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.