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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
It's interesting that many of your subjects tend to be solitary types as well.
Yeah, although I also write about marchers and revolutions and uprisings. I'm fond of those moments when you feel like a member of the public. That's very much what "Hope in the Dark" is about, the sense of power and belonging that comes from feeling connected to something larger. But that came to me later in life, partly because I didn't feel empowered personally and partly because it's not how Americans are educated to experience themselves. We're trained to be consumers, which is a solitary pursuit in a much more dismal way, rather than to be citizens, which is about how we're connected. I'm very interested in the social, but I also think solitude is important. I feel like we're in a world that values solitude less and less and makes less and less room for it. I've just come back from my annual circuit around the West, visiting friends. You see these huge tracts of land that are not social spaces, places in which your primary experience might be physical and spiritual, and where all this information that has to do with navigating your way through a social world is totally irrelevant.
Talking about social worlds, I'd like to get your opinion about your emergence as a public intellectual. Do you identify primarily as an activist, a historian, a writer? What do you think people expect from you?
I probably know less than anybody who reads my books what my role is because I'm just someone who put the message in a bottle -- although one of the nice things about becoming better known is that you get to see that the bottle actually lands on beaches and people actually pick it up. Because I do have my very strong, very left (or left of the left) politics, people might expect me to advocate for work that has calculable utility. But I think all this activism is about making the world safe for aimless meandering, for watching cloud formations and those sorts of things. I also think that in an accelerated age, just thinking and reading are already radical acts, acts of resistance to that "Go, go, go; earn, earn, earn; spend, spend, spend" kind of pressure people find themselves under.
"Field Guide" is not a rallying cry in the way that "Hope in the Dark" is, but it can be read in a political context. President Bush presents himself as absolutely certain of his convictions and policies, often in defiance of scientific fact or expert opinion or reports from the field. I found myself thinking that this administration has no capacity for being lost, in your sense of the word, and how dangerous that can be.
They're certainly whacked-out. It's funny, because they have every reason to doubt themselves, given the way their war is going and how their economy is running and their Social Security reform is being received, but they don't. Bush is this kind of medieval fanatic with beliefs in revealed truths that must never be questioned, especially the truths that he reveals himself. It's really frightening that way.
But unless we indulge in conspiracy theories, we have to accept that America reelected this guy -- in which case, do you think America has lost its way, so to speak?
There are a lot of ways to talk about the election. One is that the difference between the number of votes John Kerry and Bush got isn't meaningful in any profound sense. So, you know, fuck that mandate. That's not a mandate. That's a dubious, tiny majority in an extremely dubious process that many people chose not to participate in. But I've never been one of those people who have been, like, "Oh, I've got to move to Canada." There's so much I love about this country, starting with the actual countryside. And it's such a dialectical country: It's a place where slavery was legal, but the rebel slaves and abolitionists weren't any less American than the slave owners. Unfortunately, Bush is not a huge divergence from what came before. We've been dumb and belligerent and imperialistic and wrong a lot in the last 200 and whatever years. But that's a big "we": We've also been anti-imperialistic and revolutionary and imaginative and compassionate.
Generally speaking, is your approach to the past sentimental, elegiac, analytical?
Can I just say yes?
Sure, but then I'd have to rephrase the question.
I always think historically. The way to understand something is by knowing where it came from, what it was before, how it got there, this kind of time-based analysis. And that same historical impulse can apply to your own sense of self. I think everybody's personal past is important to them, although when I was in my 20s, my childhood was much more vivid and emotionally compelling than it is now. I'm in my early 40s, and it's much further away. You know, you lose your childhood in order to grow up, and this constant arrival is the present. The book is about being "lost" in both senses: "lost" as in no longer there and "lost" as in not knowing where you are. It's about finding in some way the beauty and melancholy in living with those losses, in coming to terms with uncertainty. You have to let go of a lot of stuff, including versions of yourself and beliefs and delusions that you were right, or you get stuck.
