“I didn’t clock the line ‘the blameless mountain’ the first time I read Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015). Or if I did, I didn’t write it down in my notebook—which is how I remember most things. It was the second time I read Nelson’s book that the phrase made me stop and go back to read it again. The context of ‘the blameless mountain’ quote in The Argonauts is in reference to a ‘yes on prop 8’ sign Nelson sees ‘jabbed into an otherwise bald and beautiful mountain.’ It’s a small throwaway line—and not at all the point of what Nelson is getting at in that section—but it stopped me long enough to reread it and then write it down in my notebook. It wasn’t only the context that struck me, it was also the concept of a blameless mountain, of blameless nature—and that which we inflict upon it.
“At the time that I came across that line in Nelson’s book, I was working on an essay for my publisher about where the ideas for stories come from. I used as my starting point in that essay an anecdote about how Anton Chekhov responded to the question of where he got the ideas for his stories by pointing to an ashtray and saying, ‘Tomorrow I’ll write a story called the ashtray.’ And so that day I was reading The Argonauts, I found myself pointing to the phrase ‘the blameless mountain’ and saying to no one, ‘Tomorrow I’ll write a story called the blameless mountain.’ And that’s just what I did.
“The film footage I used here was found in the public domain, on the Internet Archive, as Sports Review. 16mm archival footage, Middlebury College (1948). The piano music was recorded by me on a phone.”
