Read Storming the Gates of Paradise Online
Authors: Rebecca Solnit
Storming the Gates of Paradise (54 page)
Seen alone, an essay or a book bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a monologue, but it is most often born amid conversations with fellow writers, editors, publishers, friends, and with history and earlier books and works of art. Imagine it instead as a long-winded reply to an invitation, a provocation, a problem, or a revelation, and you begin to imagine the crowd to whom the solitary writer is indebted. I have been fortunate in editors over the years, and some of my best had much to do with various pieces here, including Tom Engelhardt of Tomdispatch, Paul Rauber of
Sierra
magazine, Jennifer Sahn of
Orion
, and Gary Kornblau of the late, much-mourned
Art issues
. Others served less as editors per se than as traveling companions and instigators; thanks also go to Iain Boal, Alec Finlay, Michael Sorkin, and John Rohrbach of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Though I long ago ceased to be an art critic, I never gave up my attachment to artists and visual art. Because artists ask the biggest questions about everything from perception to political possibilities, they have remained an important part of my thinking; and more thanks go to Richard Misrach, John Pfahl, and Meridel Rubenstein, in particular, for asking me to work with them. My thanks as well to the other artists whose beautiful images will help readers reimagine the world around them and also to the editors on this project. Niels Hooper and Rachel Lockman at the University of California Press have proceeded with an old-fashioned degree of intellectual involvement and diligence that has much improved the rough sheaf of stuff I put together in 2005 and have made production a pleasure.
As did copyeditor Mary Renaud and production editor Kate Warne, who with thoughtfulness and precision improved the manuscript further. Finally, my agent Bonnie Nadell has much improved my working life for more than a decade now, for which I am more than thankful.
THE STRUGGLE OF DAWNING INTELLIGENCE
“The celebration of the past . . .”: Lucy Lippard, | |
“This site possesses national significance . . .”: cited in Robert Dawson and Gray Brechin, | |
“The group of figures fronting the City Hall . . .”: City of San Francisco, Municipal Report of 1893–1894, archives of the San Francisco Arts Commission. | |
“We request the removal of a monument . . .”: letter from Martina O’Dea to the San Francisco Arts Commission, January 30, 1995, archives of the San Francisco Art Commission. | |
“In 1769, the missionaries first came to California . . .”: draft document for plaque text, archives of the San Francisco Arts Commission. | |
“many of us, including myself . . .”: letter from Consul General of Spain Camilo Alonso-Vega to Mayor Willie Brown, May 24, 1996, archives of the San Francisco Arts Commission. | |
“a Franciscan missionary directs the attention . . .”: letter from Archbishop William J. Levada to Mayor Willie Brown, April 17, 1996, archives of the San Francisco Arts Commission. | |
“How can San Francisco . . .”: fax from Kevin Starr and John P. Schlegel (president of the Jesuit University of San Francisco) to the San Francisco Arts Commission, April 30, 1996, p. 4, archives of the San Francisco Arts Commission. | |
“that a war of extermination would continue to be waged . . .”: Governor Peter Burnett, “Message to the California State Legislature,” January 7, 1851, | |
“At least 300,000 Native people . . .”: text from the plaque on the monument itself; also included in archives of the San Francisco Arts Commission. | |
“The law also stated that the memorial should provide visitors . . .”: official Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument web site, | |
“enraged critics . . .”: | |
“It’s like erecting a monument to the Mexicans killed at the Alamo”: quoted in Chris Smith and Elizabeth Manning, “The Sacred and Profane Collide in the West,” | |
“carefully described key landmarks and locations of fresh water . . .”: Leslie Marmon Silko, “Interior and Exterior Landscapes: The Pueblo Migration Stories,” in | |
Keith Basso, “ ‘Stalking with Stories’: Names, Places, and Moral Narratives among the Western Apaches,” | |
“the precise date of the incident is often less important than the place”: Silko, “Interior and Exterior Landscapes,” p. 33. | |
“Americans ought to know . . .”: Patricia Nelson Limerick, essay in | |
“I grew up going to Devils Tower. . . .”: Lakota leader Charlotte Black Elk quoted in | |
“Climbing on Devils Tower is a religious experience for me. . . .”: Andy Petefish quoted in | |
“I began to realize that for them the religion . . .”: Malcolm Margolin, remarks as part of a panel titled Where Holiness Resides, April 11, 1992, at the Headlands Center for the Arts, in a series organized by Ann Chamberlain; quoted in | |
Work by Edgar Hachivi Heap of Birds is cited in Lippard, | |
“All of the state of Oklahoma is Indian Territory. . . .”: Edgar Hachivi Heap of Birds, presentation at the Headlands Center for the Arts, in a series organized by Ann Chamberlain, May 9, 1992; quoted from transcripts courtesy of the Headlands Center for the Arts. |
“You are in a maze . . .”: cited in Michael Shallis, | |
“Place your right (or left) hand . . .”: Julian Barnes, “Letter from London,” | |
Another United Technologies landscape was underground . . . : Ted Smith, executive director of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition in San Jose, telephone interview with the author, September 8, 1994. | |
Langdon Winner, “Silicon Valley Mystery House,” in | |
“If machinery be the most powerful means . . .”: Karl Marx, | |
Jerry Mander, | |
Silicon Valley itself is an excellent check . . . : On Silicon Valley’s social problems, see Winner, “Silicon Valley Mystery House”; and Dennis Hayes, | |
On relations between the Ohlone and the Spanish missionaries, see Malcolm Margolin, | |
“For almost twenty miles . . .”: Vancouver quoted in Yvonne Olson Jacobson, | |
One successful raider, Yoscolo . . .: ibid., p. 26. | |
“Santa Clara County is fighting a holding action . . .”: Santa Clara planning department report is quoted in ibid., p. 230. Jacobson’s volume is also the source of the 1980s acreage statistics. | |
“Perhaps the most significant, enduring accomplishment of Silicon Valley . . .”: Winner, “Silicon Valley Mystery House,” p. 59. | |
“Ts’ui Pen must have said once . . .”: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in | |
“VR is reverse Calvinism . . .”: Norman M. Klein, “Virtually Lost, Virtually Found: America Enters the Age of Electronic Substance Abuse,” | |
“Humans intuitively see analogies . . .”: Paul Shepard, | |
These are the tentacles, the winding corridors, the farthest reaches of Silicon Valley, and the hardest to imagine: Hayes, | |
the rest of the Olson orchard is on its way out: “Last Call for the Last Sunnyvale Orchard,” |
This essay accompanied a book of Richard Misrach’s sky photographs.
The Sky Book
(Santa Fe: Arena Editions, 2000) includes pictures of clouds; of constellations, comets, and planets (slow exposures of their curving trajectories, often interrupted by the straight lines of military flights); and of the cloudless sky, identified by the exact time and place at which they were made (“Paradise Valley [Arizona] 3.22.95 7:05
P.M
.,” for example, or “Dead Sea 4.3.93 5:01
A.M
.,” “Warrior Point 6.27.94 5:25
A.M
.,” “Jerusalem Mountain 10.28.94 7:52
A.M
.”). The titles of the sky pictures were chosen to call attention to the peculiar naming practices deployed across the American West, and the names of the heavenly bodies were also resonant (“Mars and Air Traffic over Las Vegas,” “Cygnus over Ak-Chin”).
“Don’t show the sky . . .”: Eliot Porter, quoted by David Brower in a letter reminiscing about Porter, to curator John Rohrbach of the Amon Carter Museum, September 1999. | |
“Somehow the sky seems important . . .”: Beaumont Newhall, in a letter to Nancy Newhall (including cloud contact prints in the original), June 20, 1944; quoted in the alternative monthly newspaper | |
“a traveling deity who was everyplace . . .”: Paul Shepard, | |
“These series are not meteorological records . . .”: Sarah Greenough and Juan Hamilton, | |
“A metaphor is a word with some other meaning . . .”: Aristotle, | |
“Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world . . .”: Hannah Arendt, introduction to | |
“The rib bones are the closed ellipses of the planets . . .”: Peter Hoeg, | |
a comet moving through the pudenda of a constellation . . . : Italo Calvino, “Man, the Sky, and the Elephant: On Pliny’s | |
On alternative readings of the Big Dipper, see Dorcas S. Miller, | |
“When Orion and Sirius are come to the middle of the sky . . .”: Hesiod, quoted in Anthony Aveni, | |
“It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky . . .”: John Ruskin, | |
“that beside the planet there were three starlets . . .”: Galileo, | |
“four planets swiftly revolving about Jupiter . . .”: part of the subtitle of | |
“The streams were timbered with the long-leaved cottonwood . . .”: John C. Fremont, “Journal of the First Expedition,” in | |
On Solomon Nunes Carvalho, see Robert Schlaer’s definitive book | |
“From the Dalles to the point where we turned . . .”: Fremont, May 23, 1844, | |
“Massacre Rocks and Battle Mountain tell their stories . . .”: George R. | |
“The Indian name of the lake is Mini-wakan . . .”: Fremont, | |
Minnesota | |
“Most place-names today are what could be termed ‘linguistic fossils’ . . .” A. D. Mills, | |
“The poets made all the words . . .”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Susan Morrow, | |
“Nullagvik, Pauktugvik, Milliktagvik, Avgumman, Aquisaq, Inmaurat. . . .”: Richard K. Nelson, “The Embrace of Names,” text of a 1998 talk, courtesy of the Lannan Foundation. | |
“the entire North American continent in a time before living memory . . .”: ibid. | |
“Monument Valley’s Navajo name is | |
“And ultimately, the basic configuration of Rothko’s abstract paintings . . .”: Robert Rosenblum, | |
“so lavishly, engagingly visual . . .”: Rebecca Solnit, “Scapeland,” in | |
“I wanted to deconstruct the conventions of landscape . . .”: Richard Misrach in Tucker, |