Two Boulders, Seeming So

It is possible that to seem—it is to be,
As the sun is something seeming and it is.

The sun is an example. What it seems
It is and in such seeming all things are.

Thus things are like a seeming of the sun
Or like a seeming of the moon or night 

Or sleep.

— Wallace Stevens

ABOVE: An old-style boulder moved from the edge of the lower Columbia River, as Bonneville Dam was constructed, to a plaza in front of the county courthouse at Stevenson WA.  

So it seems:  The Garrison Eddy Petroglyph Boulder

...

There might be, too, a change immenser than
A poet’s metaphors in which being would

Come true, a point in the fire of music where
Dazzle yields to a clarity and we observe,

And observing is completing and we are content,
In a world that shrinks to an immediate whole,

That we do not need to understand, complete
Without secret arrangements of it in the mind.

—Wallace Stevens

...

BELOW:  Near a road winding east in Mendocino County to the Elk River, with over a dozen concentric circles carved in bas relief, this boulder considered an example of the some of the oldest rock art in the Northwest.

So it seems:  The Spyrock Petroglyph Boulder

Hundreds of miles apart, these two boulders bearing carvings which appear to be related traditions. I speculate early peoples traveled along the coast and explored up rivers. Perhaps settling, or moving on, maybe disappearing. But in these attentive instances, they left their marks.

These concentric circular motifs seem to speak of water.  Perhaps of cycles, of seasons, in memory. A bringing forth from and with stone. As invocation. We cannot know.

All photos: Douglas Beauchamp

In flat appearance we should be and be,
Except for delicate clinkings not explained.

These are the actual seemings that we see,
Hear, feel and know. We feel and know them so.

—Wallace Stevens

(All Stevens excerpts from the poem Description Without Place)

It is a sense

To which we refer experience, a knowledge
Incognito, the column in the desert,

On which the dove alights. Description is
Composed of a sight indifferent to the eye.

It is an expectation, a desire,
A palm that rises up beyond the sea,

A little different from reality:
The difference that we make in what we see

And our memorials of that difference,
Sprinklings of bright particulars from the sky.

The future is description without place,
The categorical predicate, the arc.

—Wallace Stevens