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.