Rock Varnish

The extraordinary patience of things! 

—Robinson Jeffers

In particular I will mention Rock Varnish.

Carving, hammering, abrading —  the making of petroglyphs — interacts with layers of being and becoming by cutting through.  To reveal.  From within and through a thin “patina” layer the rock-art design motif emerges.

This rock varnish, compounded by dust or clay adhering to stone, accumulates and concentrates manganese and iron. The characteristic rich blacks, browns, reds of exposed basalt. Cyanobacteria find a home here as do a variety of micro-fungi.  Tiny lichen often complicate this living surface. A microcosm of Gaia. 

Time stands still having no place else to go, rather here, deposited, metallic sheen glistening in the slow eye of duration.

The English words rock and varnish yearn to grasp this living changing realm. Yet the petroglyph as action, as image, transforms our understanding of formation.  The inspirited expanse of the matrix. Earth matter.  A marked language decipherable with guess and luck in the context of changing light and weathers.   Allowing for a certain grace of presence.

CODA

As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

—Robinson Jeffers, Carmel Point

Photos:  Douglas Beauchamp, Oregon's Northern Great Basin; High Lakes region

Snowfall High Lakes Country

Predictably, the first frost arrived
simplifying what we saw. 
The atmosphere began to hibernate 
into the realm of hypothesis. 
    —Luljeta Lleshanaku

A Last Look Back

Things change behind my back.
The starting snow I was just watching
has escaped into the past.

Well, not the past, but the part of the world
that surrounds the moment at hand.

That's why, whenever I see
animal tracks in a light snow like this,
I think of footnotes.

So strange, to inhabit a space
and then leave it vacant, standing open.

Each change in me is a stone step
beneath the blur of snow.
In spring the sharp edges cut through.

When I look back, I see my former selves,
numerous as the trees.
    —Chase Twichell

NOTES
—Luljeta Lleshanaku. trans from Albanian by Shpresa Qatipi from the poem Over the Icy Magma of Your Gray Curiosity, in her collection Fresco (2002)
—Chase Twichell, A Last Look Back from her collection The Snow Watcher (1998)
 

 

Podcast: Rock Art of Oregon

And a man walks through the field

Like a Voice like Breath

amidst the trees, waiting to hear 

their Names for the first time.

                —Gennady Aygi

...

The Rock Art Podcast, hosted by Dr. Alan Garfinkel since 2020, is part of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Recorded and posted November 2025:

Douglas Beauchamp and the Rock Art of Oregon - Rock Art 154

https://www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/rockart/154

"In this episode, Alan is joined by Douglas Beauchamp, an arts consultant and photographer based in Oregon, whose work explores the enduring power of rock art in shaping cultural landscapes. Douglas examines how ancient engravings and visual imagery continue to speak to contemporary audiences, bridging archaeology, public art, and the study of visual memory. Through his photography and field documentation, he illuminates the ways ancient art interacts with the landscape and modern viewers."

Appreciation to Alan and the staff of the Archaeology Podcast Network for their commitment to helping voice the diverse endeavors of archaeology.
LINKS

Archaeology Podcast Network

https://www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/

Rock Art Podcast

https://www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/rockart

Douglas Beauchamp and the Rock Art of Oregon - Rock Art 154

Audio podcast also available on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xypEwt3M5cs&list=PLyvgo3cTFkH_BgKqcgZXjzwTg9T5g7rrv&index=1

 

Repetition in Modoc Country

The cycles come ‘round, ‘round again in Tule basin. 
As the seasons of Lost River swell and fall. 
Modoc. The Fierce Battle for Homelands. 1873. 
Did not end, has not. 

from there where stars are forever we are deserts mountains oceans
they repeat us we repeat them
a continuum of repetition is our existence
a continuum of repetition is their existence
deep into day and night beyond time
deep into night and day beyond time
—Simon J Ortiz

Click on petroglyph photos to view detail

    "Or maybe it's the repetition. Maybe you’ve been looking at this stuff
for so long that you've read all this into it. And talking with other people who've been doing the same thing."
    "I've tried to convince myself of that. I've wanted to believe it, simply in order to let the thing go. But then I go back and look at it again, and there's that sense of ... I don't know. Of an opening into something. Universe? Narrative?"
—William Gibson, in Pattern Recognition

 

To turn across this aching world, this place who repeats, ever emerging, ever dissolving…

CODA
AGAIN: IN BREAKS
BETWEEN SLEEP

what watches
always ceases:

and day! and world! . .

unique is
the unending —
is it along its visage that
the soul slides:

like dust! —

and the world of the watcher
does not always open! —

and the shifting dust:

not illuminated! —

is shed

—Gennady Aygi, a native Chuvash writer who often wrote in Russian.

Infinities

There is no prophecy, only memory.

What happens tomorrow

has happened a thousand years ago

the same way, to the same end—

and does my ancient memory

say that your false memory

is the history of the featherhearted bird

transformed into a crow atop a marble mountain?

—Luljeta Lleshanaku

Complexity of the Center (click to enlarge)

Bear Paws ... going there

Center: bighorn sheep motif (faint, recent); below: old dot/pits

To reflect on this Indigenous Peoples Day, here marks in and of stone, rim of an infinity playa, the Hart Mountain block-fault escarpment looming east of Warner Lakes basin.

Photos of petroglyphs color and contrast altered to draw forth the hammered and abraded shapes and forms.  Some thousands of years in age, some recent centuries, often side by side.  Making space a lived place. In the passing. In the infolding now.

A moment without weight or duration,

a moment outside the moment:

thought sees, our eyes think.

Triangles, cubes, the sphere, the pyramid

and the other geometrical figures

thought and drawn by mortal eyes

but which have been here since the beginning,

are, still legible, the world, its secret writing,

the reason and the origin of the turning of things,

the axis of the changes, the unsupported pivot

that rests on itself, a reality without a shadow.

The poem, the piece of music, the theorem,

unpolluted presences born from the void,

are delicate structures

built over an abyss:

infinities fit into their finite forms,

and chaos too is ruled by their hidden symmetry.

—Octavio Paz

NOTES

—Luljeta Lleshanaku, an Albanian poet, from her poem Memory in her collection Fresco (New Directions)

—Octavio Paz, from the poem Response and Reconciliation (trans Spanish by Eliot Weinberger)