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)