TUFF :: Tule Lake

Time thins. Memory serves the mirage.

A cliff wall of tuff. Volcanic cone erupted underwater 250,000 or so years ago under the ancient endorheic basin now known as Tule Lake. Terminus of the expansive watershed nourishing Lost River. In turn, nourishing the Modocs in their ancestral territories for thousands of years.

This tumultuous country now sliced by an unwavering geopolitical line, the Oregon-California boundary. In the 19th century this line demarcated a transgressive often violent zone of difference. The Modoc peoples subjugated, displaced, often killed. Gold-seekers, militia, US Army, Wasco scouts hired from Warm Springs reservation, and would be railroaders-turned-ranchers-turned judge and boss.

How do these thousands of rock cut markings gazed at by the modern drive-up viewer align with colonial claiming and naming?  What can we ask that comes close to empathy and release?  

Petroglyphs carved through several millennia now easily accessed and viewed in a protected section of the Lava Beds National Monument:  Petroglyph Point.

 

CODA
… Forgotten now forgetting, no
more the absent-minded in full preoccupation
with the ten thousand things, each separate,
each needing its own space and unique memory.
Years seem to have gone by in this forgetting.
Do thousand lives have to be wasted now
to sharpen this one life? But all the lives
return again into the picture as sun wills me
to wither down to a last flare of love.
            —Nathanial Tarn from the poem Recollection of Being

MARBLE

we live in narrow realms

by necessity

by chance

by the unthought will of an unknown star

Petroglyphs carved into marble in the now of millennia. Peoples living, moving, north south east west.  In the eastern shadows and waters of the Sierras west of Death Valley.  Many carvings destroyed in the white settler era by mining the marble stone.  Thought gestures of exacting desire — carving, mining — an extraction, intention, abandon.  Dust and starry skies prevail.

 

TUFA

Tufas, like mineral flowers, emerge, protrude, and fragment as a lake recedes.  Bud, blossom, seed, left high and dry.  Tufas congeal in crenate patterns, constellated, crystallized, caverned, calcified froth. 

This tufa boulder formed under the waters of a bay of Pleistocene Lake Lahontan in northwest Nevada.  An immersed spring emits dissolved calcium which combines with carbon in the lake water to form calcium carbonate into a sort of crystalline structure, which is then eroded. These deeply carved petroglyphs, vulva-like shapes and linear incisings, are undated.

The petroglyphs on this boulder appear as emblems of desire, as invocations, perhaps entreating sexual fecundity, necessary replenishment. In these landscapes as marvelous, saturated dream-space, I am reminded of Max Ernst’s frottages and textured paintings.  

The boulders' location is proximate to the justly famous, oldest dated petroglyphs in North America, also carved on tufa. Those dated petroglyphs look to the east over Winnemucca Dry Lake, east of Pyramid Lake - both remnant lakes of pluvial Lake Lahontan. The Winnemucca petroglyphs were determined by Larry Benson and associates in 2013 to date to at least 10,500 years ago.

 

Another carved tufa boulder near the spring.

A very hot spring, once at the bottom of a pluvial (Pleistocene) lake, located on the playa near the tufa boulders.

CODA
We all belong not just to our present moment, nor to the place in which we find ourselves at that moment, but to a far greater system of changes which have occurred throughout Earth's history and will continue to occur long into the future. The present convulsions of the planet are the result of the whole Earth system trying, in response to terrible pressures, to shift itself, often violently, into a new set of alignments, and we are part of those changes. We are the weather, and the water; we are the lionfish, too, changing our environment as we are changed by it. This realization can be humbling. and it can be hopeful too. We belong to the whole timescale of history. —James Bridle, from Here Come The Lionfish,  Emergence Magazine, Vol. 5: Time (2024)

Below: Max Ernst: The Gray Forest (1927)

MATRIX

The sea, turned to stone, is laughing
a last laugh made of waves.
— Federico García Lorca

TUFA. Tufa boulder formed under the waters of a pluvial lake in northwest Nevada; these deeply carved petroglyphs undated.

SERPENTINE. Coastal boulder in Oregon; various deep carvings.

SCHIST. Deep groves forming ovals and circles on schist boulders embedded in the rolling hills east of the Russian River CA. 

SANDSTONE. Deep cups and carvings on boulder once along lower Rogue River; twice removed, now in a park.

MARBLE.  Golden sun softened by the sand of time, eastern California.

GRANITE.  Cupped and carved boulder near the Pacific ocean, California.

FELDSPAR.  Crystals embedded in an igneous matrix with swirling carvings, on a wave-worn boulder, edge of a desiccating pluvial lake in Oregon. 

BASALT.  Completely patinaed carvings on this chocolate boulder in eastern Oregon.

ANDESITE.  A massive andesite glacial erratic in NW Washington, carvings obscured by mosses and leaves. 

TUFF. Carvings on face of cliff of welded tuff in eastern California.

In the beginning all was Molten. Caressing, congealing Creation arrives. Stone appears, birthing Earth. Restless Movement brings Life to all things. Beings wake, blink, consent. Carrying stone, placing stone, carving rock in the Telling time of prayer. The carving of the petroglyph, a fleeting phase in the life of the stone. Yes, the stone, alive. Actor and witness. Change, the constant forgiving. In the faraway end… all is Molten.   

NOTES
— Federico García Lorca (Spanish, 1898-1936) from the poem Moonbow.
— Photos by DB. Future posts on this blog will be devoted to each of these petroglyph, emphasizing eco-context, silences, and duration through time and beyond.  With gratitude to the unknown carvers.

CODA
Is life immortal? Don't ask life,
for it doesn't even know what life is.
We are the ones who know
that one day it too must die and return
to the beginning, the inertia of the origin.
The end of yesterday, today, and tomorrow,
the dissipation of time
and of nothing, its opposite.
Then will there be a then?
will the primigenius spark
light the matrix of the worlds,
a perpetual re-beginning of a senseless whirling?
No one answers, no one knows.
We only know that to live is to live for.

    — Octavio Paz (Mexican 1914-1998)
        from the long poem Response and Reconciliation
        (trans Eliot Weinberger)