{"product_id":"the-anthropology-of-turquoise-isbn-9780375708138","title":"The Anthropology of Turquoise","description":"In this invigorating mix of natural history and adventure, artist-naturalist Ellen   Meloy uses turquoise—the color and the gem—to probe deeper into our profound human   attachment to landscape. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan   Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and deep canyons   of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through vistas of both great beauty and great   desecration.  Her keen vision makes us look anew at ancestral mountains, turquoise   seas, and even motel swimming pools.  She introduces us to Navajo “velvet grandmothers”   whose attire and aesthetics absorb the vivid palette of their homeland, as well as   to Persians who consider turquoise the life-saving equivalent of a bullet-proof vest.    Throughout, Meloy invites us to appreciate along with her the endless surprises   in all of life and celebrates the seduction to be found in our visual surroundings.“Exquisitely rendered. . . . Meloy’s gem-studded collection calls us to be mindful of the physical world, to see it—really see it—with fresh eyes.” —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Meloy’s vision of the world through turquoise-colored glasses is a unique, moving, self-effacing delight.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e “By the time you lift your eyes from the last page, you’ll be longing to clasp a piece of stone, to be surrounded by blue water. . . . Powerful and transporting—and funny.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Times-Picayune\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Finely crafted, vigorously descriptive, dazzling in its insights into biology and culture.” —\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“[Meloy] crafts potent meditations on the desert landscape. . . . \u003cb\u003eThe Anthropology of Turquoise\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eexplores Meloy’s beloved Southwest—a region she knows intimately and describes with her trademark sharp wit.” —\u003ci\u003eSalt Lake Tribune\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Amusing and intelligent . . . the talented Meloy is a Southwestern voice to listen to.” —\u003ci\u003eSanta Fe New Mexican\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Smart, evocative, and memorable: Nature-writing done right.\" —Kirkus \u003ci\u003e(starred review)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Combine[s] the best of travel writing with fascinating slices of history in an irresistible invitation to open our eyes and our minds, taking beauty where we find it.” —\u003ci\u003eKingston Springs Advocate\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Diverse, thoughtful, and humorous.” —\u003ci\u003eAlbuquerque Journal\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A book of great beauty under which lies a drumbeat of grief and passion for the desert. Meloy is a perfect, often hilarious guide. Trust her on any river. There are images in this book I will never forget.” —Nora Gallagher, author of \u003cb\u003ePracticing Resurrection\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eELLEN MELOY, a recipient of a Whiting Foundation Award in 1997, was a native of the West and lived in California, Montana, and Utah. Her previous book, The Anthropology of Turquoise, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the Utah Book Award and the Banff Mountain Book Festival Award in the adventure and travel category. She is also the author of Raven’s Exile: A Season on the Green River and The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest. Meloy spent most of her life in wild, remote places; at the time of her sudden death in November 2004 (three months after completing Eating Stone), she and her husband were living in southern Utah.Chapter 1 - The Deeds and Sufferings of Light\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Words begin as description. They are prismatic, vehicles of hidden,  deeper shades of thought. You can hold them up at different angles  until the light bursts through in an unexpected color.\"\u003cbr\u003eSusan Brind Morrow\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Names of Things\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWinter on the Colorado Plateau has not been arduous, only a thin cold  without storms, a lucid map of stillness. Caught in the abrupt  instant of its rising, our faces take the tangerine sun, our backs  dissolve to silhouette in the brilliant dazzle of its incandescent  beam. The nights come less as a smooth pause than as a steep,  enduring purity of eye-blind dark. The mesas creak and strain in the  frigid air, audible only if I lay my ear to them. The colors in their  flanks-terra cotta, blood-red, salmon, vermilion-bear the temperament  of iron.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn these days of winter I climb to the top of a sky-raking spine of  sandstone and sit beside a juniper tree.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe ridge runs from a crumpled mountain range in southern Utah to the  Arizona desert, jumping a river along its way. It is an elongated,  asymmetrical reef of Mesozoic sandstone with a face and a flank, two  sides so different you think that you are somewhere else when you are  in the same place. The face rises brick-red from a broad wash, nearly  vertical but for a skirt of boulders along its talus. The flank is  the crazy side: an abruptly sloped flexure of ancient rock beds  tilted upward into a jagged crest. Most of the massive slab is Navajo  Sandstone, the Colorado Plateau's famously voluptuous field of  windblown sand dunes now consolidated into nearly pure quartz  crystals. Against the steel-blue sky of a summer monsoon, the ridge  bleaches to white. Moonlight blues it, and bright sun turns it pale  cream or, if you are making love atop it, blush pink.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom afar the stone reef appears continuous, exfoliating here and  there into flakes the size of small European countries. Look more  closely and you will see that box canyons cut across its length,  ending in deep alcoves. Smaller fissures run in unexpected  directions, and narrow valleys hang high toward the crest, where  faults have filled with sandy soil held stable by the living organism  of a black cryptobiotic crust. Yucca, single-leaf ash, Mormon tea,  blackbrush, and other shrubs find purchase in pockets and cracks.  However, most of the ridge is bare-boned slickrock. When you hike it  in midsummer, you are lightning bait. I climb it with my paints and  crayons, breath hard, heart pounding, up the slope to the isolated  juniper tree. It is the far edge of winter, no longer bone-cold, not  yet spring's exhalation of green. The surface of the slickrock is  neither icy nor warm, just touchable.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn my first winter days on the ridge, I bring watercolors and the  hope that the hand of my brother, an artist who died outdoors with  his paint box near him, will guide the tip of my brush across the  paper, rendering effortlessly exquisite art on paper and a Zen-like  serenity in my heart. Then I change my expectations and carry a box  of crayons up the ridge to the juniper tree. I blunt their tips with  irresponsible yellow and the demands of green. I rub bold, wild  strokes. I shuck the Zen crap and try to obey Ezra Pound's advice to  artists: \"Make the world strange.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFinger paints will be next in the lineup of media and with their  slurpy nonchalance a release from the weight of a cerebral life-what  remains of it, that is, for in recent years I have suffered what  neurologists call \"a reduction in mental acuity.\" So far, it feels  like a kind of carbonated brain fog, with perforations in memory that  threaten to become air ducts. Because there is the possibility of an  abrupt slide into chronic befuddlement, I thought it might be useful to acquire some basic motor and tactile skills, like pushing around  cool, gooey paint in mindless, repetitive motions, as preparation for  that freshly vacated space, that airy void between the ears.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn watercolor days I carry a field kit that belonged to my brother, a  faded olive-green canvas bag that he slung over his shoulder when he  went out to sketch and paint on the northern California coast where  he lived. Over the years since he died, I have kept its contents  intact: a tin of paints and camel-hair brushes, colored pencils  bunched together like chopsticks and bound with a rubber band. A  prism. A miniature pencil sharpener made to look like a shark's  mouth. A sumi inkstone in a slender box marked by a column of  Japanese characters and a vial once filled with water from a stream  in the Sierra Nevada, where he and I often joined company in the  summers. A Swiss Army knife and three orange juggling balls. From  wherever he is-a ghost in his favorite denim jacket, a vapor hovering  above me cross-legged on a cloud like a cotton puff, a mere slip of  memory and thought-I want him to teach me to juggle, but mostly I  want him to teach me to paint, to inform the movement of my brush  across the rough blank of paper. I end up thinking more about him  than about art, which is, after all, what I am supposed to do.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn crayon days I try to explode my hand, my eye, my past. For a  number of years, in a previous life, I made a living in technical  illustration, churning out laboriously stippled pen-and-ink drawings  of bones, feathers, fish, and wolves; the orchid's calyx and the  ear's canals and vestibules, which are the organs of balance;  profiles of geological strata; maps of rivers and mountains; maps of  islands known and islands imagined; diagrams of subatomic structure;  meticulous renderings of leaves and seedpods, pebbles and aetites,  stones with small clay cores that emerge when you break open their  ironstone shells. By drawing these things I learned that sand dunes  and the bends of rivers migrate and that stones could give birth. For  relief from detail I drew cartoons, but they were not relief enough,  so I painted barns. The idea of paints now, and of barns back then,  is to leave behind those black-on-white, uptight stabs of a pinpoint  pen and open my hand to a looser muscle of expression. I hope to make  pictures like I walk in the desert-under a spell, an instinct of  motion, a kind of knowing that is essentially indirect and sideways.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Orange is like a man, convinced of his own powers,\" wrote Russian  painter Vasily Kandinsky in his 1912 meditation, \u003ci\u003eOn the Spiritual in  Art.\u003c\/i\u003e On crayon days I have trouble with orange for its highway-cone  authority, its Cheez Whiz 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNot far from my post a large pothole cups a catchment of autumn  rains. The pool of water is emerald in the shade, a lapis sky mirror in the sun. In it grow blond spears of dried cattails and,  on its rim, a spiky cluster of prickly pear cactus-odd marsh and  desert bedfellows in a miniature garden. Do not think of a cactus  acting like a cactus, with its apple-green paddles and white spines.  In winter the prickly pear hallucinates. Its spines glow red-gold in  the angled sun, like an electrocuted aura. The paddles are nearly the  color of burgundy wine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou would think that these rich colors reside in the thing itself,  that the cactus, the crayons, the lichen \u003ci\u003ehave\u003c\/i\u003e their colors. But  colors are not possessions; they are the intimate revelations of an  energy field. \"Colours are the deeds and sufferings of light,\" wrote  German poet and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They are light  waves with mathematically precise lengths, and they are deep,  resonant mysteries with boundless subjectivity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eColors challenge language to encompass them. (It cannot; there are  more sensations than words for them. Our eyes are far ahead of our  tongues.) Colors bear the metaphors of entire cultures. They convey  every sensation from lust to distress. They glow fluorescent on the  flanks of a fish out of the water, then flee at its death. They mark  the land of a woman deity who controls the soft desert rain. Flowers  use colors ruthlessly for sex. Moths steal them from their  surroundings and disappear. An octopus communicates by color; an  octopus blush is language. Humans imbibe colors as antidotes to  emotional monotony. Our lives, when we pay attention to light, compel  us to empathy with color.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eImagine that you have no eyes and this is how you must organize your  perceptual life: by physical contact. You sneak or crawl or ooze over  objects in your path, perhaps crash into them or knock them over. You  stick out an advance appendage to fondle your terrain, hoping to come  across something edible or matable or both. You might slip your  appendage up and over the face of a cold, flat, steel plain and only  seconds after severing that limb with a bloody spurt think \"razor  blade.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf you and your kind survive bruised foreheads, amputation, and  impalement, particular cells may grow somewhere on your body surface,  cells that become sensitive to light. Rather than form an image, the  cells merely discern brightness from dimness. If, where these cells  gather, your skin cups slightly, in a sort of lenslike curve, and if  the cells form layers of rudimentary pigments, the cells will capture  some of the light. Your nerves may translate this trapped light into  information, perhaps distinguishing between something bright versus a  shadow, say the shadow of a giant killer hyena, and with your sensory  awareness by remote rather than physical contact, you might have a  few seconds to flee before the hyena eats you. At this point the  pigments, photoreceptive cells, cups, and nerve impulses, already  vastly complex millions of years before they become eyes, are moving  along the dense evolutionary path toward vision-toward color  vision-as we know it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen someone says they \u003ci\u003efeel\u003c\/i\u003e color, the serene caress of jade or the  acidic bite of yellow, do not accuse them of using illegal drugs. In  primitive life forms the eye began as a light-sensitive depression in  the skin; the sense of sight likely evolved from the sense of touch.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe complex human eye harvests light. It perceives seven to ten million colors through a synaptic flash: one-tenth of a second from  retina to brain.\u003ci\u003e Homo sapiens\u003c\/i\u003e gangs up 70 percent of its sense  receptors solely for vision, to anticipate danger and recognize  reward, but also-more so-for beauty. We have eyes refined by the  evolution of predation. We use a predator's eyes to marvel at the  work of Titian or the Grand Canyon bathed in the copper light of a  summer sunset.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe eye spreads light softly in the retina, across blood and  long-stemmed nerves that resemble frilled balloons or leggy trees of  bladder kelp. These nerves, called ganglion and bipolar cells, fled  the cranium; they are actually parts of the brain that now live in  the eyes. Toward the back of the retina, light reaches intricately  sensitive photoreceptors that sort out, for example, a red sensation  from a blue one. One set of receptors, the cones, functions for color  and daylight, or \u003ci\u003ephotopic\u003c\/i\u003e vision. The other set, the rods, operates  in shades of gray for dim light, or \u003ci\u003escotopic\u003c\/i\u003e vision. \u003ci\u003eEye and Brain,\u003c\/i\u003e a classic by neuropsychologist Richard L. Gregory, notes an  accidentally metaphorical middle world. \"Between the brightness of  sunlight and the dim light of the stars is the intermediate light from the moon, giving uneasy \u003ci\u003emesopic\u003c\/i\u003e vision, which should not be trusted.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThroughout time, without words, nature and the artist have best  explained the interactions of light, color, and mind. I can look at a  canyon shadow or a Byzantine mosaic and understand blue better than I  understand a dissertation on the comparatively stubby quantum of  electromagnetic radiation measured as 4 x 10 -7 meters (blue light).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow does vision, this tyrant of the senses, draw someone to a piece  of earth? What do the eyes rest upon-mind disengaged, heart not-that  combines senses and affection into a homeland? Do the eyes conspire  with other senses in a kind of synesthetic faculty, an ability to  respond to the colors of place as if they were taste and scent, sound  and touch? On walks in my desert home a yellow cottonwood leaf stings  my tongue like lemon, the indigo and copper margins of the river in  shadow inflict the bruise of a frail wind on my skin. Somehow in the  day's prismatic clarity, even in the untrustworthy moonlight, these  orbs of blood and nerves understand that light is the language of the  desert.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46305202438373,"sku":"NP9780375708138","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375708138.jpg?v=1767738101","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-anthropology-of-turquoise-isbn-9780375708138","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}