Repetition in Modoc Country

The cycles come ‘round, ‘round again in Tule basin. 
As the seasons of Lost River swell and fall. 
Modoc. The Fierce Battle for Homelands. 1873. 
Did not end, has not. 

from there where stars are forever we are deserts mountains oceans
they repeat us we repeat them
a continuum of repetition is our existence
a continuum of repetition is their existence
deep into day and night beyond time
deep into night and day beyond time
—Simon J Ortiz

Click on petroglyph photos to view detail

    "Or maybe it's the repetition. Maybe you’ve been looking at this stuff
for so long that you've read all this into it. And talking with other people who've been doing the same thing."
    "I've tried to convince myself of that. I've wanted to believe it, simply in order to let the thing go. But then I go back and look at it again, and there's that sense of ... I don't know. Of an opening into something. Universe? Narrative?"
—William Gibson, in Pattern Recognition

 

To turn across this aching world, this place who repeats, ever emerging, ever dissolving…

CODA
AGAIN: IN BREAKS
BETWEEN SLEEP

what watches
always ceases:

and day! and world! . .

unique is
the unending —
is it along its visage that
the soul slides:

like dust! —

and the world of the watcher
does not always open! —

and the shifting dust:

not illuminated! —

is shed

—Gennady Aygi, a native Chuvash writer who often wrote in Russian.

Infinities

There is no prophecy, only memory.

What happens tomorrow

has happened a thousand years ago

the same way, to the same end—

and does my ancient memory

say that your false memory

is the history of the featherhearted bird

transformed into a crow atop a marble mountain?

—Luljeta Lleshanaku

Complexity of the Center (click to enlarge)

Bear Paws ... going there

Center: bighorn sheep motif (faint, recent); below: old dot/pits

To reflect on this Indigenous Peoples Day, here marks in and of stone, rim of an infinity playa, the Hart Mountain block-fault escarpment looming east of Warner Lakes basin.

Photos of petroglyphs color and contrast altered to draw forth the hammered and abraded shapes and forms.  Some thousands of years in age, some recent centuries, often side by side.  Making space a lived place. In the passing. In the infolding now.

A moment without weight or duration,

a moment outside the moment:

thought sees, our eyes think.

Triangles, cubes, the sphere, the pyramid

and the other geometrical figures

thought and drawn by mortal eyes

but which have been here since the beginning,

are, still legible, the world, its secret writing,

the reason and the origin of the turning of things,

the axis of the changes, the unsupported pivot

that rests on itself, a reality without a shadow.

The poem, the piece of music, the theorem,

unpolluted presences born from the void,

are delicate structures

built over an abyss:

infinities fit into their finite forms,

and chaos too is ruled by their hidden symmetry.

—Octavio Paz

NOTES

—Luljeta Lleshanaku, an Albanian poet, from her poem Memory in her collection Fresco (New Directions)

—Octavio Paz, from the poem Response and Reconciliation (trans Spanish by Eliot Weinberger)

Lake Ephemeral

The persistence even in the 21st-century of the belief that medieval people thought that the world was flat is hard to explain; it certainly isn't based on evidence, because there isn't any. 

—John Haywood

Rock stacks on rim are contemporary hunting blinds (above & below) with triangular openings for rifle barrel sighting and firing.  

Pronghorn need water daily, so will come to this lake playa early.

Pronghorn can detect any movement for over a mile away and will dash-run when alarmed. Pronghorn season was a week in August in this region; photos September.

ANDY 1929 above a serpentine petroglyph.

Below, the beholding one.

CODA

… And the dust-maker sun, alkaline

over a wound-scouring wind, sees to it

the flowers seed but leave no green sign.

This seascape of stone, its beige & grey stretched exposed 

ten hundred thousand winters, recorcds

no events but those of rocks: WE EXPLODED—

announcing it in a seared continuous cry

to the vastness of empty unlistening

others call sky.

—Marie Ponsot

River of Stones

In Buddhism, the metaphor of Indra's Net from the Avatamsaka Sutra has been used over the generations to exemplify how not one thing is separate from any other thing even though things are different from each other. At each intersection in Indra's Net, there is a shining and distinct jewel. Sustaining the light from all the other jewels, each jewel reflects all the jewels in the Net and has no real or separate self nature. A single jewel and all other jewels thus exist in a pattern of presence and mutual activity.
—Joan Halifax

Again, from Joan Halifax:  Buddhism, shamanism, and deep ecology are ways for us to understand and realize that this Earth is a vast and rich network of mutual arisings, dyings, and renewings. Seeing this, we experience ourselves as part of the world around us, and the world around us is part of us. It is from this base that authentic harmlessness and helpfulness awaken.

Einstein proposed that the universe be regarded as a field which is an unbroken and undivided whole. Particles are then treated as certain kinds of abstraction from the total field, notably as localized regions in which the field is very intense. As one gets further from the center of such a region, the field gets weaker, until it merges imperceptibly with the fields of other particles.
—David Bohm

Again, from David Bohm:  Einstein’s emphasis on undivided wholeness of the universe in terms of field is carried yet further. For even that which "observes" or "measures" the field can no longer consistently be regarded as something that exists separately from the field.

Wading in to cross the late season river quickly becomes surprising and a sticky muck.  Why even risk sinking?  For me, to sense place — in the two senses — the sensual and the common. And to simply cross the river to the dark boulders — precise petroglyphs active and dense, the stone deeply imbued with water and wind — time slipping by as particles.  To traverse beaver country. To walk the land, clear and compelling.  To listen to what is said.

 

CODA
Perhaps one thing only is of great concern to me: whether I come closer, slowly, by detours, circling here and there, moving away, returning, but always with one aim. Coming closer to what? To a knowledge, though of what kind I do not know, to comprehension.
—Czeslaw Milosz, Unattainable Earth (1986)

 

NOTES
—Joan Halifax, The Fruitful Darkness:  Reconnecting with the Body of the Earth (1993)
—David Bohm, The Art of Perceiving Movement (Essay, 1971)