sense hope in the earned sense which you talk about in your book the hope in the dark not hope as I'm sort of you know I think that word has been misunderstood as somehow soft or silly or saccharine you know but but hope in this sense of something like sharper and more determined yes open yes I wonder if there are things that you've stories you've collected or observed during this period that have given you that sense any other things that we haven't touched on that you think might be heartening to people to hear in this time since you are our great collector of stories yeah and I think that it was something that's worth saying that's talked about in the memoir talked about in a all my almost all my books is I feel like a lot of the job of storytellers is to say who's not at the table who hasn't been invited in how do we invite them in and you know as a white woman my job is to listen to non-white voices as well and try and pay attend to them and amplify them and get out of the way and that means for example publish you know editing the first non-white majority volume of the best American Essays last year and it means listening to the stories that beak of white supremacy after Hurricane Katrina for a paradise built in hell and stuff like that but for the hope side of things which of course it has come from a lot of these places Native American cultural and political revivals and resurgence --is the coalition of Immokalee Workers where immigrant farm workers in Florida the zapatistas more than almost anyone and in this moment actually with my friend marina Citroen a sociology professor and Thelma Young climate activists in Fiji who I mentioned before we actually formally set out to try and collect a lot of stories of mutual aid and marinas collecting them from an anthology of stories around the world I knew because I have written about disasters before that tons of it would happen because it always does but it's almost shocking how much there is in Hell there the very term mutual aid which comes out of the anarchist book peter kropotkin z' mutual aid is now a really mainstream term there's a website in the united kingdom where you can see several hundred neutral aid groups around that country and you know somebody complains that about the redundancy of for for mutual aid groups in lexington kentucky because people are also charting mutual aid in the this country and just to see all the people who form different kinds of mutual aid from food delivery to the vulnerable and advocacy mask-making orchestrating PPE interesting weird things like the factory workers who make the raw material for more professional-grade masks forty something men shut themselves up for twenty-eight days in the factory so they would not be infected or infectious or and impacted by the pandemic so they stayed for twenty-eight days in their factory eating and sleeping and working in 12-hour shifts around the clock to produce as much as they and you know I'm like they were paid for that but that's at the generosity of that the altruism of that just the full awareness we have something to give and we will give as big and hard as we can in this moment is so amazing you know because the Trump administration is utterly corrupt and is sabotaging state's efforts to equip their medical and frontline workers and limit the reach of the pandemic the governor of Massachusetts actually used the Patriots football team playing to fly direct to China and fill up with masks and fly back so that they couldn't be hijacked as many others have and a buddhist group in florida raised half a million dollars to buy PP for people in that area you know I've seen two and a half million dollars raised for the Navajo Nation by what started out I believe is a small fundraiser aiming for $25,000 I'm just seeing really extraordinary stuff everywhere where people are saying I see a need I can invent a way to meet that need that will involve being connected to other people in ways we haven't connected before we can form a new group we can form a new coalition we and so not only is this meeting specific intangible and you know kind of rational needs but I think it's also meeting a metaphysical need to be connected and to do meaningful work one thing I learned in disasters is that the need to give the need to respond out of empathy compassion a sense that we're not separate is actually an urgent need after 9/11 people went to blood banks and hospitals all over the country to give blood which turned out not to be needed but so much blood was given if I remember correctly it would have filled an Olympic swimming pool you know and this desire to give from the most intimate the most intimate thing you have your hearts blood from your own body it's also happening now as blood is running short I've been trying to figure out how to do it myself but it's called located here and you know but I'm just seeing so many interesting ways people are doing this stuff and I'm also seeing politicians the ones who are on our side trying to prevent the corruption and respond to needs people like Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker also trying to advance stuff they just advanced a bill against large-scale factory farming and so it feels like so many emergencies do whether it's a war or a regional disaster that everybody almost everybody is trying to find their place find out what they have to give and to give it and just the generosity and the creativity and intensity is actually really hopeful my understanding from reading a paradise built in hell and hope in the dark and looking at these things very carefully is this is our true and authentic nature and capitalism among other things has been a scheme for generations to turn us into lonely selfish miserable people because that's what makes us good consumers good and obedient parts of the Machine of consumption and production and destruction and inequality that doesn't fulfill us but we don't often see the other way the best thing that comes out of disasters is this vision this experience of connectedness and this vision that everything can change for the better as well as the worst and moments like this and some people always seize it and try and make something more lasting out of it and the task facing us all in that moment is to do that and so my hope has never been optimism which is a passive belief that everything will be fine regardless nor has it but it has been the antithesis of both optimism which is passive and assumes we know what will happen and the opposite of pessimism which is gloom and doom and cynicism and posturing because despair is a black leather jacket everyone looks good in hope is a frilly pink dresses I would always say when I was talking about this book so much most people don't want to wear hope is a sense that the future is not yet written that what we do will help write it that there are incredible dangers and that we need to never lose sight of the suffering and the destruction but that there is room to address that suffering and there is room for creation and that's everybody's job including our own and that's the hope in everyday life which is itself full of suffering and injustice of hunger and exclusion and silencing and environmental destruction and that's our job in this moment and it's the most beautiful work we can do and some people do it every day in their work as nurses as preschool teachers as but I think you people also do it as investigative journalists as filmmakers in so many things and sometimes when people don't love what they have to do for a living they find that they're doing it through their church their mosque their synagogue they're doing it through their mutual aid group they're there they're sewing circle they're sewing circles yeah and there's gardening club yeah yeah yeah they're their community you know one of the things that was really exciting the last decade was in places like Detroit all the urban gardening going on as a revolt against the food deserts and kind of nutritional inequality that planting vegetables could be a revolutionary act of solidarity but the planned you know shut down of the fossil fuel industry on a global scale to a local solar project there is room for everyone but what I also think shows up in this pandemic is that emotion is contagious and you see acts of kindness of encouragement people putting things in their windows and chalking stuff on the sidewalk that even even those little things count as part of the effort you know the plaus for medical workers that's become a really big deal in the UK and New York City you know that we also influence people just by whether we rain on their parade or celebrate their capacity I would just so much what I think recollections of my existence was about was trying to become one of those encouragers and the writer Michael Sims has reminded me that the word encourage which is often seen as a kind of pollyannish word that means being nice actually means to instill courage courage the quality that allows us to do what we believe should be done that allows us to be who we want to be and need to be and Brit I think you yourself are remarkable source of courage and encouragement in your work I'm grateful we're friends I'm grateful we talked I'm grateful to City Arts & Lectures for bringing us together and you should have the last word but I want to just say one more thing which is that I started telling fairy tales as a way to reach out first to the kids in my family to anybody who wanted to be told a story in this crisis because fairy tales are about relatively powerless often neglected abandoned devalued people and how they find their way their people their power but what was exciting about doing it was realizing here we are all alone in our houses but if a hundred people are listening then the story is in the hundred rooms and if we're all in the same story then we're in a hundred rooms we're in a palace of rooms beyond what we'll know and imagine so I feel like having talks like this are ways that we join together in the big world I suspect we're going to be in a thousand words when this goes live and many moves afterwards I want to thank everyone in their room for being with us for joining us in the roominess that is a story and a conversation - thank you all for your own stories and conversations that get us through this and thank you Brit so much for being a powerful powerful teller of new and different and subversive stories it's so great to be with you and so great to be with all of you so great to be back with City Arts & Lectures in the metaphysical grand space of the Sidney Goldstein theatre thank you everyone yes I'm Thank You Rebecca for inviting me to do this with you and to end to giving all of us this memoir I would encourage everybody who's listening to start with the memoir recollections of my non-existence but then to go back and read hope in the dark and read men explain things to me and read a field guide to getting lost I reread that recently and allowed myself to wander out of my house and get lost in the city I thought I knew my way in and it was a fantastic experience thank you to City Arts & Lectures and also to Holly and Ann for helping organize this call and the entire staff behind this experience that's keeping these conversations up and running when we need them in this time thanks Rebecca for this experience thank you see you will shoot together an Ocean Beach before long I hope one day soon yes take care bye bye

Channel: City Arts & Lectures

Views: 21,504

Keywords: city arts, rebecca solnit, brit marling

Id: ZZOv9CAgPTU

Length: 76min 37sec (4597 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2020