Stones Spheres

As modest Gaia circles Great Sun, revolving on her tilted axis — Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere of our Earth ball —  consider stone spheres. Stone spheres —  ancient artifacts of ceremonial or ritual purposes. Perhaps so, this and more. For this Solar-Lunar-Earthling journey, three examples:  Costa Rica, Scotland, Oregon’s Fort Rock basin.

In Alajuela, a few miles northwest of Costa Rica’s capital San José, this massive stone sphere relocated from from SW Costa Rica’s Diquís region. Photo D. Beauchamp, 2003. Two colonial ironies (per wiki):  “The culture of the people who made them disappeared after the Spanish conquest.”  “The spheres were discovered in the 1930s as the United Fruit Company was clearing the jungle for banana plantations.”  Many have been relocated over the past decade for decor or for preservation. Now, Stone Spheres are one of Costa Rica's National Symbols. 

Basalt balls, Fort Rock basin, southeastern Oregon, 2.5-3.5", est. more than 3000 ybp. Photo in Jenkins (2004), see Notes.

Basalt spheres, about 2.4-6”, from Christmas Valley, southeastern Oregon, now in a private collection, photo Henry C. Koerper, in Sutton and Koerper (2005), see Notes.

Carved stone ball, Scotland. Neolithic, about 3000 ybp. Displayed at Kilmartin Museum, Argyll, western Scotland. photo D. Beauchamp, 2019.

Carved stone balls in the British museum, from Aberdeenshire, NE Scotland. In British Museum, photos D. Beauchamp, 2014.

NOTES

Costa Rica

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_spheres_of_Costa_Rica

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1453

Oregon

— Dennis L. Jenkins, The Grasshopper and the Ant: Middle Holocene Occupations and Storage Behavior at the Bowling Dune Site in the Fort Rock Basin, Oregon in Early and Middle Holocene Archaeology of the Northern Great Basin, Edited by Dennis L. Jenkins, Thomas J. Connolly, and C. Melvin Aikens, 2004 

— Mark Q. Sutton and Henry C. Koerper, The Middle Holocene Western Nexus: An Interaction Sphere between Southern California and the Northwestern Great Basin (2005), pp 5-10. https://pcas.org/v41n23.htm

Scotland

— Carved stone balls, British Museum https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1930-0412-2

TWO POEMS

10.

Objects 

They live beside us. 

We don't know them, they don't know us.

Sometimes they talk with us. 

—Octavio Paz, from the poem Object Lesson in Loose Stones (1955), trans. Eliot Weinberger 

xi

These bones brilliant in the night, 

these words like precious stones

In the living throat of a petrified bird,

this beloved green,

this hot lilac,

this heart alone mysterious.

—Alejandra Pizarnik, from Diana’s Tree (Árbol de Diana) (1962), trans Anna Deeny

Big Island Hawaii

As Mauna Loa opens rifts and flows molten lava, and with a bow to Pele, petroglyphs from the Ka'u district, near South Point, Big Island

Ancient figures near grinding slick

 Papamū, a stone board for the game kōnane; located in shelter protected by a bouldered wall

Above, petroglyph figure facing the sea; detail below, note small head and waving? hands

Appearance as power figure.

Above, two figures looking to the sea; detail below.

This style more recent than the rectilinear-style figures; style may determine a general chronology.

NOTES
— Ka’u, Big Island Hawaii, 2009, photos and notes, Douglas Beauchamp
— Recommended:  Spirit of Place: Petroglyphs of Hawai'i (1999) by Georgia Lee and Edward Stasack
 

Addendum:  Configuration of Stone
Configuration a word. Description founded on a quest for understanding. As all words.
Stone an image of stone, an appearance of fundament beyond language.
Configuration as word seeks to grasp appearance beyond the boundaries of duration.
 

Consider figures in place. Consider a stone game board played with white shells smoothed by the sea.
 

Consider variations on “Configuration” per Wiktionary:
— Form, as depending on the relative disposition of the parts of a thing's shape; figure; form factor.
— Relative position or aspect of the planets; the face of the horoscope, according to the relative positions of the planets at any time.
— The way things are arranged or put together in order to achieve a result.
— The arrangement of electrons in an atom, molecule, or other physical structure like a crystal.
— A finite set of points and lines (and sometimes planes), generally with equal numbers of points per line and equal numbers of lines per point.

Metamorphosis

The Past Parts Per Million

Soaring we imagine

Seeing far we think possible

The slightest movement

Sweeping wings precise

The scheme of leaves

Of fur

Of feather

Later the beak

The bones

The earth of air

We imagine

Soaring

The Now Parts Per Million

The Future Parts Per Million

The Ghostling Parts Per Million

The Rebirth of The Unknowable

Divided by The 8 billion

Becoming

The Vanishingly Small Parts Per 

The Ten Thousand Things

NOTE

On November 14 2022 the human population of This One Earth arrived at 8 billion; since January 2022, a net increase of 60 million (Births minus Deaths).

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Dome

Looking in

Seeing with figurations enfolding place, time. 

How boundary dissolves between seer, seen.

Was there once such a boundary?

Such wondering will get us no where.

Stone dome, base of basalt rim. Basin-and-Range country, near what-is-now the boundary - as imagined - between Oregon and Nevada.

(click photos to enlarge)

Indian Land

Lizard ex/claims Indian Land. 

A trace as tracing. 

Red Lizard becoming sign on sign. 

Bound up in space becoming place. 

Time hovers as ghost immemorial.

As longing, as stones and bones.  

Obverse of the sign:  Geology Oregon:Abert Rim.

Sign faces US Highway 395, looking west over Abert Lake

In 2011, sign on US Highway 395.

Two ways of imagining, of mattering...

Spirit guardians lean into Future, 

grounding Abert Rim, one of the highest fault scarps

in US and the longest exposed fault scarp

in North America.

Grinding slicks on basalt boulder overlook the ancient lake,

a salty terminal basin, remnant of Pleistocene Lake Chewaucan.

Translucent point, photoed and replaced

2012, a year later, chalked outline

and naming Indian Land erased.

Lizard abides...

... by 2015, sign disappeared,

Geology dismissed, Lizard displaced. 

Notes

— In recognition of Indigenous Peoples' Day

— Prints of the Indian Land and Oregon Geology photographs purchased from this writer by the University of  Oregon Law Library in 2017.  Two of eight purchased for permanent display in the Library’s main reading room at the Law School; the other six are photos of petroglyphs, Oregon Northern Great Basin aka Indian Land.

— The above Indian Land/Geology sign photos from 2011 appeared prior to the now popular Land Back movement which emerged in 2018. 

Land Back

All beings abide

What Does Lizard Know? 4

On the scales of your life, give as much to forgetting as to remembering. Watch for their point of equilibrium. 

 — Juan Ramón Jiménez

Lizard knows evennight; the glimpsed light, the unblinking dark.

Equinox. The crevice, crack, disappearing, mirroring an appearing; equilibrium?

Twinning between worlds, Lizard/s consider/s mythtime/s. Know they weren’t heroes, won’t be.  

Lizard eyes forgetting of stone, gazes, remembering bone.

No heroes, only the here, and the gone.

Lizard dreams the before, and after

Click to enlarge photos

Born of line

Figures born of line 

familiar in shared simplicity

Of longings lost intent

Striving stilling falling.

Poised.

Arriving as we do on an edge we will not see.

Memory dissolves where does time go?

Journey we may whisper.

Contingencies of Stone

Peoples moving through country 

placing stones in angular embrace

constellating vague terrain

mineral clouds congeal silence

molten oxides spark red patina 

flaming brown starkly russet

each stone accidentally 

atomic star-light dusted 

lichen brushed… hushed… 

shaped shadows drifting

ghosts eluding gravity 

… no more messages

A Matter of Experience

These placed stones, near Dry River, the terrain of the central Oregon lavalands, are among uncountable thousands encountered over many years of wandering around sagelands — SE Oregon, Central Oregon, NE California, NW Nevada.  Placed stones as I use the term is one species in the complex descriptive genus referred to as rock features, for example:  rock cairns, rock piles, stone circles, ring sites, ambush drive walls, kill or traps sites, “vision quest” structures, “prayer seats,” “medicine wheels,” cache pits, rock art sites.  Yet, nothing is as it appears…

Consider: World Observation

“In the first place, an observer observing herself in the act of the world observation will quickly realize that the results of her observation (her respective experiences) will depend on the different points of view accessible to her, and as there are always exists a potential infinity of such points of view, it follows that there will also be a potential infinity of representations (experiences) for each object of reference."

— Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, from Three Notes on Contingency Today (2022)

Condensities

To testify to simplicity

Not asking what this mark means

Look

The mark floats in the densities of stone

In the making without asking

Power humor presence prayer

Modern words stream

In an obedient search

Wait

The mark rises in immensities wind blown

Contrail jetting to Phoenix 

In the sky below

A solitary mark on an extended rim, playa-edge, west-facing; a playa where once i witnessing hundreds of grazing pronghorn while parent falcons shrieked me away from nested fledglings high above.

High above a deep stream-cut canyon, sunrise-facing

Manganesed basalt, fire within... congealing

One of two similar glyph-motifs, each side of a rough arch protecting a rock shelter above a wide creek-bed facing east and a red canyon wall

Further, consider ….

Having fallen outside the realm of the familiar and the useful, these landscapes were overtaken by what Henri Bergson called the “powerless” past, different in nature from the “sensori-motor” present, which propels the body to action. This past, which is without immediate utility, emerges from consciousness and forms the matter of time, Bergsonian “duration”: prepared to return, but only capriciously and contingently, it looks for a fissure in the present. 

— Maria Stavrinaki, in Transfixed by Prehistory: An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time 2022

Petroglyphs: A sampling of  images on basalt rims in the high country of Lake County, Oregon.  Photos by Douglas Beauchamp

Now stand with the image: capricious and contingent

fissure the present

opening the place of no thing

CODA, A gloss

— Condensity: The state of being condensed.

— Simplicity:    The state of being uncompounded.

— Immensity:  The state of being immeasurable.

— Contrail:  An artificial cloud made by the exhaust of jet aircraft or wingtip vortices that precipitate a stream of tiny ice crystals in moist, frigid upper air; condensation trail.