28 July 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.