The word ‘essay’ stems from the French verb ‘essayer’ – to try, to attempt. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as a short piece of writing on a given subject. Renaissance author Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) is regarded as the originator of the modern essay and in three books of essays he covers a variety of topics, some including friendship, fear, vanity, solitariness, even drunkenness. Of solitariness Montaigne writes, ‘The greatest thing of the world is for a man to know how to be his owne.’ And of drunkenness: ‘I finde it to be a fond, a stupid, and a base kinde of vice, but lesse malicious and hurtfull than others.’ Reading Montaigne essays, more than 400 years later, we see how times have changed yet we also get insight into the consistencies of humanity, nature, and culture.
The enticing quality of the essay is that it’s short, some written in a mere few pages while others may extend much longer. Between reading lengthy, time-consuming books, a person can pick up an essay and relatively quickly be exposed to a new idea or be reminded of an important one. Eloquent succinct language that spills off the page and into the heart is what makes an essay, that brief piece of writing, so timeless and memorable. In general, essays expose fragments of the human condition. In essence, they reveal meanderings of the mind, profound wisps of thoughts.
A relatively new book of essays and Pulitzer Prize Finalist, ‘The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky,’ by Ellen Meloy (2002) brilliantly captures the essence of this art. Praised by the media, The Los Angeles Times writes ‘[the book] calls us to be mindful of the physical world, to see it – really see it – with fresh eyes,’ while The Washington Post judges it a ‘unique, moving, self-effacing delight.’
Meloy’s prized collection of essays may be categorized as nature writing, but she reaches beyond pedestrian concepts of nature and culture and toward less obvious connections and paradoxes. Inevitably, she wakes us up to the beauty of nature, in its simple finery, but also our degradation of it: ‘I have learned that when we dammed Glen Canyon we traded stunning redrock wilderness for better hospitals, security lighting in Kmart parking lots, lettuce in January, and block ice in my boat cooler.’ As an avid and skilled river rafter and confirmed desert rat, Meloy writes from nature about nature, bringing to light man’s innate connection yet often harmful relation. We are reminded of a Las Vegas before a Hollywood-type Vegas, of the excavation of stones before their transformation to jewelry, and of histories of people deplete of histories of land.
Crossing landscapes, Meloy confronts the Sierra, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, the Bahamas and the Southwest, all the while connecting the theme of turquoise. Turquoise becomes the center, a sort of middle ground. A place between yellow and blue, turquoise holds a tension for Meloy, which she claims she’s ‘stuck in.’ In the Bahamas, in swimming pools, and in stones, Meloy revels in the color and its association with certain settings.
Part biography, part natural history, and mostly profound reflection, Meloy writes with passion, compassion, and bedrock bottom honesty. It’s the truth in her soul she shares with the reader and an acute awareness of our brethren tie to nature. Ultimately, Meloy’s descriptions and conclusions are what take our breath away. In the essay, ‘The Silk That Hurls Us Down Its Spine,’ the Colorado River Basin becomes a metaphor of a grand banquet: mesa tops of pinyon-juniper broccoli, banks of cottonwood celery, and slickrock pools of quivering green Jell-O. In another essay, she explains her attraction to and revulsion of swimming pools and recounts, with humor, her swim at the Bellagio in Las Vegas: ‘Now this is a Motel with a Pool.’
‘Waiting Its Occasions’ brings the reader to the southern Sierra and of a basket made by a Yokut: ‘When I look at the basket, I do not know how it was made, but I know the soul of the Sierra Nevada went into the weave.’ Farther from home, Meloy traces the stone of turquoise to its origin in the Middle East and its history in the Southwest.
Certainly, as with all essay writing, there’s a point, a theme, and certainly Meloy’s addresses one: loss of landscape, thus loss of spirit. This is her brilliance. As readers envision her vivid descriptions of places as they once were, they know she’s trying to tell them something. She wants them to think, to wonder.
Unexpectedly, Meloy died in 2004 at the age of 58 at her home in Utah. Her death shocked the literary world and at the time prompted her peers and publishers to write tributes, many which are published on her website. The Boston Globe described Meloy’s work as ‘spirited and intelligent, as vivid and vibrant as the land itself is dry and spare.’ And fellow nature writer Terry Tempest Williams wrote in a poem:
Your voice is eternal –
You leave us with Bighorn tracks to follow
on the page – in the world
shaped like love – always with love.
Reading an essay by Ellen Meloy is traveling on a new journey, even just one can capture life in all its breadth. Book this one. Book it!
~ Other award winning books by Ellen Meloy: ‘Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild’ (2005), ‘Raven’s Exile: A Season on the Green River’ (2003), ‘The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest’ (1999), and excerpts from her writings in ‘Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape’ (2006).
~ Suggest a book for review, bookit@moonshineink.com
