No Straight Road
Rebecca Solnit, uncertainty and hope.
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I spent much of this past weekend in a big wet tent with two exhausted and overexcited children. After more than six straight weeks of miraculous sunshine, things reverted to proper British ‘summer’ on the very day we drove up to Scotland for a mountain-biking trip. Did we have fun? Reader, I’ll be honest. Very little.
I dealt with our longest stretch in the tent by sticking my nose in Rebecca Solnit’s brand new book, No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain. I’m not often a fan of essay collections cobbled together from bits and bobs the writer has published over the previous years: the essays are usually, by nature, dated — tied to topics no longer topical — and feel that way. But I made an exception for Solnit. Hers is a voice I thought I could use right now.
My take on the book overall: dipping into the essays feels like flipping through a really good collection of magazines left in a doctor’s waiting room — a bit of unnerving time travel into the recent past. There are bits I would tear out when no one’s looking and take home with me. On climate change: “Like refugees leaving a place, we are leaving a time.” On the success of activism against Las Vegas’s attempt to drain the Great Basin, a Shoshone elder: “‘Never give up the ship. Never. That’s the kind of feeling I think most of us had. Just do the best we can and let’s make something happen, even if it does take forever.’” On Big Tech’s impact on life in San Francisco: “There is an underlying assumption that each of us aspires to be as productive as possible and that stripping away everything that hinders productivity is a good thing.” No, no it is not.
But what I most appreciate about this collection is the short prologue tying the essays together, which I keep returning to, in which Solnit reminds us that “we are always in one way or another in the middle of the story.” She quotes Howard Zinn: “There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability.”
I think many of us right now are feeling bowled over by the transformations and devastations we are bearing witness to. We may have been expecting awful, but most of us were not expecting this.
But, if we can accept that this is now our present moment, then we can see the possibility of future astonishment of the kind Zinn describes! Unexpected rebellions, extraordinary changes, welcome collapses of systems of power. This present moment can change too.
Solnit asks us to embrace longsighted over shortsighted and evitable over inevitable. Mostly, she says, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know what small actions now will create large actions later. If we think we know what will happen, we basically give in to it. As Audre Lorde says, “To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up.”
Allowing for uncertainty instead of certainty, allowing for things not to be already determined but to be yet evitable, offers a different way. If we can see and embrace “the space in which to move toward the best and away from the worst,” then we become able to see “that the future is not (as it is so often spoken of) a place that already exists, toward which we are trudging, but a place that we are creating with what we do and how we do it (or don’t) in the present.” I love this: the future as a place we are creating right here in the present.
Twenty years ago, when I was giving the question of hope a lot of thought, I came up with a definition of hope as faith in the future. I then decided, based on this definition, that I did not find hope all that useful a concept, really, as it focused my attention on the what-is-to-come rather than on the present. I wanted to be a person concerned with the right now — in my life, in my politics. I wanted to choose presence.
Solnit has given me a different way to think about this. In the third essay in the collection, she writes, “Years ago, when I began writing about a variety of hope that is inextricable from uncertainty — a sense that we don’t know what will happen but we might have room to participate in determining what will happen — I ran into this false omniscience again and again, and found that a lot of people liked certainty, even grim certainty, more than the genuine uncertainty about what would happen next.” In other words, people often prefer pessimistic prediction to neutral not-knowing; there is something reassuring about believing you know how things end, even if you don’t like the ending.
When I read this, I feel seen. I feel seen, called-out, and taken to task.
If Solnit is right, and hope is better understood as embrace of uncertainty, of really believing that we do not know what will happen and that it is never too late to shift the direction of history, then I have been wrong. I have been, especially in these past few months, one of those people she refers to, the ones who have been opting for grim certainty over genuine uncertainty. Are you one of those people too?
Maybe instead of thinking a lot about the 1930s right now, I should be thinking more about 1989, when small protests became more powerful than even the protesters imagined possible, and a wall came down, and a world changed.
The world is always changing. “Reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation.” This is Paulo Freire, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and it is a line I quote to myself often. A little less certainty, a little more uncertainty, makes a little more room for action, curiosity, possibility. Believing we already know how things end is taking the easy way out.
Postcard from my garden
