Take Back Your Life!

I’m in essay writing mode, which means I’m reading a lot of essay/memoirish type books these days.

One with spectacular writing is The Anthropology of Turquoise by Ellen Meloy (2002, Pulitzer Prize Finalist). I majored in Anthropology and love the word. The clothing store chain spells it Anthropologie, which I like too. Funny how words become in vogue after sitting in obscurity for years. I’ve heard that anthropology is one of the most popular majors at my alma mater. I must be a trendsetter of sorts. When I attended the program had about 40 students majoring in it — if that.

I loved the classes and teachers and subject. We went to Safari type places, studied the Yanomamo on the Orinoco River, genetic drift, vervets, cultures and people. Offbeat, fascinating stuff that I’ve come to appreciate the last 10 years or so. I’m so tired of everyone saying all the jobs will be in math and engineering. How can that even be true? Imagine if everyone majored in one of them, nothing else. Would that create more jobs? I don’t think so.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the book. She traverses the desert landscape celebrating the surprise and seduction of nature. Dreamy.

Here are some lines I drooled over …

Californians, of course, are born with swimming pools. When you are born, if your family does not already have a pool, one shalt be dug while the obstetrician snips thy umblicius.

The mall’s underground parking lot burrowed five levels into purgatory and I lost my truck in one of them. I roamed the cement catacombs for more than an hour trying to find it , convinced I would never again see the light of day. People who lose their cars here simply buy new ones I thought.

For modern, often sleep-deprived humans there is less communication between dreams and waking life. We have lost the ancestral enchantment with mystery. We have severed ourselves from what were once the wellsprings of myth. When we do dream, we dismiss it as static, conjure up some Freudian dreck or bore others to death with the telling.

The speed of delivery  — all of us — to this distant place gives me a kind of geographical vertigo. The only  way to recuperate is to swim, walk, and visit Mayan ruins in jungles filled with luminous butterflies.

The canyon blazed with heat. Sleeping bag and clothing felt like tools of the Inquisition.

The stripped down desert, the desolate, hostile, “empty” terrain, brings a person closer to dust and mystery, to something buried deep in the blood an nerves.

And so on.

I love her metaphors, how she weaves anthropology and turquoise throughout, how she integrates quotes and other snippets of wisdom. The writing also has a wit to it. Not slapstick rip-roaring funny, but really dry, dry as the desert she dances us through.

We don’t always think of writing as a work of art, but it is. A sculpture of words. I do not understand why math equations bring in more income than word sculptures. Or why we only financially reward some things but not others. Often the most beautiful, least earth-hurting endeavors offer little monetary reward, while the ones that make us less human bring in the big bucks.

Why don’t we reverse it? We can if we want to … Toss out some ideas below.

Thanks G.

p.s. Naked Writing: Strip Off Your Fears … live in Ashland this month. On-line group is forming. Click here.