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

Click to enlarge

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.