The Land's Wild Music: Encounters with Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest William, and James Galvin
Mark Tredinnick
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 1595340181
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
stunning immediacy, he places some equally delicate abstractions. The sounds these abstractions make are angular, sharp, stark, and stern like trees or dark leads of water: memories holding like an aura, “a continuous perplexity pierced here and there by sharp rays of light”; “no deliberating legislature or parliament, no religion, no competing theories of economics, an expression of allegiance with the mysteries of life.” These consonant-rich words and the thoughts they express may be the floor
the geography of the Southwest, to the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau in particular. I have come to spend some time with her in the country of her belonging, to see what it’s like, how the place might explain, how it is carried on in, her work. “The landscape came before the words,” she told Finch and the audience who’d gathered to hear their conversation in 1989, and the Great Basin, she said, is a landscape “perfect for draping ideas over” (ibid., 41). I wonder if she has done all the
her oracle only; how can it speak her heart’s truths alone? Does it not speak its own truths, and those of the Anasazi women (almost certainly they were women) who found the rock, felt its holiness, and painted legends upon it? This “my” is not a pronoun of possession, though. This “my,” and the “my” at the beginning of Pieces of White Shell where she writes, “I can look for my own stories embedded in the landscapes I travel through” (1984b, 3), and others—these sound like words of intimacy and
draws a credo from a stone. And her intimacy with the canyon puts us in her boots. We hear the stones saying what they say to her. Turbid with celebration and protest, lively with the feeling of bodies in motion and thoughts in freeflow, this is a lyric essay in place-based democracy and in ecological imagination. It speaks at once for these rocks, for the whole earth, for one woman, and, if we let it, for us. This is artful writing. I feel Terry’s hand in every phrase, wild though the writing
little interest to science and are surely far beyond its reach. In the prologue to Pieces of White Shell, Terry Tempest Williams tells the story of a weaver finch that came down the chimney of her family’s home on the weekend after Thanksgiving, flew through the fire and alit on the Christmas tree just as her grandmother was telling the season’s story of new life. She had begun this story, as usual, with the words, “You see, this tree is alive.” This is a tree so crowded with ornamental birds