Hello, manilla_rocks,
I’m glad respond to you directly. I have enjoyed your many, thoughtful posts.
I’ll come back to your question whether the “plains” refers to Ennis’ and Jack’s sexuality at the end of this comment.
I want to quote again (see my Reply #20 to this topic) a passage from another of Annie Proulx’s stories that I think spells out the significance of landscape in Brokeback mountain.
You grasped the tragic drift of half of the following quotation, manila_rocks, simply and elequently when you said, “all of life is about flow."
But the passage below implies that the flow of Ennis’ and Jack’s life is lived out in a “fixed mass” of landscape in which the tragedies of people count for nothing.
Note allusions to fixity that occur in the following passage:
wind from the turning of the earth
grassy plain everlasting
stones like fallen cities
the flaring roll of sky
nor cruelty, no accident nor murder… delays the flood of morning light
Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light
You stand there, braced. Cloud Shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country-indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky-provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut.
Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti’d celebration of athletic victory on bridge overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not own us much beyond that.*
(I can’t help but believe that Annie Proulx’s “wild country-indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting” in this context is a poke at the relatively banal “Purple mountain majesties, above the fruited plain” from ‘America the Beautiful’.)
Brokeback Mountain is about the flow of human life seen against the fixity of the landscape.
Ennis’ and Jack’s tragedy hurts us because, seen against the landscape, they both are so ephemeral.
manila_rocks, to your question, Is the plain a reference to Ennis’ and Jack’s sexuality.You got me thinking about a reference to the prairie/plain when Ennis passes the little cemetery, leaving Jack’s parents’ house (not in the movie, but in the story):
...a tiny fence square on the welling prairie…, and (Ennis) didn’t want to know Jack was going in there, to be buried in the grieving plain.\
The grieving plain and welling prairie, a pale alternative to Brokeback Mountain, have to serve Ennis for joy and release: the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.
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* Prologue of Annie Proulx, ‘People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water’ (“Close Range: Wyoming Stories):
