September 1994, I camp on a mountain slope near the entrance of Hogup Cave. Throughout the night, the landscape is severed distinctly into a zone of darkness and a zone of lightness. The black mountain shape silhouettes starkly against sky brightly illuminated by a full moon. In a peculiar segregation, the expansive salt flats below belong not to the dark earth zone but are claimed by luminous reflection into the radiant realm of light. Gradually the two-toned night departs, chased away by the intensifying of the soft, subtle light of dawn. ES (1)

A special optical phenomenon simplifies the landscape along with the task of description. Ground “defects” – typical GSL weirdness, ground/skyscape ambiguity. Image: cave, zone, darkness, lightness, full moon, salt flats.

with the fervid heat pouring down on the lava rocks, with its lizards darting across the burning sands, the green and blue water lying glassy calm, and on the horizon gleams of snow-crested peaks, it more closely resembled some lonely rock of the Azores. Well could we ask, Where could we find another such lake, with another such island, where, in the noon of a summer day, we might fancy ourselves by the shore of some southern sea, and yet be standing on a spot that is howled across by the fiercest of winter storms? AL (2)

Romantic. AL is intent on exoticizing the landscape. “Lava rocks:” geology of Gunnison is limestone, not volcanic, but you can see why he’d prefer the image. Emphasis on surprising combinations, rarity, extremity—straining to convey: This place is unlikely! Image: burning sands, glassy calm, snow-crested, winter storms.

Rattlesnakes the size of a large man’s arm inhabit the western shore of the lake. I find a shed skin of one wrapped around the gnarled branches of a greasewood and wear it as a necklace. It’s easy to get lost out here in the alkaline desert of big sage. It’s squint-worthy country, covered with shattered glass and empty shotgun shells. We have seen no one. TTW (3)

Again, the impulse to impress. GSL as a legendary landscape, realm of monsters. TTW takes care to show her personal intimacy and comfort with place (necklace) while also suggesting exclusivity (no one), danger (easy to get lost). Not pristine, but anthropogenic and even trashy. Image: shed skin, greasewood, alkaline, shattered glass, shotgun shells.

Winds on the lake can be very strong especially over the long open stretches of water. Sailboaters tell of frequent 70 and 80 mph winds buffeting the lake, especially just before a cold front moves through. Because these prefrontal winds blow from a southerly direction, at times it becomes difficult, if not impossible for sailboats to navigate toward the south shore against them. Occasionally, great damage is done to buildings and boats along the south shore from these "Devil Winds" of the Great Salt Lake. Boaters on the lake call this wind a "Tooele (too-will'-a) Twister" since south winds from the Tooele side of the Oquirrh Mountains are especially strong. The Oquirrh Mountains seem to have some strong topographical influence on these winds. At least once or twice each year, these winds will reach speeds of 75 to 100 mph in gusts, and about every five to ten years, the winds will gust over 100 mph doing considerable damage along the south shore. ME, CB (4)

Depiction of fluid force; do we think of wind as part of the landscape? Landscape as dynamic system. Perilous, characterized in opposition to human aims. Nicknames "Devil Winds," "Tooele Twister," situate the lake as a subject of local lore. Image: cold front, devil, south shore, considerable damage.

The night soon began to clear away and the stars to appear, their beams reflected brilliantly in the dense water of the lake. Flashes of vivid lightning blazed up occasionally from behind the mountains, and several meteors, some of great size and dazzling brilliancy, shot down the sky to the north-east. This was the third entire night I had thus spent on the lake, sitting quietly at the helm, guiding my little bark over its solitary waste. Again was I struck with the deep and profound silence that reigned around me. HS (5)

Romantic. Colonist frames as heroic quest. Backdrop is sublime, dramatic; celestial phenomena reflect the rarified setting. Notes total absence of sound, implying lifeless and uncanny. Image: stars, dense water, lightning, meteors, solitary waste.

Visitors have called its waters bright emerald, grayish green and leaden gray; they have called them sapphire and turquoise and cobalt and they have all been right. Its color varies with the time of day, the state of the weather, the season of the year, the vantage point from which it is seen. It can lie immobile in its mountain setting like a vast, green, light-filled mirror, or, lashed by a sudden storm, rise wrathful in its bed to assault boats and its shoreline with smashing four-foot waves. The wind is its only master. The wind drives it contemptuously about from one part to another of its shallow basin, piling up the water here, exposing the naked lake floor there, as if the basin itself were twisted and tilted under the surging green brine. It lies at the bottom of three great north-south depressions which together comprise the valley of the Great Salt Lake. East of the lake the mighty rampart of the Wasatch Mountains, rising as high as eleven and twelve thousand feet above sea level, exacts from the prevailing westerly winds a tribute of rain and snow which created the lake and has maintained it. West of the Wasatch rises a lesser, parallel range, the Oquirrh, which dips beneath the lake at its southeastern shore to create its only good beaches. Farther north, this range rises intermittently as Antelope Island and the speck called Egg Island then again as Frémont Island, and emerges finally that long, rocky spine, the Promontory Mountains. DM (6)

Polymorphous. GSL is not one thing, but many. Emphasis on relativity, variability. Dynamic force—not a backdrop, but a system. Recourse to simile (like a mirror) and anthropomorphism (assault, wrathful, master). Is depiction of wind exposing lake bed hyperbole? Hard to know with GSL. In any case, effective portrayal of erratic/accelerated nature. Geography, relative positioning provides staging, (deceptive) sense that it can be seen all at once as a grand amphitheater. This kind of macro-summary is both reductive and compelling. Image: emerald, sapphire, mirror, lashed, master, naked.

The Great Basin region would seem to have been singularly uninviting to people fresh from the verdant hills and lush countryside of western Illinois. Ninety-five per cent of the land was either mountainous or desert. The horizon was broken by naked, flat-topped mountains, rugged and full of unearthly color and beauty. Between the few arable patches were vast stretches of sagebrush and bunch grass, populated with coyotes, jackrabbits, and rattlesnakes. The atmosphere was one of loneliness and “empty immensity." Even after twenty years of development and improvement, Samuel Bowles still viewed the Great Basin as "a region whose uses are unimaginable, unless to hold the rest of the globe together, or to teach patience to travelers, or to keep close-locked in its mountain ranges those rich mineral treasures that the world did not need or was not ready for until now." LA (7)

In almost every example, stress placed on differentness/alienness, here by comparison with the temperate Midwest. Voices a historical opinion of place. Judged in relation to human use (uselessness, despite improvement, treasures pending). Generic terms to swiftly paint whole region (naked, flat topped mountains), contrasts hostility and beauty. Image: broken, flat-topped, rugged, unearthly, empty immensity, close-locked.

The highway entering Salt Lake City from the west curves around the southern end of Great Salt Lake past Black Rock and the ratty beaches, swings north away from the smoke of the smelter towns, veers toward the dry lake bed where a long time ago the domes of the Saltair Pavilion used to rise like an Arabic exhalation, and straightens out eastward again. Ahead, across the white flats, the city is a mirage, or a mural: metropolitan towers, then houses and channeled streets, and then the mountain wall. WS (8)

Rapid summary or caricature, almost makes it sound like a model train set. Miniaturizing. Highway as device for ushering perception through landscape. Mountain wall = effective exaggeration, halts the summary. Image: highway, ratty beaches, smoke, smelter towns, white flats, mirage, wall.

The beach pioneers, those species of plants capable of establishing themselves on barren beach areas and initiating an ecological cycle, grow abundantly at the base of the bluff while greasewood grows along the top. On the east side of the Promontory Point the exposed beaches become narrower from the northern portion southward; in some places the lake water approaches the headlands and abruptly rising borders and there are no beaches. The plants are restricted mainly to the upper border of the shore where the waves do not flood them with lake brine. Along the western borders of the lake are wide expanses of barren beaches, in some places nearly ten miles in width. ER (9)

Expresses the contingency of plant life in this place; here is life, there is barren. The metaphor of “beach pioneers” is hard to resist: maybe an anthropomorphism, or on the contrary, a reminder of that principle of vitality that places human pioneers too within an organic order. Surprising indications of scale (10 miles in width). Image: cycle, headlands, waves, miles.

I leave the men at the causeway and find a more remote vantage point of Antelope Island on dry ground. From where I sit now, it looks like a large buckskinned animal sleeping on its side. The rural country with monarchs on milkweeds on the eastern shore of Great Salt Lake almost allows me to believe this is a calm and predictable place. I watch the island intently with my binoculars, scanning the shoreline, noticing where beaches end and outcroppings of stone begin. The island appears still and serene, but I know better. Buffalo live here. I have also seen deer and coyotes. Vultures clip the ridgelines in search of carrion, and the wind is always present. But in spite of the human hand, Antelope Island remains remarkably pristine. A state park claims the northern tip with a few facilities for tourists, but with the causeway submerged, it becomes wild and uninterrupted country once again. The pulse of Great Salt Lake, surging along Antelope Island's shores, becomes the force wearing against my mother's body. And when I watch flocks of phalaropes wing their way toward quiet bays on the island, I recall watching Mother sleep, imagining the dreams that were encircling her, wondering what she knows that I must learn for myself. The light changes, Antelope Island is blue. Mother awakened and I looked away. TTW (3)

TTW’s focus is consistently animal life, so it is unsurprising that she would perceive the landmass as a sleeping beast (reminds me of the strong ‘sentience preference’ among activists)—though she also regards beaches and outcroppings of stone. “The mass looks void of sentience, but I know better.” Contrast of development with the pristine, + the romance of reclaiming (causeway submerged, like a castle drawbridge raised against the enemy). Here land writing is intense metaphorization: the landscape as personal is the basis for the whole memoir. Instead of alienation and meaninglessness, hyperfamiliarization. Image: sleeping, buffalo, deer, coyotes, vultures, pulse, flocks.

The land along the Bear River, a natural depression, is thick with willows and other brush to shelter from the wind and winter blizzards. Natural hot springs nearby provided warm water for their daily use. This was the way that life was meant to be spent during the winter months: a time to reflect, renew friendships with loved ones, and rest from all cares. The area was centrally located in the Shoshone country, where the different bands of Northwestern Shoshone gathered for meetings, winter sports and fun and games. They took part in foot races, horse races, played a game similar to hockey, and danced. In the winter, dried deer hides were used as sleds. In the summer, the children would dig foxholes along the banks of the river and play war. Over time, the foxholes got larger and deeper as the children played their games; it was later reported by the military and the white settlers from Franklin that these children's play holes were rifle pits that had been quickly dug as defensive pits against Connor's soldiers, although this would have been impossible in the frozen ground of winter. DP (10)

An indigenous account thwarts the human/land distinction. DP describes use, but in the sense of integration (cf. colonial use above). Landscape as a site of vital activity, not visitation. As a subject in this passage, land recedes because it is not subjected. Also: Drama, foreshadowing; the idyllic/pastoral is a foil to coming violence. The heart of the contrast is the foxholes (misapprehended by settlers): play vs. massacre. Image: hot springs, game, danced, war, rifle pits, frozen ground.

With the sun firing the island beyond 100 degrees Fahrenheit, we stop to conserve our waning energy. The full heat of the day blasts upon us, a soporific drug forcing us into the bathtub-warm lake for relief…. The heat, one week before the longest day of the year, grows leaden. Our plan to hike to the ridgeline sinks like a stone in the tepid lake. We manage a slow slog along a jeep road and up a dry wash, avoiding tenuous plants and soils, ever cautious of where we leave our footprints. A bleached snake skull, three live garter snakes, and an apple-size nest in cheat grass holding four buff and gold-speckled eggs are among discoveries we observe and leave alone. At Westside Spring, 130 feet above the lake, seeping moisture feeds a small but lush patch of green vegetation. Drinkable water trickles from a pipe into an old wooden trough. A couple of low, stone foundations mark the remains of forgotten buildings or stockholding pens. This fresh water flowing out upon the scorched landscape is the rarest find of all. Has this oasis drawn humans and animals to it for centuries? For millennia? I try to listen, but the heat hums in my ears. MS (11)

Island of the Lotus-Eaters, only the drug is the totality of place. Trance. Sleep. MS identifies himself and his companion as noble visitors, at once reveling and careful not to touch. “This is not our place.” And yet, the surprising discovery of ruins and implements reveals, it is. Image: soporific, bathtub-warm, stone, tepid, bleached, snake skull, apple-sized, gold-speckled, seeping, foundations.

Daylight found the boat at the mouth of the passage between Fremont and Antelope Islands, and, shortly after, we entered the beautiful little cove on the north-east side of the latter, from the banks of which several springs trickle down from the base of a small cliff of protruding rocks. The scene was calm and lovely in the extreme. The rays of the rising sun, glancing brightly over the eastern mountains, shone upon the tiny ripples of the placid little bay, upon whose bosom a flock of snow-white gulls was calmly floating; while the green and gently sloping shores, covered with a luxuriant growth of rich and waving grass, contrasted strongly in our minds with the dreary and desolate waste of sand over which we had been roaming for the last month. Several little mocking-birds were singing gayly on the shore, and the shrill, cheerful whistle of the curlew resounded along the beach. Four graceful antelopes were quietly grazing on the grassy slope, while the cry of the wild duck, and the trumpet-note of the sandhill crane were heard in the distance. The whole formed a picture which, in this desolate region, was as welcome as it was rare. We landed at our first campground near the box-elder tree, about two hours after sunrise, making twenty-four continuous hours that I had sat at the helm, without a moment's respite. HS (5)

Hallucinatory. After the ordeal of “the dreary and desolate waste” (the suffering of early GSL explorers was immense), the island appears like a celestial intervention. Deep inside Hades, an isle of paradise. It is difficult to know where objective description ends and deprivation-induced fantasy begins. Again, the colonialist frame is heroic/Homeric. Image: cove, springs, rays of the rising sun, bosom, snow-white, luxuriant, waste, whistle, grassy, sandhill crane, helm.

The Rozel Hills comprise a 16 square-mile area forming a westward bulge from the northern side of the Promontory Range. The bedrock of the Hills rises about 300 feet above the lake and consists of interbedded basalt and limestone of the Salt Lake Group, of probable Miocene-Pliocene age. The structure is simple and the exposed strata dip 15 degrees to the northeast. This area is interesting in that asphalt seeps occur in the lake off the southern margin of the Hills. About twenty shallow wells have been drilled around Rozel Point but to date no sustained commercial production has been attained. WLS (12)

Neutral, practical survey. A casual reference to the age of the hills is startling—a fiery glimpse into geologic depths. Note failed drilling. Somehow, the fact that the place is almost useful makes it more wild. Image: bedrock, 300 feet, basalt, limestone, exposed, strata, asphalt seeps, shallow wells.

How many hands have threshed and winnowed in the wind, hurling chaff to fly with the air, leaving behind thousands of tiny, nutritious, brown seeds? The limestone outcrops, which define the mountain ridges and span the hollow space of the cave, formed beneath the waters of some long-ago sea. Now the limestone outcrops tower above a desert. This spot has known great change. Today in Hogup Cave, four ten-inch stalactites grow slowly from the limestone too. Each drip, a beat of time. Each lengthening, a measure of change. The time since humans first discovered the cave is short time, and changes are subtle. A little more of the mountain has become part of the salt flats. The shrubs are the same, but the ground cover has added aliens such as cheat grass and halogeton. ES (1)

Another attempt to express an inexpressible timescale. Change is so slow as to be negligible since ancient days. Yet what has transpired is a complete revolution: subaqueous ridges become desert towers. Amazingly, the increment between these impossible extremes is visible to the naked eye: the dripping stalactite. The mountain melts into the flats: magic acid land. Image: cave, long-ago sea, outcrops, drip, salt flats, aliens.

Nightfall finds us nestled pleasantly in a meadow fifty yards from the lake, listening to the lake's undulations massaging the gravel beach below us. I peer into the darkness over the lake. The mountainous ridge of Stansbury Island stands, a black, two-dimensional wall, fourteen miles away. The much lower Carrington Island, north of Stansbury, lies lost in the black night, as does Strongs Knob, forty miles northwest of us. The Knob marks the tip of a peninsula defined by the Lakeside Mountains, and it is next to impossible to see with the naked eye even on a crystalline day. My mind is nevertheless drawn to this distant point of land. With the high lake level (4,209.95 feet in May), this limestone and tufa landmark is more than a peak towering over mud flats. Strongs Knob is another island. The gravelly legato sounding against Antelope Island must also be rolling across the foot of the Knob. MS (11)

Nocturnal loss of vision and the language shifts toward sound. Undulation, massage, legato. Again, night mercifully flattens the complex landscape; features become two-dimensional, black. In this darkness, imagination projects itself through space. In an instant, the listener is many miles away at the site of the invisible. Image: gravel, darkness, fourteen miles northwest, crystalline, tufa, rolling.

A wind treacherous and soft…As if made of burnished silver, shone the passing clouds. Lovely tints of pale, turquoise blue lay on the placid water, and the mountains, like vast crumpled foldings of cream-colored silk, stood shimmering along the horizon... All of this, and yet once more the wild March blizzards come out of the north. The salt spray is hurled across my island. AL (2)

The stillness of the lake is an illusion. Gentleness hides treachery. Image: burnished silver, clouds, tints of pale, salt spray.

Toward an Unreal Land Writing

A terminal lake is one with no outlet. And, to make a cruel joke, one that is mortal.

Great Salt Lake is disappearing because of human development. Agriculture, industry, and suburban growth have strained the desert, diverting the mountain runoff on which its rare ecosystems depend.

Reducing water use is an urgent political cause. Yet on a macro timescale, it is not surprising that Great Salt Lake should vanish. Even the Mormon settlers who encountered the place at its most fecund and pristine, gulls and pelicans rising from its surface by the hundreds of thousands, sensed this. The lake, they predicted, would cease to be.

Great Salt Lake is an apparition, rapidly changing size and shape. It flickers, grows, shrinks from an ancient sea to a mere fragment, then floods, now desiccates under the force of an anthropogenic megadrought. The human event could be read as one more organic episode in the adventure of this phantom, which finally makes its exit through the desert floor, leaving behind an ectoplasm, its sparkling mega-deposit from eons of terminal flow: lithium, arsenic, magnesium, and five billion tons of salt.

Give it a few centuries, and the phantom will return. “The stakes,” as the poet Nan Seymour said to me, “are human.” Meaning that the lake itself is not so tenuous as the habitability of this region. So while at the state capitol activists labor against the currents of self-destruction, I find a different task: knowing, documenting, and memorializing a place so weird you would have to go there to believe it.

I’ve always avoided writing about land. When I was little, I would look out across the rugged Idaho countryside and think: “one day I will write all this.” But it is impossible. Land can’t be written. Those who claim to write it are conjurers. They weave together scientific details, geographic reference points, geology, plant and animal names, and regional history to create a delirium of landiness. It’s pretty damn cool. But it’s not land.

Go out there (anywhere), look around, and you’ll understand. Descriptive language is no match. The scale and dimensionality of place are overpowering, and the texture and detail that make it are infinite. We only encounter land in an embodied dimension, never through a medium.

On one level, this is a banal observation about language. Whether we are describing Zion or a refrigerator, the words are not the thing itself and their powers of representation are limited. descriptive language summons in the mind (at the nexus of our personal image repertoire, memory, hyper/hypophantasia, and neurosis) a more or less phony substitute. Or, if you prefer, a rich and psychically dynamic substitute, but never the embodied referent.

So why make an issue of land writing in particular? Because this is the subject of my advocacy. And because, as a lover of big, silencing Western landscapes, I find the failure of representation here particularly offensive. It’s a bit like the attitude of apophatic theology, where the mystic reacts to every depiction of God: “No! It’s not like that.” Mysticism insists on direct experience. You can’t read about it. You can’t explain it. You have to go there. And yet… mystics do write about their experiences, and I want to write about mine. Or at least, I want to write; I want to be in land; I want there to be some communion there. But as a grown-up, I can no longer stomach the idea of landscape as a subject to be depicted.

This study is a test of concept.

What does traditional land writing do? It takes you there. It gives you the experience of being in a place. Supposedly. Readers of Edward Abbey go to red rock country, just as readers of Thoreau taste wild apples, and those of Annie Dillard rest by the water at Tinker Creek. To say that’s not really happening is obvious enough. But then what is happening? Where do you go?

My argument is that land writing is less like a proxy for the thing itself and more like a hallucination device. Its function is not to take you there but to generate an experience—albeit inspired by a real landscape—of a totally unreal and imaginary place. The character and detail of this place are enriched by the author’s study of land. And “faithfully” capturing information about that place, its geography and the relative position of its features, its topography and geologic strata, its named flora and fauna, is an effective technique for generating a high-quality hallucination. A good weaver borrows the fiber of actuality.

What are the uses of this land-image machine? Entertainment: a little psychic tourism to a faraway place. As a realm for exploration, the literary landscape may be sufficient unto itself, like that of a video game. Another use is as a primer. The work is a guide for one who plans to visit the referent and see for themselves. Or it may be a memory aid for one who went before. Advocacy is another use. We write about places to convince others to protect them. Wallace Stegner famously did so, writing about Utah while lobbying in Washington. From John Muir onward, writers have offered their word-simulations of the American wilderness in a desperate appeal to preserve some sacred space. A space that they—and a lucky few others—entered in the flesh.

This is my purpose too. I write about Great Salt Lake now because it is in peril. Or at least, its present form is in peril. I had to get over my hangups and write about land because there’s no time to lose. Whatever contribution is made to this effort must be made now. The important thing about a literature of advocacy is its power to affect.

Another land writing:

• is openly artificial.

• stands in a complex relation to its referent, unbounded by accuracy.

• prioritizes affect over coherence.

• demotes language to the field of noise.

• is not preoccupied with meaning.

• is its own landscape, not a proxy.

Land is a poor candidate for realism. But if we concede the failure of representation outright, what is left to writing? We do not have to abandon reference. This other approach still depends on the associations/mental images of a reader at least nominally familiar with barren beaches, rabbitbrush, dry bluffs, lapping waters etc. Far from giving up on the image, the intention is to distill and concentrate imagery by liberating it from the requirements of context and syntax.

In a word, the technique is the mix. Collage at the expense of realism, since it interrupts sentences and combines them arbitrarily. The freedom of mixing with disregard for the real is freedom to maximize evocation. From a mass of combinations, effective instances are painstakingly selected. Aside from its evocative power, this rude unrealism is a protest against representation. It is the apophatic “No!” as if to say: “this nonsense comes just as close to the real thing as any faithful depiction, i.e., not close at all. Land cannot be represented.”

If this text is not a representation of land, what is it? A strange imitation? I want to be in land; I want to write; I want there to be some communion there. But this communion does not need to be one thing (me) taking the other (land) as its subject. It can be me learning to do what I do from the land doing what it does. Of course, this exchange of essence already occurs in all good writing, including nature writing. The text is not just about its subject, but somehow like its subject. What if we pushed this concept of likeness further, neglecting the task the reference? What would it mean to make something that is like land?

With affect as our imperative, the question of what is like land brings us to soundscape.

Is the metaphor soundscape-landscape superficial? Or is something substantive shared between this kind of music and a bio-geological terra firma? In other words, what makes something a scape? We should be careful here. Landscape is one of those metaphors so broad as to be applicable to almost anything. The body is a landscape (as Terry Tempest Williams has emphasized); the internet is a landscape (we’ll get to this); anything from markets to love affairs is a landscape, taken in the generic sense of a great expanse whose full complexity is impossible to anticipate. I would offer, however, that a soundscape—even more than a song—is a particularly good model/analogue to land. It earns its name.

We know, instinctively, what differentiates a soundscape from a score or soundtrack. Intentionality recedes. The structure does not feel overdetermined. There is a level of (seeming) randomness, arbitrariness, and asymmetry. What it shares with landscape is a layered, irregular, accidental expansiveness that is nevertheless (almost inexplicably) orderly and beautiful. It does not tell a story.

To me, the best thing about land is that it is meaningless. This other land writing is closer to soundscape. It is closer in that it denatures the meaningfulness of referential language, but also in that it is a soundscape—a composition in sound.

Sound rules the domain of affect. If the function of land writing is to take us there, where ‘there’ is no longer a real location but an unreal one, we want whatever means is best for taking you there (somewhere). Beyond the obvious statement that sound/music affect us, I would emphasize the capacity of music to induce a state—for example, the trance state of dance music. Dance music is not soundscape per se, but it is on the continuum, where the relative absence of narrative and emphasis on pattern/repetition produce much the same effect. In a sonic dimension, this new writing would do more directly and shamelessly what land literature has done all along: induce a LAND TRANCE.

Here, language is denatured in the direction of sound. And text shares its environment (the composition) with other species: synth tones, field recordings, piano samples, etc. As a model of the plural ecosystem, it goes without saying that a mix is better than script.

Another way of conceptualizing this is along the spectrum signifier—signified. Roland Barthes, the great theorist of the text of pleasure (of affect), envisioned a hypothetical “plural text.” The literary work becomes a “galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds.” This plural text would be multidirectional, with many possible points of entry. It would be expansive, associative, and playful without a strict agenda of meaning. (The internet, in certain ways, comes closest to this vision). Barthes was obsessed with the ascension of the signifier—the visceral word-object—to a position of dominance over its traditionally privileged counterpart, the signified or meaning of the word. Literature’s evolution toward the plural text would occur as the triumph of play, sound, feeling, pleasure over meaning and reference.

To work with sound and write in the register of music—the epitome of an affective, non-referential, signifier-dominant “text” of pure feeling—is to play on that team. A land collage is not this theoretical plural text, but it is perhaps a “semi-plural” text that courts ambiguity, multiple meanings, and a general unmeaning in the direction of the signifier. Land is meaningless. It demands a literature of meaninglessness.

Great Salt Lake is not an incidental subject for this treatment. It is an unreal landscape in its own right. Many of the authors above are desperate to convey just how weird and unlikely the place is. It has been likened to an alien planet, and indeed, the Saints who fled the Midwest to establish their millenarian utopia were bound for a wilderness-planet few white people had ever dreamed of, much less seen. This, too, is not incidental. In the 19th century, the Great Basin remained one of the least known and scarcely inhabited regions on earth because… it’s a basin! A vast desert bed with no outbound watercourses and no connection to the sea.

The Mormons made it their destination because it was so alien and unwanted. And the blankness of this bizarre feature—a silent desert sea of undrinkable water—made it a screen for the projections of settler fantasy. It was imagined as an exotic retreat, and various beachside resorts operated in the early decades. All were destroyed by the temperamental old lake. It has been imagined as pristine and pastoral, which it is not; and as a limitless source for resource extraction, which it is not. Indeed, the whole region was imagined as an agrarian paradise. Today that fantasy is nearing its end. Overconsumption of water promises to transform Great Salt Lake into a toxic dirt pit. What blows off it will annihilate the kingdom for good.

A better tribute to this mean, beautiful, gentle, wrathful saline pool would divest it of meaning and honor it for what it is: an ecstatic void.

We have thought about conventional land writing, how it purports to recreate an actual place, and how it instead generates an unreal hallucination, a virtual mini-realm. We have conceived of an openly hallucinatory writing that imitates landscape and builds its own virtual terrain to induce a land trance. But there is another kind of writing, one that stands in a radically different relation to its subject.

In a sense, code delivers on the naïve promise of descriptive language: it creates the very thing it describes. Describing and building are one. The internet is a massive, unfathomable, impossibly weird landscape built of code. A website like this one is a virtual space in the sense of being disembodied, but it is definitely not a hallucination. Its substrate is not the imagination or the brain, but the screen and the microprocessor. We should be careful, then, about exaggerating its distinction from a “real” landscape, since this substrate is every bit as physical as a slab of limestone. But for now, the cost imposed in exchange for the remarkable efficacy of code is a drastic reduction of embodiment.

The increasing sophistication of virtual environments, and especially of virtual reality and gaming, hints at the ambition of this new language: to make the real. I doubt this will go to plan. After all, the real environments we now inhabit, the landscapes like Great Salt Lake upon which our lives depend, have the advantage of 13 billion years of R&D. Godspeed, Meta. But we should also take the immersive potential of virtual landscapes seriously, and above all, question where the real ends and the rest begins.