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)