The east arm of the Wintu

I learned from her article "Men Explain Things to Me" (see earlier post) that Rebecca Solnit is the author of numerous books, but I have read only one: A Field Guide to Getting Lost, which I picked up in the DeYoung Museum shop a few years ago, simply because I was intrigued by its title. I enjoyed the book but found the introduction, a rambling essay called "Open Door," to be the most thought-provoking part of it.

Solnit is a promiscuous reader—a quality I admire—and her essays draw on a surprisingly varied array of source material. Readers are invited along on her literary (and literate) excursions through art, philosophy, history, anthropology, ecology and more. One of the passages I underlined in Lost contains an idea I still think about from time to time:

Malcolm, apropos of nothing at all, brought up the Wintu in north-central California, who don't use the words left and right to describe their own bodies but use the cardinal directions. I was enraptured by this description of a language and behind it a cultural imagination in which the self only exists in reference to the rest of the world, no you without the mountains, without sun, without sky. As Dorothy Lee wrote, "When the Wintu goes up the river, the hills are to the west, the river to the east; and a mosquito bites him on the west arm. When he returns, the hills are still to the west, but, when he scratches his mosquito bite, he scratches his east arm." In that language, the self is never lost the way so many contemporary people who get lost in the wild are lost, without knowing the directions, without tracking their relationship not just to the trail but to the horizon and the light and the stars, but such a speaker would be lost without a world to connect to, lost in the modern limbos of subways and department stores. In Wintu, it's the world that's stable, yourself that's contingent, that's nothing apart from its surroundings. (p. 17)

Solnit goes on to muse further about the ways the nearly extinct Wintu language embeds the speaker into her environment and what happens when that environment changes or disappears, or when people are displaced from it. I'm intrigued by the idea that in the Wintu worldview the self is not "the autonomous entity we think we are when we carry our rights and lefts with us" (pp. 17-18). Instead, even to imagine her own body, a Wintu must understand her relationship to where she is. The task of orienting oneself to a new environment becomes a literal process of learning to identify one's east arm.

When I looked up a map of the Wintu tribal territory, I was surprised to realize that it is adjacent to the part of the Trinity Alps where my family spent many summer vacations. It's odd to think that I actually know something about what it might mean to be lost in the Wintu neck of the woods—and how easy it is to get disoriented when you have only your rights and lefts to guide you.

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maggie and milly and molly and may and natalie

I heard an interview with Natalie Merchant (formerly of 10,000 Maniacs) on NPR the other day. She talked about her new album, Leave Your Sleep, whose lyrics are based on rhymes that evoke children and childhood. Her selections were gathered from such famous poets as Christina Rossetti, Robert Graves, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ogden Nash, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Lear, e.e. cummings, and many others who are less well known.

I was so taken with what I heard that I bought the album as soon as it was available (hooray for the instant gratification of iTunes!). And then TED emailed me a link to this video, where Merchant performs several songs from the album. I thought it was worth sharing... enjoy!

The Overbearing Know-it-all explains things

My friend Misha Klein recently sent me Rebecca Solnit's article called "Men Explain Things to Me," which is very much worth a read. Here's a tidbit:

…the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men.

Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence…

One of the delightful things about reading is coming upon (or making) connections between disparate sources. Inspired by Laura Miller's list, I've been reading young adult fiction lately, including a book that everyone but me seems already to have read: Norman Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth. In that book, as heroes Milo, Tock and the Humbug flee the Mountains of Ignorance—with the Princesses Rhyme and Reason in tow—they are pursued by all manner of demons, who are trying to keep them from attaining Wisdom.

One of these demons is someone Rebecca Solnit would recognize all too well:

From off on the right, his heavy bulbous body lurching dangerously on the spindly legs which barely supported him, came the Overbearing Know-it-all, talking continuously. A dismal demon who was mostly mouth, he was ready at a moment's notice to offer misinformation on any subject. And, while he often tumbled heavily, it was never he who was hurt, but, rather, the unfortunate person on whom he fell. (pp. 238-9)

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Au diable les avocats!

Over the past couple of years I've become a great fan of traditional Québecois music. I love the rich and haunting harmonies, the energetic podorythmie (foot percussion), and the Canadian-accented French lyrics—which are sometimes a challenge to decipher. But more than anything else, this is music that makes me dance!

• Le Vent du Nord is my regular companion and inspiration for many energized walks and spontaneous dancing fits. (Listen to some samples.)

• Thanks to my friend Rudy Busto (merci, RuRu!), I've also recently discovered Les Charbonniers de l'Enfer, an a cappella group singing a traditional repertoire. They're marvelous—as you can hear for yourself. (Apologies to my lawyer friends for the lyrics! :)