Mary Austin

Death Valley is a desert valley locate in Eastern California within the Mojave desert. It is the lowest and driest area in North America. Holds the record for the highest recorded air temperature on Earth.

Creosote

“odorous and medicinal as you might guess from the name, wandlike, with shining fretted foliage

Yucca

“The Yucca bristles with bayonet-pointed leaves, dull green, growing shaggy with age, tipped with panicles of fetid, greenish bloom.”

“ One hot, stifling spring in the Little Antelope I had occasion to pass and repass frequently the nest of a pair of meadowlarks.”

Lower Owens River Valley in Eastern Sierra- The land of little rain

On a morning Mary was walking down one of these, leading her horse, and suddenly she was aware of poppies coming up singly through the tawny, crystal-sanded soil, thin, piercing orange-colored flames. And then the warm pervasive sweetness of ultimate reality . . .

Earth Horizon (1932)

In the 1980s, when eloquent voices of Western writers cried out for conservation and environmental protection of land and water, her work was resurrected. Austin is now viewed with reverence as a pioneering feminist and ecofeminist; The Land of Little Rain , in the words of historian Lawrence Powell, is considered “the ripest, richest book of the many she wrote.”

“ It was what most women wanted; time and adventure of their own”

“To write books you could walk around in”

“I have wild thoughts sometimes,----- such as men have when they go out and snatch things,---- but it wouldn’t do me any good.”

The nineteen century American female was cut off from the freedom of male experience and possibility.

Mary Austin’s landscape

A desolate and inhospitable expanse of desert, punctuated by sordid mining towns.

The Land of Little Rain (1903)

Lost Borders (1909)

Land’s effect upon the human individual and

community.

“ to understand what the writing of this, my maiden book, meant to me, you must realize that up to that time, and for many years afterwards, I was living in a California town of about 300 inhabitants, and , with the exception of the middle Western college town of about six thousand, it was the only kind of town I had ever known… For twelve years, I had had lived deeply and absorbedly in the life of the desert.”

The Power of Desolate Places

The experiential quality of the wild is presence.

“Happily absorbed” in the Great American Desert – the long stretch between Salt Lake and Sacramento Pass

“ There was something else there besides what you find in the books; a lurking, evasive Something, wistful, cruel, ardent; something that rustled and ran, that hung half-remotedly, insistent on being noticed, fled from pursuit, and when you turned from it, leaped suddenly and fastened on your vitals. This is no figure of speech, but the true movement of experience.” Earth Horizon

Eroticism of the wild

“ It would come leaping out at me in odd contradictions of the accepted way of waking intelligence, with a keen sense of the long known, the reexperienced… coyotes hot in chase, and something older in me than thinking, off after them obsessed after the quarry, the entrancing, the utterly desired, sole object of endeavour, the delightful other of consummation…. O Delightful, I could eat you up! As I walked into the wild, now and then, with just such reversions of knowing and thinking, the animals “spoke” to me … and not animals only, plants … stones… mountains.” Lost Others

A practiced “watching”

“ I can’t do it..;. I thought it would be easy to do it, but it isn’t. I have just looked, nothing more, when I was too sick to do anything else. I could lie under the sage brush and look, and when I was able to get about I went to look at other things, and by and by I got to know when and where looking was worthwhile. Then I got so full of looking I had to write to get rid of some of it to make room for more.” -- An Account of the genesis of The Land of Little Rain

Wu-wei

“without action”

“ Not a forced quietude, but a course of action that is not founded upon any purposeful motives of gain or striving. In such a state, all human action become as spontaneous and mindless as those of the natural world.”

Keywords: Correctness of perception, method for changing one’s sense of identity, of the way in which one experiences the fact of being alive, subject-object dichotomy as a form of mis-

The Wild as Female

“ If the desert were a woman, I know well what like she would be: deep-breasted, broad in the hips, tawny hair, great masses of it lying smooth along her perfect curves, full lipped like a sphinx, but not heavy-lidded like one, eyes sane and steady as the polished jewel of her skies, such a countenance as should make men serve without desiring her, such a largeness to her mind as should make their sins of no account, passionate, but not necessitous, patient- and you could not move hair’s- breadth beyond her own desires.”

A Loss of Borders

Men are usually attracted to the desert for its gold

The overriding theme of The Land of Little Rain is that none exists except the alchemical gold

The desert takes from those who expect it to give

It is bigger than they think

In the overwhelming emptiness, something does emerge from nothing: Mystery.

Country of Lost Borders

Native Shoshones and Paiutes recognize the psychological dimension of the Mojave Desert, adapting themselves and their culture to it,

The white man much to learn or un-learn about it

The desert destroys those who are not prepared to change the way they live their lives

It offers the possibility of self-transformation

“Great souls that go into the desert come out mystics– siants and prophets– declaring unutterable things: Buddha, Mahomet, and the Galilean, convincing of the casual nature of human relations, because the desert itself has no use for the formal side of man’s affairs. What need, then, of so much pawing over precedent and discoursing upon it, when the open country lies there, a sort of chemist’s cup for resolving obligations? Say whether, when all decoration is eaten away, there remains any bond and what shall you do about it/”

The Walking Woman

Begins her nomadic life by “walking off an illness.”

Presents a striking contrast to other desert nomads, all of whom are male, since she is not looking for a lost mine

She simply walks and in doing so she leaves behind the social conventions that keep women in place.