13 February 2025

MARBLE

we live in narrow realms
by necessity
by chance
by the unthought will of an unknown star

Petroglyphs carved into marble in the now of millennia. Peoples living, moving, north south east west.  In the eastern shadows and waters of the Sierras west of Death Valley.  Many carvings destroyed in the white settler era by mining the marble stone.  Thought gestures of exacting desire — carving, mining — an extraction, intention, abandon.  Dust and starry skies prevail.


 

25 January 2025

TUFA

Tufas, like mineral flowers, emerge, protrude, and fragment as a lake recedes.  Bud, blossom, seed, left high and dry.  Tufas congeal in crenate patterns, constellated, crystallized, caverned, calcified froth. 

This tufa boulder formed under the waters of a bay of Pleistocene Lake Lahontan in northwest Nevada.  An immersed spring emits dissolved calcium which combines with carbon in the lake water to form calcium carbonate into a sort of crystalline structure, which is then eroded. These deeply carved petroglyphs, vulva-like shapes and linear incisings, are undated.
The petroglyphs on this boulder appear as emblems of desire, as invocations, perhaps entreating sexual fecundity, necessary replenishment. In these landscapes as marvelous, saturated dream-space, I am reminded of Max Ernst’s frottages and textured paintings.  
The boulders' location is proximate to the justly famous, oldest dated petroglyphs in North America, also carved on tufa. Those dated petroglyphs look to the east over Winnemucca Dry Lake, east of Pyramid Lake - both remnant lakes of pluvial Lake Lahontan. The Winnemucca petroglyphs were determined by Larry Benson and associates in 2013 to date to at least 10,500 years ago.
Another carved tufa boulder near the spring.
A very hot spring, once at the bottom of a pluvial (Pleistocene) lake, located on the playa near the tufa boulders.

CODA
We all belong not just to our present moment, nor to the place in which we find ourselves at that moment, but to a far greater system of changes which have occurred throughout Earth's history and will continue to occur long into the future. The present convulsions of the planet are the result of the whole Earth system trying, in response to terrible pressures, to shift itself, often violently, into a new set of alignments, and we are part of those changes. We are the weather, and the water; we are the lionfish, too, changing our environment as we are changed by it. This realization can be humbling. and it can be hopeful too. We belong to the whole timescale of history.
—James Bridle, from Here Come The Lionfish,  Emergence Magazine, Vol. 5: Time (2024)

Below: Max Ernst: The Gray Forest (1927)


04 January 2025

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)


17 December 2024

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)

27 November 2024

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