Tracking

 

  

  

Rim: Upper left, track (detail below); Lower right, one/two tracks.

Seeking, imprinting gesture on stone.  In these pictures of petroglyphs only stone. Tracks reveal a presence, the before sense of arriving.  The beyond sense of departing.  Movement through transitory moments.

Caution advised.

 

How to place side-by-side our hope, desire, caring, with what we know happens daily?  An existential question: Over eight billion humans now on the planet. Multiple billions of caged, farmed, slaughtered animals. The thinning herds and flocks and solitaries, the adapting and yearning natural animals. Grizzily extinct from Oregon. The Wolf.  Where to, how now, in the tracking? In the old stories what were they telling?

 

This side of now, the nowhere of the 2020s. The image: Machining the earth. Gleaming extraction demands compacting deposition. Landfilling waste. Seeping, streaming. Filtering odorless tasteless into living streams. River steams. Blood streams. Streaming bombs shatter and splatter screams. 

 

These tracks here, quietly of stone, weathering, testifying, reminding -- simply of what-is in the curve of seasons, as we wonder.  As we all go forth along the way.

 

...

Three pictures, to return to the beginning. To an ending. The basalt rim. Cleaved. Lichened. Patinated. Sky depthless. 

Lower edge, approaching shadow: Track! eluding.

 

Moving closer, tracking track. The sag of basalt, stone flow, mineral yielding.  Lightly marked dots. How do we know anything?

This track, the first track, the last track. A returning cycle? A timeline to infinity?

Solstice : Emerging

 

Season of their loss

A poem by James Welch

Thanksgiving at Snake Butte

In time we rode that trail
up the Butte, as far as time
would let us. The answer to our time
lay hidden in the long grasses
on the top. Antelope scattered

through the rocks before us, clattered
unseen down the easy slope to the west.
Our horses balked, stiff legged,
their nostrils flared at something unseen
gliding smoothly through the brush away.

On top, our horses broke, loped through
a small stand of stunted pine, then jolted
to a nervous walk. Before us lay
the smooth stones our ancestors, the fish,
the lizard, snake and bent-kneed

bowman – – etched by something crude,
by a wandering race, driven by their names
for time: its winds, its rain, its snow
and the cold moon tugging at the crude figures
in this, the season of their loss.  

..........................................................................

Lauren Bridgeman and Maria Zedeno describe Snake Butte as "a sacred landscape, home to powerful traditional snake medicine, religious areas for fasting, environmental resources for collecting, and cultural features that convey the living and remembered traditions of the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine peoples."

James Welch (1940-2002) as a child attended schools on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations. Snake Butte is located within the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, homeland to the Assiniboine (Nakoda) and Gros Ventre (Aaniiih) Tribes. Welch became famous as a western regional and Native American writer beginning with Winter in the Blood, 1974.  Previously, in 1971, he published his only collection of poetry: Riding the Earthboy 40, which includes the poem Thanksgiving at Snake Butte. 

Upon reflection we consider again (and again) the answer to our time. An echo in the season of loss.  We may recall how the some of the rock mass of Snake Butte was mined in the 1930s for the massive Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River.  A tangible loss also fractures spirit.  This continues at full thrust on and in many sacred lands and places.  Where will wisdom sit?

The neocapitalist crush and craze for all things that can be extracted -- Lithium, for example -- continues unabated. Thacker Pass, a sacred landscape on federal lands in northern Nevada near the Oregon border, is on the brink of devastation. 

To follow the evolving situation at Thacker Pass, in the McDermitt Caldera lapping into Oregon, check these links and sources:  — Protect Thacker Pass https://www.protectthackerpass.org/blog/
On December 5th, 2023, In Reno NV, following a federal judge’s dismissal of their latest lawsuit, the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony (RSIC) will hold a press conference on their court cases against the Thacker Pass lithium mine.
— Judge again rules against tribes’ effort to stop lithium mine
November 21, 2023  https://www.nevadacurrent.com/2023/11/21/judge-again-rules-against-tribes-effort-to-stop-lithium-mine/
— Previously on RockArtOregon
https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/03/center-of-earth.html
https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/06/center-of-earth-2.html

Red

In the face of the unknown, humans have always left their mark: handprints on cave walls, painted suns on rocks, flute solos to the stars. Sometimes words are inadequate for communication. Elements must be transformed. Mineral pigments into paint. Sound into song. Fire into smoke.
— Anita Endrezze, from Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon

 

 Red sees us seeing
wavelengthening
the vibrating heart

blackening stone

fear wavering
sharpened tension 

ignites desire
congealing fire
staining shadow

 
a fine willing cry
wonder of blue sky

how many passed

this way before
now
after
blood spilled
spilling still

Photos:  Autumn 2023, a Cascades tributary to the Deschutes River flowing north to the Columbia River then to the Pacific, finding peace.
To honor in this one world the peoples bloodied, bound and displaced by the machines of war, then and now. May they also find peace.

Every Reality is Consistent

When you got tired of walking
you lay down in the grass.
When you got up again, you could see for a moment where you'd been,
the grass was slick there, flattened out
into the shape of a body. When you looked back later,
it was as though you'd never been there at all.
— Louise Glück

Propped boulder, placed as part of a shelter on the rim of a small canyon eroded into the ancient lakebed

Russet lichen, signaling

Faded red markings on basalt surface of canyon wall

Figures emerge when enhancing tones and colors

Detail of above rock surface

Dynamic image -- invocation for rain? gratitude? a "songline" narrative? All speculation!

Namings, initialings -- late 19th / early 20th / centuries

Mammoths rubbing, polishing stone edge while passing through canyon and grasslands countless millennia

Who knows? 

Below, black marking appears on light gray section of wall near crevice

Highway railing bisecting canyon near a pooling place, culvert as portal

---

Lived life is past and present and future all receding at once. What we long to hold on to, we lose; what we remember is often what we would just as soon forget; the future is always bearing down, an endless distraction. I know myself as a glitter of synaptic activation, a flimsy thing easily swept aside. A ceaselessly increasing sum materializing out of nothingness, each integer instantly flung behind me. I am persistent. I am transient. Memory is not a fixed object, and neither am I.
— Sallie Tisdale


NOTES
— Louise Glück (1943-2023) won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature and and was Poet Laureate of the United States 2003-2004. Lines above from the poem Pastoral in her collection A Village Life, 2009.
— Sallie Tisdale from her memoir/essay Mere Belief: Sliding Down the Curve of Forgetting, Harper’s Magazine, November 2023
— Campbell McGrath, from the poem A Greeting on the Trail, in his collection Nouns and Verbs, 2019.

Many things – seaweed, pollen, attention – drift.
News of the universe’s origin infiltrates atom by atom
the oxygenated envelope of the atmosphere.
My sense of purpose vectors away on rash currents…
— Campbell McGrath

 

The Fierce Battle for the Modoc Homelands

October 3rd 2023 is the 150th year since the hanging of Kintpuash (Captain Jack) and three other Modoc men by the US Government at Fort Klamath. 

Thousands of pages and uncountable photographs and illustrations have been written and pictured about the Modoc peoples before, during, and after “The Fierce Battle for the Modoc Homelands,” the sub-title of Jim Compton’s vital and essential 2017 book: Spirit in The Rock. 

Two centuries of invasion, conflict, killing, settlement, and displacement of Modocs occurred before, during, and after a series of pivotal events of 1872-1873 known as The Modoc War. Conflict and claim continue into this year 2023.

Photos: Rock paintings from the collapsed lava tube caves in the Lava Beds National Monument, near the Modoc stronghold on southern edge of Tule Lake basin, in the traditional territories of the Modocs. No specific relationship to the 1872-1873 battles is suggested here; simply a thoughtful proximity. 

Traditional Modoc country is centered around the hundreds of square of the Lost River watershed; lands and waters severed by the arbitrary border of the Oregon and California in the early 19th-century: the 42nd parallel. One of many mappings, namings and claimings resulting in devastating effects for the native peoples.

Lizard on the fault line

Consider certain tiny lizards, and that

long before
anyone could count
there was still math.

— Linda Kasischke

Is Art matter? Does Lizard matter? Ontological questions. What is not in doubt: Gravity. Matters every moment. Dark crevice, weightless.

Humans take gravity as granted. Antique certainty, wheels spin, rain falls, ice melts, water drips. Trickles. Remembers.  Rivers flow, flood, pool, press dams. Gravity “generates” in the techno-version of Genesis spinning magnetic jostling electrons spawning Electricity. Bonneville: god of appliance desire.

None of this new to Lizard. Lizard knows gravity. Lizard Is Gravity. Actually and metonymically. Lizard stands forth. Lizard not to be seen, omnipresence unknown. Simply gets by, gets on with it. Lizard still, then gone. We say dart, dash, disappear, adios. Gravity has its verbs.

“Climate Change” no longer grasped. Idea cracking, concept fracturing, spalling, spilling.  The Great Fault where no fault lies like polycrisis lies. Bar graphs, peaks, valleys, picturing nullspace, glacial shimmer. Cards on the table. Shards in the dust. Gravity wins. Lizard knows.

 

NOTES
— Photos: Block and Fault country, Northern Great Basin; waters seeking the deep do not run to the sea. Lizard abides, memory lingers, dreaming.
— Foreground of second photo: groundstone mortar for grinding or crushing.
— Linda Kasischke from the poem The Accident in The Infinitesimals (2014 Copper Canyon Press)