Art & Life

Rebecca Solnit is an excellent thinker. Orwell's Roses is an exceptional book. We all know about the Orwellian “doublespeak” of Trump’s administration but here Solnit looks at Orwell’s passion for his rose garden and life’s pleasures even as he traced the lies of totalitarianism. This is a vision that could be described as polyphony. There is some biography (although that is not her intention to become his biographer) and the history of roses and the rose industry. All this created in an associative way that also highlights the landscapes and artistic landscape of his time. This is a poetic, incisive, and fascinating angle.

In her book, Recollections of My Nonexistence, Solnit's writes about gender and becoming a writer. She quotes Diane di Prima's line "You cannot write a single line w/out a cosmology."

Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind, and so underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to make.

A writer's voice, therefore, traces this self-making. The Swedish-Finnish poet Edith Södergran (1892-1923) wrote in a notebook: "I do not write poems, I create myself; my poems are the way to my self." Each book of poems that I have made had a select group of influences, and I called it the 'constellation' from which the book emerged. This I might consider as part of the cosmology. For Solnit, it's clear that her work for the Sierra Club and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art have been significant.  

My favorite writing of George Orwell are two essays, "Why I Write," and "Politics of the English Language."  His work endures. His themes are necessary ones which speak of politics and language. The two are inseparable and can cause an irreality that harms people. Solnit considers writing by Orwell that gives readers a broad view of the era that he lived and his philosophy and his whole writing practice. The book celebrates Orwell, and it celebrates a life that combines clear-eyed vision of art and life.