The Anthropology of Turquoise

Funny thing that the other day; in class I argued exceptions to the proper placement of a comma following the word “and”. That was before the Grad Student episode but I felt it a nice way to open up this subject.

“On crayon days I remember that burnt sienna and magenta pleased my mother because she loved Italy. Reluctantly, she bought us coloring books to go with our crayons. She was convinced that staying between the lines of factory-issue images only went so far before her children should think up lines of their own, on the blank white tablets she provided, and draw what stormed out of our little heads with the innocence of trickster stories. Crayon days on the ridge bring back the waxy taste of these bright sticks of paraffin and pigment. My brothers and I ate them, even when we were old enough to know better-bit off a chunk of carmine or blue-violet or cadmium yellow, choosing gem colors over pastels.”

”’Orange is like a man, convinced of his own powers,’ wrote Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky in his 1912 meditation, On the Spiritual in Art. On crayon days I have trouble with orange for its highway-cone authority, its Cheez Whiz (sic) intrusion. I am nervous about yellow, the preferred color of mental patients who regress to infantile levels. Raw umber seems overly shadowy, dutiful verging on paranoia. As a child I never liked raw umber. One of my brothers said it was poop, but we needed it to color the underside of Daffy Duck's feet. In today's box there are still those vain pinks, hungry greens, and crayons as blue as devotion. The power of profound meaning is blue, said Kandinsky, blue is concentric motion. Of red he wrote, "Red rings inwardly with a determined and powerful intensity. It glows in itself, maturely, and does not distribute its vigor aimlessly." The red I choose is the closest in color to the eyes of a goshawk.”

”The slender crayons and the round pans of paint in the watercolor tin scatter unlikely chips of pigment on the cream-colored sandstone. The ridge bears the palette of a numb moon. The winter sun's low arc casts ebony shadows of me and the juniper tree, whose shaggy silver bark holds up a rough-needled canopy of brassy green. I place a scarlet crayon on a patch of aquamarine lichen on the slickrock” (5).

Meloy, Ellen. The Anthropology of Turquoise. New York: Vintage, 2002.

I’ve had this damned passage stuck in my head for too long now. The above quote is one of the few portions of the aforementioned book I enjoyed. In the first chapter Meloy captures well the exquisite beauty of the desert. I was curious about the specifics so today I opened the critical essay I wrote.

“As it starts out discussing the therapeutic effects of painting for her own terminal illness I found it interesting in subtle analogy. As she traverses the landscape time is frozen and she retreats into the solace of her own mind like the wandering thoughts of a wondering soul. While she appreciates the rich textures of the land it leads her thoughts to that of not only what she is looking at, but how she is looking at it. “We have the eyes refined by evolution of predation. We use a predator’s eyes to marvel at the work of Titan or the Grand Canyon bathed in the copper light of a summer sunset” (9).

“Removed from herself she relies on the memory of her dead brother and uses him as a guide. She idolizes her two living brothers as artists she aspires to be but I can’t help but wonder if the two toads frozen in time aren’t really a representation of them? They will die knowing or they will resume their journey when the thaw comes” (para. 2, 3; Snoke. April 15.). I think the frozen toads were her analogy on grief. It’s at the end of Chapter 1 as she leaves the desert.

The book starts out well enough, but crashes around Chapter 3 when she gets bitchy, “[. . . ] and we said the mountains were getting crowded” (68). She complains incessantly, though indirectly about everywhere she goes she finds recreational tourist, and yet she is a self described “seasonal gypsy”? Early on when visiting the home of her Aunt she speaks critically of the people of California saying they would be unable to survive without the comfort of their air-conditioned SUV’s yet no less than three times in the same book she writes of taking refuge in the air conditioned cab of her truck? Later she discusses the European exploitation of the Americas; something she reflects upon while vacationing in the Bahamas.

I remember sitting in class watching each take turns figuratively sucking the professor’s dick as this is his favorite book. It seemed they all pulled this translation that the world is a picture of beauty to be preserved (which so happens to be very similar to what is written on the back cover). I got from it, “no matter where she goes, she has her self proclaimed right to be there and those she encounters are little more than carpetbaggers.” (para. 2; Snoke. April 22.). I hated it and of course and rather candidly explained why it was that I felt Meloy is either a hypocrite or her editor should have been fired for not realizing her contradictions. The professor’s response of course was that this book was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist. My translation: not a winner, a finalist.

Meloy was indeed a pioneer for her efforts on creative non-fiction; she died at 58 years of age on November 4, 2004 in Bluff, Utah. She was from Utah and taught at several of the western universities. On discussing her with another professor I was told, “Creative non-fiction is for journalist and people without talent. You shouldn’t be made to waste your time.” A point on which I do not exactly agree.

So I invite you to read or at least for one particular individual to re-read this book so the next time you ask what wasn’t to like about it, you know.

Maybe I need a Crayon Day?

P.S. Examples of the exception to comma placement can be found in paragraph’s two, three and eight.