MATRIX

The sea, turned to stone, is laughing
a last laugh made of waves.
— Federico García Lorca

TUFA. Tufa boulder formed under the waters of a pluvial lake in northwest Nevada; these deeply carved petroglyphs undated.

SERPENTINE. Coastal boulder in Oregon; various deep carvings.

SCHIST. Deep groves forming ovals and circles on schist boulders embedded in the rolling hills east of the Russian River CA. 

SANDSTONE. Deep cups and carvings on boulder once along lower Rogue River; twice removed, now in a park.

MARBLE.  Golden sun softened by the sand of time, eastern California.

GRANITE.  Cupped and carved boulder near the Pacific ocean, California.

FELDSPAR.  Crystals embedded in an igneous matrix with swirling carvings, on a wave-worn boulder, edge of a desiccating pluvial lake in Oregon. 

BASALT.  Completely patinaed carvings on this chocolate boulder in eastern Oregon.

ANDESITE.  A massive andesite glacial erratic in NW Washington, carvings obscured by mosses and leaves. 

TUFF. Carvings on face of cliff of welded tuff in eastern California.

In the beginning all was Molten. Caressing, congealing Creation arrives. Stone appears, birthing Earth. Restless Movement brings Life to all things. Beings wake, blink, consent. Carrying stone, placing stone, carving rock in the Telling time of prayer. The carving of the petroglyph, a fleeting phase in the life of the stone. Yes, the stone, alive. Actor and witness. Change, the constant forgiving. In the faraway end… all is Molten.   

NOTES
— Federico García Lorca (Spanish, 1898-1936) from the poem Moonbow.
— Photos by DB. Future posts on this blog will be devoted to each of these petroglyph, emphasizing eco-context, silences, and duration through time and beyond.  With gratitude to the unknown carvers.

CODA
Is life immortal? Don't ask life,
for it doesn't even know what life is.
We are the ones who know
that one day it too must die and return
to the beginning, the inertia of the origin.
The end of yesterday, today, and tomorrow,
the dissipation of time
and of nothing, its opposite.
Then will there be a then?
will the primigenius spark
light the matrix of the worlds,
a perpetual re-beginning of a senseless whirling?
No one answers, no one knows.
We only know that to live is to live for.

    — Octavio Paz (Mexican 1914-1998)
        from the long poem Response and Reconciliation
        (trans Eliot Weinberger)

Erractics: Three Puget Sound Petroglyph Boulders

… pictures and poetry and music are not only marks in time but marks through time, of their own time and ours, not antique or historical, but living as they ever did, exuberantly, untired. —Jeanette Winterson

 

Thinking of rocks as verbs is like seeing a painting, not merely as an object that is, but as the manifestation of the motions that led to its creation. —Marcia Bjornerud

The three most significant petroglyph boulders in southern Puget Sound are tidal, today at sea level. All three are glacial erratics, boulders moving hundreds of miles on ice sheets, arriving on these shores millennia before the carvers marked them. Two are granite erratics; another (Agate Point) is fine-grained gray-green sandstone.

Surging tides, flowing water, wave action, and, in one case the physical relocation of the boulder, continue to reshape the markings and how they are seen and imagined.  Researchers have also affected physical change through rubbings, castings, and removal of barnacles - indeed, barnacles for decades have encrusted the Agate Point boulder (below) to near obscurity. (First photo: backside looking toward the sound)

 

(Above: T-shirt images carvings known from earlier studies.) 

 

The Suquamish and Squaxin Island tribes have more recently taken strong public interest in the cultural importance of the boulders.
Below, one of three boulders, originally from Harstine Island, called the Love Rock by the tribe, is now a centerpiece of the Squaxin Island Tribe’s Veterans Memorial near Shelton.

And now my thought roams far
beyond my hear; my mind
flows out to the water,
soars above the whale’s path
to the wide world’s corners
and returns with keen desire;
the lone bird, flying, shrieks
and leads the willing soul
to the whale-road, and over
the tumbling of the waves.
— The Seafarer (Anglo-Saxon)

NOTES
— Photos: DB, several years ago during tidal explorations. Defined by tides through time, the clarity and power of these faces and eyes and other forms convey a compelling presence  … living as they ever have.
— Jeanette Winterson in Art Objects Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery (1997)

— Marcia Bjornerud, in Wrinkled Time: The persistence of past worlds on earth from Emergence Magazine, V.5 (2024)

— Further: Marian Smith (1946), Edward Meade (1971), Beth Hill and Ray Hill (1974), Richard McClure (1978), Klaus Wellman (1979), and Daniel Leen (1981) have published photos or drawings of the petroglyphs; Leen’s overview in particular is a considered and comprehensive summary.  
 

CODA
Erratic Boulder.
 

What an extraordinary place
to settle on,
on a ledge, poised
on the brink.
Don't you value your own success?
— Olav H Hauge (Norwegian)

HART :: FIRE

INCIWEB file photo

Fire and heat provide modes of explanation in the most varied domains, because they have been for us the occasion for unforgettable memories, for simple and decisive personal experiences. 

Fire is thus a privileged phenomenon which can explain anything. If all that changes slowly may be explained by life, all that changes quickly is explained by fire. 

Fire is the ultra-living element. It is intimate and it is universal. It lives in our heart. It lives in the sky. —Gaston Bachelard

In August the Warner Peak Fire swept over Hart Mountain burning across 66,000 acres of Hart Mountain National Antelope Refuge.

All significant concentrations of rock art on the Refuge were outside the fire zone. 186,000 acres of the Refuge were protected from the fire.

These photos show examples from some of the several concentrations of rock art on the Refuge.

Above, three bear paw glyphs.

The fire resulted in the closure of 82,000 acres of the Refuge until June 2025. Details:
https://www.fws.gov/refuge/hart-mountain-national-antelope

 
https://www.fws.gov/press-release/2024-08/wildfire-damage-forces-parts-oregon-refuge-remain-closed

Map shows extent of the fire. 

NOTES
—Gaston Bachelard, from Chapter One: Fire and Respect in The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938, French)
—Fire effects on rock images and similar cultural resources (2012). US Forest Service Report available as a PDF: https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/40430
 

What Lizard Forgot

You look ahead, up ahead is fate. 

—Anzhelina Polonskaya

 

Lizard does recall!  The Great Remembering. The Vast Cycles.

“… global warming of more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end … faces as much as 3.1C (5.6F) of warming … prevent a cascade of dangerous … hottest in recorded … 57.1 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide … collectively a cut of 42 … 57 percent by 2035 for any hope … 20 largest economies…” —From news agencies per UN October 2024

Time measured in the counting.
The stories they don’t tell.
The brilliant bones.
Scattered shards of light.
 —DB

We suddenly discovered the sun, and we were vouchedsafed white stones and a dusky and wild body. —Anzhelina Polonskaya

Yes, we are envoys of a flat earth, our only vocabulary is antonyms. —Ostap Slyvynsky

Who needs TV drama? This is life in the volcano. This is as cold as it gets. —Meg Kearney

NOTES
—Anzhelina Polonskaya: You look… from the poem Calculator; We suddenly… from the poem Saga, both in A Voice: Selected Poems 2004. (trans from Russian by Andrew Wachtel). Anzhelina Polonskaya lives in Germany; her poems are prohibited in Russia.
—Meg Kearney from the poem Living in the Volcano in her collection Home By Now 2009.
—Kateryna Kalytko and Ostap Slyvynsky excerpts from the anthology In the Hour Of War:  Poetry from Ukraine 2023, tr. by Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky

PHOTOS Oregon’s Northern Great Basin, October 2024. Click to enlarge

CODA
Who knew? Everyone knew.
Inevitability spreads like nuclear radiation,
breaking down words …
It's easier, now, that the war has started. Easier, after all
now. How clear is our past, with its mistakes of tone,
its sincerity, its
air.
—Kateryna Kalytko

 

FIRE : Murderers Creek

Murderers Creek, a tributary to the wild and scenic South Fork of the John Day River, lies  at the heart of the Rail Ridge Fire: 175,000 acres September/October this year and not fully contained as of this writing.

Murderers Creek, a 19th century naming of a valley in traditional Northern Paiute country. The Northern Paiute arriving several centuries before Euro-American incursion, conflicts, and displacements began 200 years ago. The Creek’s name holds diverse tellings of origins.  What is to be believed?

Indigenous Peoples’ Day, recognized on October 14 in Oregon, offers a time to reflect on dramatic changes in the lifeways of the Northern Paiute beginning with the Hudson Bay fur traders in the 1820-1830s.  Murderers Creek figures prominently, yet elusively, in the 1850-1870s — an era of movement, mining, fighting, tracking, killing, capturing, and claiming in Oregon. Including the infamous and devastating Paiute War, 1864-1868. Well-documented, by Anglos — military, newspapers, settlers reports, histories, etc. — in various ways and styles.

Another kind of document:  I speculate that some of the many rock paintings in places of movement and conflict in Central and SE Oregon were made during that era, 1840s-1870s.  This may apply to some of Murderers Creek’s complex of rock paintings by indigenous people. 

Unusual image combines incising and abrading, appears to intentionally connect with the visible power of the natural stone.

Black grid/net: origin and intent unknown

NOTES
— Rail Ridge Fire Sep-Oct 2024 LINK with maps and updates
— Aurora Borealis over the Rail Ridge Fire and other photos LINK
— Photos above May 2018. Click to enlarge. Feel free to inquire. Most of these images, in Grant County, documented by the intrepid Lorings in the 1960s.

— Murderers Creek also imaged and discussed July 20 2023: https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2023/07/beneath-us-other-order-already-moves.html

 

CODA

        The Valley of Birds

We'll lock the door
and head for the valley of birds.
Hold on,
while I douse the fire
to ensure that no one
can block our path.

Sit down for a minute and rest
by the tree where the doves sing.
And if I don't appear,
don't turn around,
don't let out a scream.
Let the silence protect you.

If I don't appear
it means the fire is unquenchable.
But a swift is flying circles
above you!
Lift your head up
and watch it.
        — Anzhelina Polonskaya