Granite and Grace: Seeking the Heart of Yosemite
Autor Michael P. Cohenen Limba Engleză Paperback – 7 mai 2019 – vârsta ani
In Granite and Grace Michael Cohen reflects on a lifetime of climbing, walking, and pondering the granite in Yosemite National Park at Tuolumne Meadows. This high-country region of Yosemite is dominated by a young, beautifully glaciated geological formation known as the Tuolumne Intrusive Suite. It does not include familiar Yosemite icons like Half Dome, yet geologists describe this granitic realm at over 8,000 feet as “an iconic American landscape.”
Drawing together the humanistic and scientific significance of the wild landscapes he traverses, Michael uncovers relationships between people and places and meaning and substance, rendering this text part memoir—but also considerably more. On-the-rock encounters by hand and foot open up a dialogue between the heart of a philosopher and the mind of a geologist. Michael adds a literary softness to this hard landscape, blending excursions with exposition and literature with science. It is through his graceful representations that the geological becomes metaphorical, while the science turns mythological.
This high country, where in 1889 John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson planned what would become Yosemite National Park, is significant for cultural as well as natural reasons. Discoursing on everything from Camus’s “Myths of Sisyphus” to the poems of Gary Snyder, Michael adds depth to an already splendorous landscape. Premier early geologists, such as François Matthes, shaped the language of Yosemite’s landscape. Even though Yosemite has changed over half a century, the rock has not. As Michael explores the beauty and grace of his familiar towering vistas, he demonstrates why, of the many aspects of the world to which one might get attached, the most secure is granite.
Drawing together the humanistic and scientific significance of the wild landscapes he traverses, Michael uncovers relationships between people and places and meaning and substance, rendering this text part memoir—but also considerably more. On-the-rock encounters by hand and foot open up a dialogue between the heart of a philosopher and the mind of a geologist. Michael adds a literary softness to this hard landscape, blending excursions with exposition and literature with science. It is through his graceful representations that the geological becomes metaphorical, while the science turns mythological.
This high country, where in 1889 John Muir and Robert Underwood Johnson planned what would become Yosemite National Park, is significant for cultural as well as natural reasons. Discoursing on everything from Camus’s “Myths of Sisyphus” to the poems of Gary Snyder, Michael adds depth to an already splendorous landscape. Premier early geologists, such as François Matthes, shaped the language of Yosemite’s landscape. Even though Yosemite has changed over half a century, the rock has not. As Michael explores the beauty and grace of his familiar towering vistas, he demonstrates why, of the many aspects of the world to which one might get attached, the most secure is granite.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781948908160
ISBN-10: 1948908166
Pagini: 200
Ilustrații: 2 line art drawings; 4 maps
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.32 kg
Ediția:1
Editura: University of Nevada Press
Colecția University of Nevada Press
ISBN-10: 1948908166
Pagini: 200
Ilustrații: 2 line art drawings; 4 maps
Dimensiuni: 140 x 216 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.32 kg
Ediția:1
Editura: University of Nevada Press
Colecția University of Nevada Press
Notă biografică
Michael P. Cohen is an award-winning author of several books including Tree Lines and A Garden of Bristlecones. Cohen, a rock climber and mountaineer, is a pioneer of first ascents in the Sierra Nevada and has been a professional mountain guide. He splits his time between Reno, Nevada, and June Lake, California. He first visited Tuolumne Meadows in 1955.
Extras
Introduction
This modest set of essays explores our nearly lifelong experiment to experience and respond to the granite of a region called Tuolumne Meadows in Yosemite National Park (figure 1). Other than remarkable granite forms, many aspects of this place have attracted us over the years, not the least of which is the community of people who are also drawn to the region. But we came and lived here as much as we could to expose ourselves to granite, to feel and explore it, and to explore ourselves. Tuolumne Meadows provided a place for us to think and feel. This book tests our nonscientific experiments.
While walking on trails in national parks, it is not surprising to overhear people who spend most of their time talking not about where they are, but about concerns from where they come, as if they cannot afford to pay full attention to the present rock on which they tread. When Valerie and I desire to persuade these hikers to change we are immediately faced by a strange paradox. We have only ourselves as solitary exemplars and must speak about ourselves, not only where we are. As Henry David Thoreau so famously wrote, “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”1
This book intends to avoid the so--called “wilderness controversy” despite the prominence of solitary experience here, which would seem to reveal traditional wilderness predilections.2 The institutional construction of the Wilderness Act of 1964 embedded within it a concept of solitude, defining wilderness areas in part as affording “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation.”3 Nevertheless, the concept of solitude is much older and more nuanced than the American conservation movement’s version of it, and I refer to that more venerable concept when I speak of solitude.
When “a person longs for solitude and at the same time is fearful of it,” the Hungarian translator, critic, and art critic F. László Földényi argues, such a person may become a prisoner of that longing.4 Solitude might also make him free. How to separate a desire for solitude from ideological issues, a desire for privacy, or even a predilection toward melancholy? Földényi insists that solitude, silence, and melancholy are wrapped inextricably around each other: “A melancholic wishes, first and foremost, to escape from himself, but he can find no crack in the homogeneous, overarching culture, and resignation grows in him, together with a sense of helplessness. In the end, he petrifies inwardly as well, feeling he has been robbed of his capacity for both wanting and not wanting.”5
Yet Kierkegaard, in one instance, believed that living in solitude would allow a person to find a way back to the basic principles of life.6 Földényi concludes his book Melancholy: “With every step he takes, man tries to smuggle some goal into nothingness. The melancholic is skeptical of those goals.”7
Even John Muir received plenty of advice about the costs of solitude and the value of sociability. Emerson once wrote to him that “there are drawbacks also to Solitude, who is a sublime mistress, but an intolerable wife.”8 Perhaps too much solitude is not good for anyone, but every age must ask how much is too much and when a desire for solitude becomes pathological.
It is true I often enjoy being alone, and sometimes in the past I enjoyed climbing mountains solo, but only on very straightforward routes. These were typically day--long excursions. I have never enjoyed being alone for longer and prefer to return to social circumstances every evening. However, just because the framers of the Wilderness Act emphasized solitude as part of the experience of wilderness doesn’t mean that those who seek solitude desire a wilderness experience. For instance, Valerie and I enjoy taking a walk quietly, somewhere not filled with horseplay, not because we are looking for “wilderness” but because it is pleasant in itself. I find my commerce with rock, especially granite, best transacted without conversation, because I desire something concrete and immediate, not articulate and meaningful.
Writing these narratives cannot follow directly from our walking. In writing, I follow a method the art critic John Berger endorses in Ways of Seeing (1972) and that Walter Benjamin originally articulated in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”9 I imagine that each of Tuolumne Meadows’ granitic domes is like a “coded testament addressed to the present.”10 And who feels or listens, and who shall tell the story of encountering these rocks? According to Benjamin, “[storytelling] does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again.” Indeed, the storyteller is the figure who encounters himself.11
Consequently, I am aware of many risks here. Nor have I ever trusted memoirs. Following an acute academic friend, the historian Richard White, I am highly distrustful of written memories, not only because memory can often be flawed, but also because memory is sometimes fabricated.12 Memory forgets or erases what it does not wish to recall. “Memory is like a dog that lies down where it pleases,” according to an engaging simile of Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom.13 Please make no mistake: Though Valerie, my partner for more than fifty years, is a party to these excursions, these memories are mine alone.
What you have in your hands is unmistakably a memoir that deliberately attempts to carry our past metaphorically into the present — and also claims to be about metamorphosis. When writing engages metaphors (or similes) for memory, memory becomes metaphorical. Books themselves are a form of “external memory,” not inside but outside our minds, not oral but written.14 I claim that the granitic forms of Tuolumne Meadows constitute an external memory for us. Whether they will last longer than books remains to be seen. I’m betting on the rocks.
Generally speaking, we are also told that it is a mistake for writers or artists to attempt explanations of their lives or their works, especially in print. Nevertheless the following narratives implicate me directly, perhaps showing that I am unredeemed in my pursuits — and certainly demonstrating that I am capable of contradicting myself.
This experiment means to use the method of the essai, as Montaigne called it: a testing or trying out that subjects inner life to decisive thought. These essays are meant not only to demonstrate how we perceive and think about ourselves within this extraordinary place, but also to explore some of the influences and grounds for our ideas and perceptions.
I use the word hard and its synonyms a great deal in these attempts to grasp granite firmly because this word reveals a human response to unyielding rock: Encounters with rock are often difficult to endure or accomplish and offer a severe or rigorous test; its rough, coarse, harsh textures are hard on the hands and often involve going the hard way.
Granite, the substance or matter that occasions this book, can be found all over the world, but what we know best appears in Yosemite National Park. It is next to impossible to write anything original about Yosemite, not only because so much has been written, but also because so much has been overwritten.
Yosemite has occasioned some very good writing on geology across a set of literary--scientific texts. This tradition’s main figures include Josiah D. Whitney, John Muir, Grove Karl Gilbert, François Matthes, N. King Huber, and the current park geologist, Greg Stock. These literary texts are in some ways like a palimpsest, each successively written over previous versions. My writing falls within the context of that tradition but does not pretend to be scientific in any modern, professional, or technical sense — nor do I claim to establish a history of Yosemite’s geological writing or to conclude this tradition.
Because I have written about John Muir extensively — and also because Muir’s Yosemite is overwritten in several senses — I invoke his description:
Of this glorious range [the Sierra Nevada] the Yosemite National Park is a central section, thirty--six miles in length and forty--eight miles in breadth. The famous Yosemite Valley lies in the heart of it, and it includes the head waters of the Tuolumne and Merced rivers, two of the most songful streams in the world; innumerable lakes and waterfalls and smooth silky lawns; the -noblest forests, the loftiest granite domes, the deepest ice--sculptured cañons, the brightest crystalline pavements, and snowy mountains soaring into the sky twelve and thirteen thousand feet, arrayed in open ranks and spiry pinnacled groups partially separated by tremendous cañons and amphitheatres; gardens on their sunny brows, avalanches thundering down their long white slopes, cataracts roaring gray and foaming in the crooked rugged gorges, and glaciers in their shadowy recesses working in silence, slowly completing their sculpture; new--born lakes at their feet, blue and green, free or encumbered with drifting icebergs like miniature Arctic Oceans, shining, sparkling, calm as stars.15
Talk about overwrought metaphors for memory! Perhaps we can forgive the confident tone of Our National Parks, as a man in his sixties celebrates the accomplishments of his generation of conservationists. Aside from Muir’s mention of noble forests, songful streams, gardens, and silky lawns, he highlights most of all his geological memories of lofty granite, soaring mountains, and rugged gorges. This has been a safe bet for other writers.
Muir narrates some memories more intimately in My First Summer in the Sierra, his re--collected journals of excursions around Tuolumne Meadows in 1869. From his base camp near Soda Springs, “The sublime, massive Mt. Dana and its companions, green, red, and white, loom impressively above the pines along the eastern horizon; a range or spur of gray rugged granite crags and mountains on the north; the curiously crested and battlemented Mt. Hoffman on the west; and the Cathedral Range on the south.” The meadows themselves he calls “full of sunshine like a lake of light.”16 Muir’s overwrought Yosemite has petrified into a nearly archetypal written memoir. In many ways, his Yosemite is our own — but not entirely.
We must own certain differences. For instance, those who have become concerned about the biological health of wildlife living in Yosemite have been fighting a losing battle for many decades. Though the National Park Service claims as many as 80 species of mammals, 250 species of birds, 1,400 kinds of flowering plants, and 37 species of trees including the giant sequoia, the prognosis for their continuing health is not good. As the Park Service itself has announced, “The diversity of native species, including the genetic material they contain, the natural processes with which they are critically intertwined, and the corridors by way of which they move, are declining at a historically unprecedented rate.”17
We are not optimistic about preserving biological diversity in Yosemite or anywhere else, nor can one find many sanguine experts.18 Under such diminished circumstances, the rock Muir praised is likely to be the longest lasting legacy of his national park. This granite rock’s endurance is more than metaphorical, though it has certainly fulfilled that function in the work of writers like Gary Snyder and Robinson Jeffers.
There are myriad ways to travel on Muir’s granitic domes and peaks; I tried as many as I could without falling off. Valerie and I spent several spring and fall seasons climbing rocks in Yosemite Valley, migrating to the domes and spires of Tuolumne Meadows each July when it became too warm in the Valley. Eventually we found the topography of Tuolumne Meadows more congenial and ceased to enter the Valley at all.
The intention of these essays is topographic. By topography, I mean a description of a place, from the Greek topos, literally place, region, or space; and graphein, to write, express, or represent by written characters, or perhaps by drawn lines. Broadly speaking, a local topography includes not only relief — depicted through contour lines on the United States Geological Survey topographical quadrangles — but also natural and artificial features and even local history and culture.
There are now no secret places in Tuolumne Meadows. Almost everything a visitor to Tuolumne might desire can be located on specialized maps, climbers’ and hikers’ guides, the internet, or Google maps. These include climbing routes, legal and illegal camping spaces, and directions for hiking to landmarks, viewpoints, and interesting sites. We use more traditional methods for orienting ourselves — literary works and especially older maps. We always carry a topographical map.
Geologic maps depict in idealized form the distribution of materials at or near the ground surface of the Earth. As produced by the USGS, geologic maps for Yosemite are super-imposed on base topographical maps, with each different geologic unit (for example, Cathedral Peak Granodiorite) listed on an accompanying legend and printed in a distinct color.19 Because the base map is printed in light colors, the effect for the reader is a flattening of the plane, very like the flattening of the picture plane in the work of modern painters who aimed to call attention to the creation of an artifact. Geologic maps call attention to themselves as two--dimensional surfaces. In this regard, they are strange beasts — they are layered, so to speak, in reverse, with geology on top of topography.20 Perhaps that is why I have a sense, when reading them, that geologic information is being superimposed over my topographical sense.21 We never carry geologic maps on our walks. We are informed by them at home, but outdoors we seek what is not on them.
Perhaps because we have always consulted books and maps, we never thought of Yosemite’s rock as a “frontier,” where one could, like Huckleberry Finn, “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest,” as if engaged in some exchange of civilization for freedom.22 Does an unclimbed rock seem like a frontier? I think not. Climbing on granite is a highly civilized activity that requires physical preparation, paying close attention, judging geological suitability, establishing techniques and technology, and logistical planning. Rock climbers sometimes speak of gardening routes by cleaning vegetation out of cracks. This practice is more common in Yosemite Valley and is not, in my experience, necessary for climbs in Tuolumne Meadows.
From a distance these domes and cliffs may all look the same, but they are all different underfoot. Many look featureless, but they are not. I am particularly interested in what one scholar describes as “the haptic process by which climbers comprehend and experience place.”23 Haptic: pertaining to the sense of touch.
Stories of lighting out for the territory in Yosemite and in Mono County, where we reside for half of each year, typically end up being stories of loss and failure, as Valerie learned while serving as a ranger for the National Park Service. Nor do we believe that the interior west, as in Mono County, will be successful in attempting to live by the tourist industry in the long run. Yosemite by night too frequently consists of someone in a motel room or a tent, crying. Valerie has many stories of dislocated people whose urban troubles amplified when they came to the parks, but this is not the right place for these stories.
When Yosemite National Park was created as part of an imperial and exclusionary impulse, it displaced native inhabitants. Since then, Yosemite National Park has been an enclosed space dedicated to benefit people other than the original inhabitants. Nearly a century before we were born, Euro--Californians said to the native inhabitants of the region, “This is our land, not yours.”
In the course of this process, white American visitors and settlers renamed landmarks. In Tuolumne Meadows this often proceeded frivolously, people naming landmarks after their heroes, themselves, their relatives, their friends and associates, and even stray domestic animals. Such names as Polly Dome, Dog Dome, and Puppy Dome remain. Climbers later named some domes with even less respect, as in Whizz Domes and Drug Dome. Some names are associated with arbitrary political divisions, as in Mariuolumne Dome, on the border of Mariposa and Tuolumne counties. Some domes have been named according to directions from the Tioga Road, as with Daff Dome (an acronym for “Dome Across From Fairview”). Consequently, guides to the region are often keyed to the mileage on a modern highway that only sometimes traces traditional indigenous routes, as if geography follows the choices of engineers. Some name changes indicate competing interests. The dome that Muir named Glacier Monument became Fairview Dome.24 Steve Roper decided to rename a portion of Polly Dome “Stately Pleasure Dome” in his TheClimber’s Guide to the High Sierra.25
These names are continuing reminders that Yosemite is a recently dispossessed landscape, as Susan Schrepfer demonstrates in Nature’s Altars.26 In Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, Mark David Spence holds that “if Yosemite National Park teaches us anything, it is that scenes of great permanence are fraught with historical change.”27
Scholars such as Gary Fields at UC San Diego have been involved in investigating this issue on an international scale in places like Palestine. As Fields expresses it, territorial landscapes dramatize the power of dominant groups to reorganize all dimensions of lives in particular places; he asks, “How does landscape itself become an instrument of force in this process of transformation?”28 These questions can and should be applied to Yosemite, but that is not our purpose here.
Yosemite’s imperial history has made it a monumental task to validate original names for landmarks — and not only because names are metaphorical. The origins of the names Tuolumne and Yosemite, for instance, have been contested for decades. The varied and conflicting accounts of their sources are not entirely reliable, though both names are undoubtedly corruptions of indigenous ones. Nor are they likely to undergo substitution, as may happen with Tis--sa-ack for Half Dome, or has already with Denali for Mt. McKinley. So--called “-legends” — as recounted in the lore of commercial tourism, which is sometimes parroted by the National Park Service and then attached to landmarks — are arguably unreliable. They are almost all condescending and often corrupt, which is to say destructive of significance. None are particularly helpful in understanding the historical past of the original residents of this region. In this and in a larger sense, Yosemite’s history continues to be contested.29 We await better ways for visitors to learn about the region’s historical past.
But to speak more personally, Valerie and I did not learn to name or perceive the landmarks of Yosemite through native language or native eyes, and there is no point in pretending that we did. We use here the names we were taught, or at most substitute names from our own culture.
My cultural background has been both literary and scientific. According to Aristotle, whose definition most literary theorists accept, a metaphor uses a “strange name” to accomplish a “transfer of meaning” to a different context.30 Certainly this process of using strange names to transfer meaning also occurs extensively in the languages of geologists. I appropriate a great deal of that geological transference in what follows. When these essays use strange names for rocks, however, meaning is meant to be transferred to more than geology.
Descriere
Granite and Grace: Essays into the Tuolumne Meadows Intrusive Suite reflects Michael Cohen’s fifty-year encounter with the granite in the high country of Yosemite National Park, where he seeks a sense of belonging in an era called the Anthropocene. By creating a dialogue between geological and literary representations, where the geological becomes metaphorical, while science turns mythological, these essays shaped by on-the-rock encounters with landforms, open up important experiential and pragmatic dimensions.