Free The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness by Rebecca Solnit Page A

way,” sang L.A.-based British émigré band Fleetwood Mac in 1977, the year that the Avengers sang an ironic “We Are the One.” Music was unraveling into several strands that year when hip-hop was being born in the Bronx. In his 1977 hit “Disco Heat,” San Francisco queer black disco king Sylvester sang, “Dancing’s total freedom / Be yourself and choose your feeling.” The 1970s were as generative as they were terrible.
    2010

CONCRETE IN PARADISE
    Some Pictures of Coastal California
    Et in Arcadia Ego , says the famous inscription on the tomb in Nicolas Poussin’s paintings of that title. Even in Paradise there am I. He twice painted a group of shepherds and a woman who looks like a goddess standing around a tomb in a pastoral setting, as though he were wrestling with the meanings himself. The phrase was sometimes thought to be spoken by death itself: even in Arcadia death is present. Other interpretations suggest that it is instead spoken by the dead shepherd whose tomb is being inspected. Whether the text refers to death itself or to one dead friend, the tomb is two kinds of intrusion into the landscape.
    One, often remarked on, is mortality in a beautiful landscape. But growing is always also dying, even in Arcadia, even in springtime, where the new grass pushes through the old, where the trees and flowers feed on the soil made out of life and digested deaths, where mortality itself, of lambs and shepherds alike, gives it the poignancy that heaven lacks. And Poussin’s Arcadia is a little rough and rustic, not tender shoots, but lean trees and, in the distance, sharp crags. What isn’t remarked on often is the architectural intrusion of the big, heavy, rectilinear stone monument in the landscape, a trace of industry, of a labor far harder than herding, of altering the material world, of making stone itself work for men and their intentions, and of making something permanent in a landscape of change.
    We have our own tombs throughout the coastal San Francisco Bay Area, each of which could readily be inscribed et in Arcadia ego . Even in the paradises I have hiked so often, there is, along with the smell of coastal sage and the sea shining silver or green or gray to the horizon or not shining at all on foggy days, death, in the form of deer carcasses, the pellets of coyote, and fox spoor in which the fur of mice and rabbits is compressed,squashed salamanders, and countless vultures soaring and swinging around the hills on the lookout for carrion. And every spring’s green grass turns gold and then gray. The ordinary realm of natural death is present one way or another in every landscape. But there is also the violent death of war, in thought if not in deed, commemorated in the seventy or so bunker complexes whose blunt concrete forms are an apt modern echo of that shepherd’s tomb.
    There they are, along the beaches, roads, and the trails of this superlatively beautiful landscape, to be stumbled upon by hikers and day-trippers, who will stop for a moment like Poussin’s shepherds to contemplate monuments and death. The bunkers were becoming outdated as they were being built, and so they were becoming monuments to a particular imagination of danger and fear even as they were erected. And in a way, they are honorable monuments to the idea that wars would involve direct confrontation and that the United States would face the dangers it imposed on other nations. Soldiers sat in them waiting for ships to appear on the horizon and waiting to receive orders to fire on those ships and to be fired upon. It has not turned out that way, however.
    “We are here because wars are now fought in outer space,” said Headlands Center for the Arts director Jennifer Dowley in the 1980s, when the center was still a fresh arrival in what was a fairly new national park, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA), and the Star Wars missile defense system was being actively pursued not far away, at Lawrence Livermore