A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

Author:Rebecca Solnit
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Art, Travel, Philosophy, Writing, Biography
ISBN: 9781101118719
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2005-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Blue of Distance

Blue was the title I gave a compilation tape I made a dozen years ago, and some of the songs were about sadness, some about the sky, some about both. Every once in a while I made a collection like that, mostly to be listened to on long road trips, and in them I tried to define what it was that moved me in the music I chose. An earlier one had been called Geography Lessons, Mostly Tragic, and there too I had tried to get at something about the evocation of place and its emotional resonance in that music. A compilation about rivers and drinking, about drowning from the inside and out, I called The Entirely Liquid Mr. North, after the fatally alcoholic composer Abe North in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, though the songs were southern. In Blue, most of the music had some relationship to the blues, as if the music was going back to its origins in longing and the blue of distance.

I had discovered country and western music a few years before—not the modern stuff that is mostly sentimental pop with fiddles and a twang, but the older tunes that plumbed the dark depths of emotional experience. I had grown up in immigrant, coastal, liberal culture far removed from the realm of this music and been taught to despise the stuff as banal, as trashy, as vulgar without ever really heeding it. When the music burst upon me all of a sudden one spring, I was stunned to find out that the most popular songs often were, like the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Katherine Anne Porter, a kind of southern gothic in love with tragedy and topography. Thinking about it now, I wonder about an era when a wrenching poetics of loss possessed the airwaves and wonder too about how it slid over into the true banality of upbeat contemporary country (though there are still great balladeers around the edges of that genre).

The songs that worked their way into my blood were like short stories compressed into a few stanzas and a refrain; they always spanned and layered time. The music was haunted, was about distant memory, was about the dead and gone or at the very least aimed at a beloved far beyond earshot. Like writing, the music was solitary, talking to itself in that solitude of composition and contemplation, in the free flow of time that is before, after, between, but somehow never quite the now of a thriving romance, and perhaps this was also the time of my long summer drives, of driving six hundred, a thousand miles in a day, of unrolling again and again like movies, like stories, like the stories small children demand for reassurance, the sequences of Highway 40 through Arizona and New Mexico, 80 and 50 through Nevada and Utah, of 58 and 285 through the California desert, of many secondary highways and other roads, roads whose mesas and diners were always the same and whose light and clouds and weather never were.

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