Nuance and Immediacy v.2020

The dramatic prevalence of the image over the written word in our present moment is akin to a return to the Lascaux caves: immediacy has its advantages, but nuance isn’t one of them. -Claire Messud, Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, 2020

2020 as narrative, as a story of starts and stops. The gaps where memory seeks the link to before and after. How to picture this? Does the word immediacy imply a fleeting lack of depth? Does absence of nuance suggest a claustrophobic space? To me a picture can reverberate, a sonic, temporal extension of the contingent place of the moment. Modulation shapes nexus, rain drops begin to fall, a toss of pebbles onto the shining, intersecting ripples across a stilling pond, a cave wall flickers in firelight.

Along the urban edges during my walkabouts I take-in instances of graffiti — spray-can writing/marking/painting — which I will name chromotope, morphing from chronotope to extend an obscure and complicated metaphor, convergent chromings, images rippling. A year disappears, time becomes space, folds into place. Nuance? Dunno. 2021 may tell…

Note: In general I am fascinated by spray-can “throw-ups” (large, bold, mural-like letters, words, names), especially when layered. (I do not like generic tagging.) By moving in closely and photoing detail-as-rectangle an abstract image emerges. This form of appropriation creates a new apprehension of color, texture, and depth.

Note2: Claire Messud, an accomplished and prolific novelist and critic, in her essay, from which the above epigraph appears, writes: "The written or printed word enables the transmission of thoughts and experiences across centuries and cultures. … The dissemination of the written word, from the time of Gutenberg, has enabled us to tell stories of great depth and complexity, and to share our analyses of these stories. I don’t just mean literature: history, too, is the analysis of human stories; as are psychology, anthropology, law, and philosophy."

Note3: I was drawn in, intrigued, by Messud's characters, her style of storytelling, in her novel The Woman Upstairs, 2014.

After all your "pilgrimage?"

They build these monuments as an aid to memory. What DNA are you? What will remind you to be kind after all your walking, after all your ''pilgrimage?'' 

In the beginning was the center. In the beginning was a seeker. Yet maybe something could happen to you, naked of light in the middle of your life the Kedu plain now raw stars glowing. Trespass here. Symbols on a wall say Stick with me, in the long run, they say. Come in they say: pacify, magnetize, increase, destroy, Me. 

—Anne Waldman, from her poem Diamond Matrix World

(Italics in the original)

Photo: Petroglyph (detail), boulder outcrop, seasonal creek pool. Oregon's Basin and Range, 2019

Raven and the unmade undrawn unseen unmarked

how is it 

possible the world still exists, as 

it begins to take form there, in the not 

being, there is once then there is the 

big vocabulary, loosed, like 

a jay's song thrown down when the 

bird goes away, cold mornings, 

hauling dawn away with it, leaving 

grackle and crow in sun—they have 

known what to find in the unmade 

undrawn unseen unmarked and

dragged it into here—that it be 

visible. 

—Jorie Graham [1]

Corvids at sunrise above a creek with petroglyphs, NW Nevada.

“Ravens parallel great apes in physical and social cognitive skills” is the title of a paper published December 2020 [2]. The authors in their conclusion:

Our results suggest that ravens are not only social intellects but have also developed sophisticated cognitive skills for dealing with the physical world. Furthermore, their cognitive development was very rapid and their cognitive performance was on par with adult great apes’ cognitive performance across the same cognitive scales.

I have watched ravens and crows — the Corvids — in wildly variegated domains: desert, thick forest, snow field, urban alley, lakeshore, beach dune, roof-top. These ever-alert songbirds seem to continually sense a surrounding multiverse and with astute ability and distinct personality respond accordingly.

In this time of humans living with a compulsively accelerating planet, the list of losses and fears lengthens and expands sideways. In the post-hominid era, many species will emerge resilient. Raven, the Trickster of the Pacific Northwest, clearly among them.

Juvenile corvids eye the petroglyph explorer, near Abert Rim, SE Oregon 

Notes

[1] Jorie Graham, the concluding lines of the final poem “Mother’s Hands Drawing Me” in Fast, her 2017 collection of poetry.
[2] Ravens parallel great apes in physical and social cognitive skills.

Pika, S., Sima, M.J., Blum, C.R. et al. Ravens parallel great apes in physical and social cognitive skills. Sci Rep 10, 20617 (2020). Scientific Reports volume 10, Article number: 20617 (2020) Published: 10 December 2020. Open Access: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-77060-8

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William Kittredge, 1932-2020

Owning It All was called a book of essays, Hole in the Sky was called a memoir, and Who Owns the West? was called a meditation. They are all evidence of trying to think about what I believe, and trying to leave some residue that might be useful to others. They are texts written over texts, as this is. Ideas live in the mind, and evolve through complexities like creatures. ...

Warner Valley, tucked against an enormous reach of Great Basin sagebrush and lava rock desert in southeastern Oregon and northern Nevada, is a hidden world. Landlocked waters flow from snowy mountains to the west but don't find a way out to the sea. ... Warner Valley is the main staging ground for my imagination.

—William Kittredge, 1999, in Taking Care: Thoughts on Storytelling and Belief

Warner Valley (left: Crump Lake; far right: Greaser Rim) from Lynch's Rim, Spring 2015.

(click to enlarge) Photo: Douglas Beauchamp

Monolith discovered Oregon Cascades!

Monolith discovered Oregon Cascades! (AP, Dec 1.)

Fieldwork, applying a computational photography technique, Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), has demonstrated this “object” is composed of a metallic oxide of Aurum (gold), unknown on Earth.  

Meteoritic origin is a presumed, after initial analysis, or perhaps delivered to Earth by asteroid impacts during a heavy bombardment. Conversely, a planetesimal origin is possible, since these solid objects exist in protoplanetary disks and debris disks. Without contacting or removing it, dubbed Mazama Monolith, mass, depth and impact trajectory are not known.

An XREF remote digital scan of the interior revealed rippling and fragmentation that may have occurred as the object entered the Earth’s dense nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere. No radioactivity has been recorded, though sensors are monitoring anomalous vibrations in continuous emission.

A second now-popular hypothesis: the object was placed by an alien species, with various intents and purposes, remains highly speculative. Two other “theories" lacking credibility, here so noted: one, the "shamanic” theory, the monolith is a virtual creation, a holographic thought-wave, hence explaining how it changes color and dimension as one shifts position; two, the “marxist” theory, the object is a remnant of 20th century logging debris.

 

This remarkable object, happened upon by intrepid avocational petroglyph researchers is in a remote, nearly inaccessible region of basaltic lava fields located within the ash-fall circumference of Mt. Mazama. These intrepids wish to remain anonymous.

Other artifacts very recently discovered in the vicinity, now sequestered by the U.S. Air Force Unknown Found Objects (U.F.O.) unit from Nevada, indicate all options must remain open at this time. This is not art — it’s just good science. 

What is known is this: the Mazama Monolith is certainly Not a sound-stage studio production as was the faked Utah monument, appearing and disappearing in its fifteen-minute blitz of fame — this is the Real Thing, in place since time immemorial some might say.

A Land & The Book of Unconformities

-oh objectified—thinly sliced stratified fortified horizontal cross-section of the eventual—unified—till—all traces of the layers are erased—prettified—creating the sensation of a single solid
            ground—emulsified—petrified—gradations stations seams—such as the world. Or time. Sintering, fusing. Such that the thing before you appears whole. Is whole. Also holy.
—Jorie Graham, from The Enmeshments in Fast (2017)

In each book — A Land & The Book of Unconformities — the writer considers the passionate human relationship with stone, rock, the Earth. Deeper, the shifting relationship of the evolving, living, planet to the human endeavor.

Anthropologist Hugh Raffles, who grew up in London and lives in New York City, writing in The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time (2020):  Stone persists, perhaps for eternity, requiring only to be animated.  The frustration is that this archaeological animation—ultimately simply the rediscovery of the animating principles of its time—relies on the conceptual and theoretical repertoire of our own time … a repertoire too distant and disenchanted for the task.  Still, this is the alluring gap that these stones open, evidence, but refuse to fill …

English archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes (1910-1996), writing in her 1950 book A Land: At this one moment of time I can feel consciousness stretching from the crystalline virus that blights tomato plants, through fish, reptiles and mammals to the minds of men. Indeed, it is obviously only an expedient convention to stop with the forms of life that are earliest in time, or the simplest in space. Consciousness must surely be traced back to the rocks —the rocks which have been here since life began and so make a meeting place for the roots of life in time and space, the earliest and the simplest. … Even now imagine that I can feel all the particles of the universe nourishing my consciousness just as my consciousness informs all the particles of the universe.

 

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Images.  Isle of Arran, western Scotland.  Photos by Douglas Beauchamp, Spring 2019. 

—Standing Stone, Machrie Moor

—Cupules, surface detail of the Standing Stone, above

—Standing Stone, Machrie Moor

—Old Graveyard, originally associated with Glenshurig church (demolished in 1931), near Brodick. Mesolithic (8000 years bp) occupation is documented at Glenshurig, Machrie Moor, and several other sites in Arran.

—Stronach Ridge, Cup-and-Ring Marked Bedrock (detail), Isle of Arran.  A mile walk into Stronach Wood from the Glenshurig area,

—Standing Stone, Doon (Fort), on Drumadoon Point, a headland north Blackwaterfoot, Isle of Arran.  This upright stone is the only visible feature in the 12-acre fort, the largest on Arran, encompassed by cliffs and a running wall.

GHOST: Shadow and Simile

Jacquetta Hawkes:  Every living creature among us has taken an irrevocable step between the beginning of this sentence and its end.

Though it has duration, the sentence above is not about time. It is an image-sign. Like a shadow — absence relying on a presence. Real, but contingent. Like Ghost, an image-sign, like a shadow obedient to a presence. One ruminates, of what? The answer, ambiguous, eludes; slides away, a trace, beckoning.

Ghost is also like a spirit or, some say, is a spirit, an ephemeral existing beyond physical being as a body expires.  So a ghost is like an inspiration, an irresponsible potential, a latency inherent in every moment.

An ever-present shadow abiding, an unhurried soul, inevitable. Like art itself, always a shadow, a revelation, invisible until a transpiring and, as one consents, it glides across the threshold.  It crosses, they say, and some return, eliding, their tidings oblique.

James Hillman: Three dimensions become two as the perspective of nature, flesh, and matter fall away, leaving an existence of immaterial, mirrorlike images, eidola. We are in the land of the soul.

Images:

— Petroglyph image on basalt, Lake County OR Oct2020.

— Graffiti Ghost, Spray paint. Ghost (def.): Lingering image from removed graffiti.  Eugene OR 2020

— Skeletal Spectral, Mixed-media, Eugene OR Oct2020

— Eidolon, Ink and Water on Rice Paper (detail), Douglas Beauchamp 1973

Notes:

—Jacquetta Hawkes (1910-1996), a distinguished English archaeologist. from A Land (1950). Robert Macfarlane in Landmarks (2016) devotes a chapter “Stone-Books” to Hawkes.

— James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (1979)

America is a concept

Baudrillard:  America is a concept.

Q:  Are you saying that America represents the ideal of democracy?

B:  No, the simulation of power. … All our values are simulated. What is freedom?  We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car?  It’s a simulation of freedom.

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Roadside America Flagging photos by this blog author.

Excerpt from an interview with Jean Baudrillard (French philosopher 1929-2007), New York Times Magazine, November 2005.

VEXICON: Signs of the Times

This far from the sea and still we know these signs.

The night is an open book.

But the world beyond the night remains a mystery.

-- Louise Glück, from her poem Before The Storm, in A Village Life, 2009.

Vexicon: Image becoming communal.

Public signs and signings agitate, warn, command, envision. 

 Signs ephemeral stand forth with anger, hope, demand. 

Signs direct and mis-direct, dictate, enchant.

The night is an open book … but the world beyond …

PHOTOS:  Being random recordings situated in Eugene Oregon by the author adrift with iPhoneXR. March-October 2020.  Photos above: Hands on Street at US Federal Courthouse; Graf-Mask; Greta on Willamette River Bikeway; Lincoln Street Rose

Link to album: VEXICON: Signs of the Times

Addendum: 

Vexicon entwines with her brother Lexicon, seeding, as in the old ways...

keep 6 feet/maintain 6 feet

wildfire smoke hazardous

masks

freedom

social distancing/physical distancing

“bailouts”

resist

SEX(ED)

Pandemic

I OBJCT

Black Lines Matter

sanitize/sanitizer/sanitizing

patriotic

uprite

Seat Closed

bitcoin

FALLING

love and lightning

at your own risk

remember

on Zoom

Fatal

Silence is compliance

VOTE

For President

things to expect

SIMULACRA: A la playa

What figures in this clay: gives a sharper bone?

What turns the spirit white? Wanting to abbreviate?

The years in the blood keep us naked to the bone. 

Light breaks down the days to printless stone. 

—Duane Niatum, from his poem The Art of Clay

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A playa, Oregon, Northern Great Basin, late August 2020. Fake flat stuck “Pronghorn” imported from ? by a company in Pennsylvania called Montana. Two muzzleloader hunters emerge from their fake-foresty hunt-hut — a blind. We chat. Friendly, they say, With you guys here Pronghorn wont come today. Rut season. Thirst season. They go off on their quad hidden behind the BLM’s backhoed mound, to return next day. We go hiking, looking with sky-eyes, juniper-sense, rock-n-rollin’... 

Picture Rock Pass: Angle of Suppose

I do not want 3D glasses, friend, it’s already 3D.

Look up look out.   Out—what is that.

—Jorie Graham, from The Enmeshments in Fast (2017).

Summer Lake basin, northern terminus viewed from Winter Rim.

Center:  Ana Springs reservoir, part of the extensive state-owned Summer Lake Wildlife Refuge which, diked and channeled, manages water from Ana Springs overflow. A containment.

Green circle: Alfalfa, often shipped to the far east as animal feed, two, three cuts a year.

Far left:  Klippel Point, a block-lift escarpment, the east-west Carlon Road disappearing toward distant Diablo Mountain.   

Fire July 2017 scorched northern Winter Rim, charred logs blazing in sunrise, portending a heating landscape.  Thousands of acres of old Juniper trees clearcut in the northern Great Basin, an un-native devastated terrain intended to hasten water run-off.  Sometimes a controlled burn follows. In testimony: a stump near Picture Rock Pass.  

 

The well-known Picture Rock Pass petroglyph, near Highway 31.

The definitive Oregon Geographic Names, 6th edition, 1992, strangely states: “Picture Rock Pass  … The name comes from some strange designs or pictures on the rock about a hundred feet south of the highway.  These peculiar marks, made by Indians, are strongly suggestive of a WPA style painting project operated by the aborigines.”  The most-recent volume, 7th edition, 2003, revised to simply:  “The name comes from some designs or pictures on the rocks about a hundred feet south of the highway.”

A placed rock near an abandoned Native American village site.

Marker, prayer, respect.

A petroglyph Luther Cressman did not see, but from a photograph in the 1930s he called it a horse design. (Site 26, Petroglyphs of Oregon 1937). Maybe. This picture, an imagined being, a representation, an unknown, moving on... in place, through time.

North of the Pass below Egli Rim an abandoned spring fenced in by settlers, by travelers through the pass between Silver Lake and Summer Lake.  Back when, water piped, channeled to fire-hollowed logs for stock watering. A containment.

Walking sandy ground, downslope, a few petroglyphs one local named in a self-published booklet purchased years ago at Summer Lake store: The Medicine Man Trail.

Look up look out. Another angle of suppose.

Lake County Oregon August-September 2020.  Photos Douglas Beauchamp