Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild [Hardcover]

Many write gorgeously about deserts and mountains, but few inject self-conscious weirdness, of the absurdist variety, into their lyricism. Ellen Meloy does. In Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild, she describes her obsession with a band of desert bighorn sheep near her home in a small town on the Colorado Plateau and her wider explorations of the species in Baja California, on Navy bombing ranges, and around uranium-mining ghost towns. Readers can loll about in rhythmic, biblical prose, in sentences like, "The late afternoon light comes from the bedrock, from within the mountains themselves, pouring amber from granite and dust, wicking up through the trunks and out the branches of the foxtail pines." Then Meloy exclaims, "The next time you buff up the Hummer with an auto-detailing cloth that came from the skin of a petite rupicaprid, bond with the ungulates that share with us a molecular past."

Meloy welcomes the reader without pretension, so her bizarro sallies seem flirtatious. They tease, tantalize, and keep us alert even as they run the risk of annoying us. For my part, I enjoyed the jarring mysteries. It was like finding Dali touches in the corners of a grand Bierstadt landscape. For Meloy, the road along the Hoover dam becomes the "hair-thin rim of a giant potato chip." A diorama of bighorns in a museum "sounds as if its grinding up fresh loads of zirconium monkeys." She casts "a Giacometti shadow," invoking the uncanny yet familiar weirdness of those elongated statues. Like other nature writers, she exhorts us to wake up and pay attention, but she does so with these curious injunctions: "Admire the male midwife toad," "Master a hyena's laugh and use it when in the presence of politicians" and "Quit badgering your tax attorney." She observes a poodle's entrance into a small church in Baja California and then declares, "I am too snobby to share a church with a poodle."

Meloy seeks to mirror the strangeness of the world and of the mind. The very randomness and uncertainty are the point. As she finds herself in intimate contact with the desert and the sheep, her response is flailing, voracious, bewildered. She wants "to rise up and bite the desert to bits." Like Virginia Woolf, Meloy finds meaning in "moments of being." She seeks "the occasions when jolts from the universe fly open. This jolt, in this desert with these animals, is a belonging so overwhelming, it can put deep cracks in your heart." At the moment when she finally belongs, when she comes home, the experience breaks her. The wilderness makes her whole as it accepts her discontinuities. Perhaps this is the meaning of the subtitle, "Imagination and the loss of the wild." Wilderness embodies and welcomes chaos, the chaos that gives rise to imagination and spirit. In the wild, Meloy feels at home in the wildness of her mind.

Ellen Meloy was a patient woman, judging from this book. How many of us could spend a whole year tromping around desert slickrock in not-too-close pursuit of an illusive animal? Until the 1990s, she tells us, no one knew that ancient long-horned desert sheep near her home had survived modernity. But they had, and Meloy hung out for a year, tracking them.

The book begins with wild sex--a rut which will produce the next year's crop of ewes and rams. Then it follows what she calls the Blue Door Band as it disperses across the rocky landscape and fills us in on all kinds of sheep facts.

Like the best nature writers, Meloy has an almost unending store of fresh metaphors that help us see through her trained eyes what we otherwise might overlook. And we learn enough about her to understand her thirst for this quest--a childhood spent partly in England, where a big game-hunting relative's trophy of a tiger skin fired her imagination and an ancestral background of California ranching, among other things.

It's not until she has enticed us to see the profound meaning of these magnificent animals' survival that we get to the nitty-gritty facts of all the work required to preserve them. Her argument for its continuation is highly convincing.

Ellen Meloy's Eating Stone -- Imagination and the Loss of Wild

I have been absorbing this book over some time. Each time I found it to be compelling as subject , vibrant and masterful as literature, an eye-opener to the state of human psyche and a textbook offering information about one of the most reclusive species that still live in the wilderness of my state and the neighboring four corners - Arizona,Colorado, Utah and Nevada. The subject is both the bighorn and the human being. Through rich information about this four legged mountain dweller, we learn of its physical beauty, its temperament, its life cycles, its passion for ane another, for life and continuation of the species in spite of forbidding environment. We learn of their unique intelligence that "maps" each stone, each fissure in the stone wall, each hidden pool of water for themselves and for future generations. Folloing this mindset it is not difficult to follow the author's musings taking us into the past, when thousand or so years ago, the bighorn and the natives were sojourners in this area, and when the same unique qualities of the animals inspired the native artists' imagination to leave indelible records of their close ties in form of petroglyphs still admired by modern travelers. The author speculates further and concludes that the beautiful horned animal was not just a subject of art but an expression of the ancient artist's deep-seated need to fill his wall messages with what made his life tick and the environment around him alive. In tandem or in partnership man and animal became joint dwellers in a gorgeous, albeit, harsh and difficult to conquer milieu of the native earth.

At this point the reader is ready for the dialectical jump (new quality arising from quantitative accumulation) from the animal's mindset to the mindset of modern man, who is exemplified and represented by the author primarily but also by Mark "the love of her life" and by a number of others: anthropologists, zoologists, Navaho wildlife handlers, hunters and other enthusiasts she cooperates and exchanges experiences with. All of them are zealous, given to a single cause, as if their whole life depended on their mission to preserve this species, to save it from extinction, to keep it alive in this unique environment, and to keep it apart from civilization, which spells death to them. Like the author these people are fulfilled, vibrant and alive. Time and again under the white hot sun in the sizzling heat with only a bottle of water to keep her going, the author feels to be one with energy that surrounds her. She feels alive and credits the quaint animals, which she has followed for months and year around, for this feeling of happiness. She feels being part of living nature.. Without them the mountains would be unconquerable by life, and therefore, they would stop being a source of life. In moments of such realization, she understans why modern man is insulated, for there are mainly mechanical things that fill his consciousness, and no mechanical thing gives rise to imagination. What it gives rise to is fear, isolation and depression.

Like in subject, like in philosophy, the literary style of Ellen Meloy is unique. Almost like a stream of consciousness, her narration takes us directly into her mind. There we learn exactly what it feels like to be happy, dedicated, adore life, not just one's own but life in all its forms. Whether human or bighorn's all life is a part of the same energy. With one dying off, the other is doomed, too. She does not say it in that many words, but by the power of her narration and imagination she allows the reader to recognize the meaning. She is masterful in the use of her language, which bursts with energy and richnes. Her figurative language makes you often wonder where you will land with the next statement. There are theses, antitheses, paradoxes all creating powerful images. The whole book, all its 328 pages read like poetry, which is another proof of the strength of her imagination.

Written by
Ksenija Djordjevic

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