Night of Stone II

An environment eternal:  this place of water in the desert attracted travelers, seekers, through thousands of years of solidity and change… Seeking resolve, resolve in seeing with the night of stone.  A mineral landscape of erosion, adherence and deposition.  

Then, the cutting through, the exposure of the light in the stone. The old atomic knowing.  The night of stone wavers, shadows the inevitable departure.  

Sparks, marks, made, signaling to and from, to and fro, involute, the universe, Indra's jeweled net.

CODA

The Tao is infinite, eternal.

Why is it eternal?

It was never born;

thus it can never die.

Why is it infinite?

It has no desires for itself;

thus it is present for all beings.

The Master stays behind;

that is why she is ahead.

She is detached from all things;

that is why she is one with them.

Because she has let go of herself,

she is perfectly fulfilled.

TAO TE CHING

—Translated by Stephen Mitchell

NOTES

—Photos above from the rock rim pictured in the July 21 2026 post:  The Night of Stone.  Harney County, Oregon, with good fortune for fellow travelers, photos by DB. 

Hands, Reaching

Consider the splayed human hand, dipped in ochre or paint and pressed against any firm surface-cave wall, church wall, school wall, rock wall. … this universal hand mark … presented at full stretch … is radiant, reaching out from its singular base to establish the eternally mysterious space of just where it is. It confirms presence while not engaged or proclaimed in directing or manipulating anything at all. It is empty-handed presence.
    —Susan Murphy

How can it be that we only live once— 

the body constantly wishing for 

what only the hands can do: reach 

and grasp, reach and grasp. Something 

like the foaling of eternity, born 

and reborn on spindles. 

    —Keetje Kuipers

NOTES

—Hand prints on stone, Owens River Valley, Inyo County, CA. Photos: DB, 2026

—Keetje Kuipers, from the poem For All The Dead Lovelies from her collection The Keys to The Jail (2014)

—Susan Murphy, an Australian Zen teacher, from A Fire Runs Through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis — Teachings on Earth, Mind & Not Knowing (2023). 

—Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, June 1944. From Mon Cher Amour: The Love Letters of Albert Camus and Maria Casarès, 1944–1959 (trans from the French, 2026)

CODA

When someone has a soul, they tend to call what frustrates them lucidity, and what eludes them, truth. But that lucidity is just as blind as anything else. There is only one type of clairvoyance: the kind that wants to grasp at happiness. And I know that, even though it might be short-lived, endangered or fragile, happiness awaits us, if we reach out our hands. But we must reach out our hands. 

    —Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, June 1944.

(Maria Casarès and Albert Camus met in Paris on June 6, 1944, the day the Allies landed in Normandy. She was 21; he was 30. His last letter to her was December 30, 1959. On January 4, 1960 Albert Camus was killed in a car accident on his way back to Paris.)

The Night of Stone

Rock rim exposes, shadows, faces south.  This place of water in desert attracted travelers, seekers, in thousands of years of solidity and change.  I slept once on this rim. A rough and lucid night as I dreamed of the ancient ones in visitation. An allowance emerged from their wisdom.
To make pictures of the glyphs, the markings, aims to respect the deep intent of their presence. As they — the makers and the markings — invoke the spirit of place. Perhaps seeking resolve in seeing with the night of stone. In the light of day.

 

This collection of images considers one section of complexity of rock and petroglyphs at this place of power.  Moving in closer, then moving away.   

CODA
From the Chilean master Pablo Neruda:
 
To harden the earth
the rocks took charge:
instantly
they grew wings:
the rocks
that soared:
the survivors
flew up
the lightning bolt,
screamed in the night,
a watermark,
a violet sword,
a meteor.
The succulent
sky
had not only clouds,
not only space smelling of oxygen,
but an earthly stone
flashing here and there
changed into a dove,
changed into a bell,
into immensity, into a piercing
wind:
into a phosphorescent arrow,
into salt of the sky.

—Pablo Neruda, from Stones of the Sky. 
(1970, trans James Nolan 1987, Copper Canyon Press)

Ovoid as Vulva, Abstracted

Will our life not be a tunnel 
between two vague clarities?

Or will it not be a clarity 
between two dark triangles?
    —Pablo Neruda

Georgia Lee considers the pecked ovoid:  “a type of petroglyph, like the pit and groove, is found in many other areas. They are generally believed to be abstracted vulva signs.”

Two photos above:  Death Valley. 

  Two photos below:   Mono County.  

Lee notes: “According to McGowan, they probably are the most common and most universally recognized female fertility symbol.  Not all vulva signs are pecked ovoids; they take other forms, such as horseshoe shapes, wedge shapes, and bisected ovals.”

And further, citing Lee:  “Such symbols were more than simply ‘sexual’ depictions. As Marshack pointed out, depictions of the vulva became, over time, isolated, abstracted, and loaded with symbolic meaning. … Thus, rather than a narrow symbol of eroticism or anatomical study, vulva symbols had a more comprehensive aspect; they stood for concepts, stories, myths, processes.”

How does an image abstracted bear such a weight of symbolic meaning?

First, an embracing definition of abstraction:  The result of mentally abstracting an idea; the product of any mental process involving a synthesis of: separation, despecification, generalization, and ideation in any of a number of combinations. (Wiktionary)

Two photos, above and below:  El Paso Mountains 

Second, Charline von Heyl, a German abstract painter, emphasizes, almost Rilke-like, the force of thing itself:   “the ability of an abstract image to function as a fact—not as an illustration, representation, or evocation but with the force of the thing itself, be it a feeling that comes on sharp and sudden, an emotion that seeps in and aches, or an idea that generates an entire architecture of forms to be understood, and then only fleetingly, as the scaffolding falls away.” —Artforum

 

NOTES
—Pablo Neruda, from The Book of Questions, trans William O’Daly.
—Georgia Lee, "The Rock Art of Soxtonocmu, an Inland Chumash Village" in the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, 1981 3(1).
Available:  https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8pt4v2wk
—Kaelen Wilson-Goldie reviewing Charline von Heyl, Nov 2013, in Artforum.
—Also:  https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2025/01/tufa.html
—Photos:   Douglas Beauchamp, Mono and Inyo counties, Eastern California
—Above: Charline von Heyl painting. Oil/acrylic/charcoal on canvas; 82x78 inches. Blacksmile: “An abstract painting characterized by layered shapes and surface tensions rather than direct representation.” 

Solstice Dreaming

I dreamed among the ice caps long ago,
Ranging with the sun on the inward slope,
Down the wheel of seasons and the solstices.
                —N Scott Momaday from Prairie Hymn

Summer Solstice 2026: A watery dream accelerates as the ice melts. This Earth, a place of stone, knows molten density. Knows solar intensity. Thinking to and fro, this boat rocking through gateless sky. What do we know?

 

Photo: Petroglyph, detail. High Lakes, Lake County, Oregon. Douglas Beauchamp. 

 

CODA
What follows the light is what precedes it:
the moment of balance, of dark equivalence.
            —Louise Glück from the poem Solstice