Emotional Typography

by Beth Brandon, '04

I know as soon as we get to the airport that once we are in California I will want to be by myself in the hills. Though I haven't yet seen the yellow hills that roll up around us like huge haystacks, dotted here and there with black cattle. Yellow hills? They burn the hills seasonally, to trigger new growth. Black cattle? Where are the Jerseys, the Holsteins? Those are beef cows, not dairy cows. My family is going to California to celebrate my cousin's Bar Mitzvah, and I am going to California to celebrate land. I haven't yet seen the hills, but I know what I am looking for when we are in the airport and it feels like an infirmary the towering-white-floating ceilings an empty cathedral hall an unfinished apse an artificial environment that belongs to no one, no one - and my father is fighting for our tickets six hours in a middle seat, us scattered around the plane, you don't even know how uncomfortable, for six hours? On the plane they come around offering me peanuts, warm, wet towels, plastic blankets, refreshing drinks-as if I am meant to feel numb. I feel small and slightly blinded swaddled into these tall wheaty structures; it confuses me that they should surround us on all sides as we drive the highways, because I know only the flat, straight, tree-lined roads of the northeast. Once you are in those hills, there is nothing else but yellowness; it blocks your view to the outside. Round shapes molded of it, live oaks soaked with it. California feels like another life. I become my landscape. A photograph my father took of me hiking in the hills: my face is embossed, dripping with the yellow light. This is what is touchable. Life, or where life lives. Life lives in life. (See: Gaia) This is an emotional topography of the American west. A topographical... emotion? This is America. Fabric, skin, the palpability of all landscape, including air as well as water or mountains. Brueghel believed in the fabric of atmosphere. This is what is touchable. Everything else is fabrication. This is what is touchable; therefore, this is what makes us feel. We drive up Twin Peaks. There are a few bold stragglers running toward the top. We drive up Twin Peaks and it is beautiful, you can't see an inch of the city, it is floating in fog. You can see the fog. Dad says we have to come back on a clear day. They built a look-out point up there, but they also stuck a post in the ground on a mound that offered topographical information. I run up the mound, then down, then read. The petal face of a bush monkey flower, of the snapdragon family, "grins." It is a yellow-orange tubular flower, with sticky glands on its leaves and stems, which render it useful as a bandage. Yarrow was named by the Greek warrior Achilles who used it to heal soldiers' wounds. I see a cloud in California: bird-mouth, eye-dive, I write. A complete feather. Life lives in life. All I do in California is record life forms: in painstakingly literal terms; in blatheringly romantic terms. Why do I write? Because I am afraid of losing things. Because metaphors are waiting to be picked like bush monkey flowers and we are dying for their bandages. The world is a big open wound we keep working at. I like to see how people work at it. At the land. For miles, all they do is make wine. The land becomes undeniably sensuous; a body rounded and curved. Skin rumpled and freckled. Shadows run through flaps of flesh. Grapes drop in full blue bundles. At sunset, a vineyard in the Alexander Valley: rusted tractors the skeletons of modern machines burnished in the yellow light; yellow motorcycle; twin bloodhounds; a tremendous pipe organ. And grapes in the backyard. Land is either life or where life lives. I took some red sand from a cliff side in California, where I was dangling my legs and watching the ocean. It sloughed off the rock so easily, could I just dust off these rocks and before I knew it they'd be gone? I rubbed the rock, sand slid off, I pinched it up and pocketed some but it just stained my pants rusty and it wasn't anything later when I scraped it up from my pocket and it was just a pinch of fuzz-filled dirt, barely red, and no longer slid off a cliff. It wasn't really anything after my brother told me it was just iron. I had planned to pack it in with my letters, as if to explain myself, but I sent bay leaves instead, although they were already losing scent when I licked the envelopes. The Ansel Adams exhibit (a moment of silent film in the middle of San Francisco): he found light in California; that was that. He found light on shapes. Shapes gone from knowledge, gone... land knows nothing. To look at land and know nothing is so true, so true... I look at Ansel's pictures and see faces, bodies, snakes, and then I look at land and see the same. Knowing nothing is essential in this, essential to just seeing things and not expecting them. Metaphor is imminent. What I saw in San Francisco: stucco boxes. Boxes stuck to the hillside, firm, holding, trying to institute right angles. In San Francisco I see the side of a building. "Monsters love art - speak monsters - la basta!" And a drawing of a moose. Speak, monsters! Speakmonsters. Speak monsters. I don't want to go in airplanes anymore. The planes have gone down. The buildings have gone down. I want to run away to this country- to Nevada or Wyoming or Oregon. I try speaking to my parents but I am speaking monsters. I want to find the real, the raw, the actual, the natural- the right? Is that, as they all seem to say, ideal? Cave paintings warning men of encounters with wild boars... pottery... river gods, sun gods... seemingly aimless designs: topographical descriptions, maps so men don't get lost. Religion responds to the need for resource management and land understanding. Native American chiefs sitting on mounds for days while other men ritually place praised sticks in the river, speak to trees and pray to salmon... eventually build a dam to trap the precise number of fish for the season. Fables and hymns arise, seen as separate from practical regular real - life - Festivals of harvest. Calendars on the sun and moon. Boats, airplanes, submarines... culture from nature. Why do I write? For survival. a) sanity b) record-keeping, which we do, why? For reference ... so we'll do it all better later, and our species will survive. Maybe. If nothing else, to be (unavoidably) influential. Therefore, c) evolution. Spilling my seeds. All that changes in art is the current view of man. Necessity stays the same. We haven't come so far from cave paintings. I learn what this country is through landscape alone. Watching how a belt of mountains slides down into a sheet of desert; how other mountains erupt suddenly like huge foreheads and shoulders. I learn that everything feels softer from far away - the smooth bodies of distant hills and the splinters they leave on my feet. I remember Oberlin cornfields: graygreen fizzle. I remember Arizona desert: the same thing over and over and over again, interrupted only by the ash of a retired volcano. Here in California, Big Sur: mouths of space, low coves, water barking, babbling, drooling, savagery. I feel what this country is through landscape alone. We started at the east edge and spread westward to extended freedom. There's still a wingspan in the middle. Why does America hold this spirit of liberty? Because it is intoxicated with landscape emotion. We landed - a blank chunk of continent, sea on each side. The westward thrust, the need for personal space in order to live, has driven so many to the west-most point: California is squirming with over-population . Most of Nevada seems to have been left in the dust. The middle is too plain? I want that plainness, I want those plains. America does not seem to know that it is land. If I am an American, I need to see the land, I need to see where there is nothing but what was always there, or else I will never know myself. I need to see without interruption; cities interrupt me constantly, they have no decency, no privacy, no respect for what is personal, no silence, no gaps, no truth, only things built out of or on top of truth, I try to find landscape here and- I find no purity in the city, no purity because, no truth. It is impossible to find yourself in a city. All you find is what you are supposed to think you are. I find myself asking who glued San Francisco to the sides of the mountains. Who could have seen treacherous steep brown dives land tipped up driving down diagonal like that and seen a city pasted onto its face, who would want it? Why not raw hills? What are we looking for? We have all our ointments, we have all our bandages; all is provided. Legend eucalytpus We drove to muir beach with the windows down, sucking deeply through our nostrils because we were smelling the eucalyptus that loomed all over the noodley road and they were so balmy-green and drippy they had to be eucalyptus and for the same reasons I had to write about them. They did look like water, those trees, and they did smell so good that we had to drive to muir beach with the windows down, sucking deeply through our nostrils, and everything we did and felt for those trees was true. But then my father got back from the golf course a couple days later and the same trees were not eucalyptus anymore, and I should believe some guy I don't know that my dad talked to on the golf course that their leaves aren't shaped right. [I can't even remember if it was someone he talked to on the golf course or someone he had talked to at home or what so what can I say?] So they aren't eucalyptus anymore, but I had already seen and smelled and written them, so they had to stay eucalyptus trees, eucalyptus leaves, especially because it doesn't matter. We drove to muir beach with the windows down, sucking deeply through our nostrils because we were smelling. They still might have been eucalyptus. bush-monkey flowers and yarrow Along the same lines I did not actually see these plants or I if I did, I didn't know what I was seeing. Along the same lines, it doesn't matter1. I read about plants on a wooden-plastic signpost board and happily hopped among the rocks stopping to examine plants this might be yarrow, too bad it's all dried up and everything is the color of the ground. The sign also wrote about wild strawberries but having seen strawberries before I was certain I hadn't seen any and for that reason didn't write about them. (But I wished I could have.) I did not see them but I knew about them. So I wrote based on what I knew. Though that may not be true. I wrote because the words were too delectable. Bush-monkey. Snapdragon. Stickyglands. Yarrow. I didn't know what I was seeing, therefore, I am unaccountable for falsehoods. 1It doesn't matter for these purposes, but it would matter if I wanted to use any of the plants, for medicinal purposes, and this fact plagues me.