Memories made of stone

In my dreams, I would always wonder if my body was made of hydrogen.
If so, then my memories must be made of stone.
— Bi Gan

Mysterious… when we know weight, when we confront an unknown. When a sentence or a title begins with mysterious, I become skeptical.  Yet it is the word that floats free when I discover these two images converging from separate threads of my explorations and research. 

How can this be, I wondered as I looked, studying the designs.
The upper: a sketch of sloping stone on the edge of a river gorge in Chandeshwar, central India, by JH Rivett-Carnac, Esq., an officer of Britain’s Bengal Civil Service. The drawing was one aspect of his investigations published in the 1877.  
The lower: a photograph recorded during a 4x4-and-canoe journey with friends in the Owyhee River canyon in eastern Oregon.

The rock slope in India has over 200 cup-marks, two of which have circles, arrayed in near vertical and slightly curving parallels.  The Owyhee boulder has similar number of cup-mark-pits, similarly arrayed. It has one cup-pit with a circle. Striking that these complex arrays are each uniquely distinctive from other design-clusters among the thousands I have viewed and studied.  

Yet they exhibit a powerful resonance. The mystery leads into the ageless question of synchronicity; its space/place equivalent. Who and why? enters the deeper expressive mind of the human, an abyss harkening to stellar origins.

Where? 

That which is not in stone,
not in the wall of stones and earth,
not even in trees,
that which forever trembles a little,

must, then, be in us.

— Eugène Guillevic

Images displayed here for visual-design comparison; the size of the expanse of the Chandeshwar rock slope and the Owyhee boulder differ significantly. Click to enlarge. Below, detail of the Owyhee boulder.

NOTES
— Bi Gan’s film, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018), voiceover of the main character, translated from Chinese.
— Eugène Guillevic (French 1907-1997), trans Denise Levertov, in Selected Poems (1969 New Directions)
— J.H. Rivette-Carnac, Esq. Archaeological notes on ancient sculpturings on rocks in Kumaon, India, 1879 (1877), The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta.
— Garrick Mallery. Picture-writing of the American Indians, 1893. Foreword by J. W. Powell. Tenth annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington DC. Mallery, in his seminal and essential report, references Rivett-Carnac with a brief summary and a replica of his drawing.
— Vale District BLM in 2014 contracted consultants to use Portable X-Ray Flourescence (PRFX) to obtain relative chronology of petroglyphs at this site. (PRFX is experimental; absolute dating remains very difficult.) Also, to use this preliminary study to help interpret the area’s occupation and use history, and to assess possible conservation measures at this well-known place, though not easy to access except by river.
—Below, detail of another boulder. In all, fifty boulders with petroglyphs.

How many years were we to learn without understanding.
— Czeslaw Milosz in Caesarea, 1975

Looking into stone

Look closely into the lower half of this older figure.  A series of precise incisings -- horizontal, vertical, diagonal.  This type of linear marking-into-stone appears some places in the Northern Great Basin and in Owyhee country. 


Various rock surfaces show a rangeof petroglyph intentions and styles.  Look at the rock face upper left. Moving closer in the photo below. An elongated figure. Notable, incisings in the lower area.  Especially the intense repetitive cross-hatching, see close-up, following.


 

 A clear, minimal figuration, lightly marked. Looking closely, one imagines "eyes" in the "head" -- natural, shallow depressions -- intentionally embodied by the carver?  A looking-out and beyond... and through you, the transient viewer.

 

Lower right, another appearance of repetitive incisings.  Perhaps the performative act was of primary importance; the resulting image an artifact.  One wonders.

Below, three other rock faces at this place -- a baffling and intriguing variety of designs and elusive meanings.


 

Photos April 2024, Northern Great Basin, near the arbitrary political partitioning of Oregon, California and Nevada (42nd Parallel in 1819; 120th Meridian in 1849). These resident petroglyphs older and deeply responsive to seasons and terrain.