The Night of Stone

Rock rim exposes, shadows, faces south.  This place of water in desert attracted travelers, seekers, in thousands of years of solidity and change.  I slept once on this rim. A rough and lucid night as I dreamed of the ancient ones in visitation. An allowance emerged from their wisdom.
To make pictures of the glyphs, the markings, aims to respect the deep intent of their presence. As they — the makers and the markings — invoke the spirit of place. Perhaps seeking resolve in seeing with the night of stone. In the light of day.

 

This collection of images considers one section of complexity of rock and petroglyphs at this place of power.  Moving in closer, then moving away.   

CODA
From the Chilean master Pablo Neruda:
 
To harden the earth
the rocks took charge:
instantly
they grew wings:
the rocks
that soared:
the survivors
flew up
the lightning bolt,
screamed in the night,
a watermark,
a violet sword,
a meteor.
The succulent
sky
had not only clouds,
not only space smelling of oxygen,
but an earthly stone
flashing here and there
changed into a dove,
changed into a bell,
into immensity, into a piercing
wind:
into a phosphorescent arrow,
into salt of the sky.

—Pablo Neruda, from Stones of the Sky. 
(1970, trans James Nolan 1987, Copper Canyon Press)

Ovoid as Vulva, Abstracted

Will our life not be a tunnel 
between two vague clarities?

Or will it not be a clarity 
between two dark triangles?
    —Pablo Neruda

Georgia Lee considers the pecked ovoid:  “a type of petroglyph, like the pit and groove, is found in many other areas. They are generally believed to be abstracted vulva signs.”

Two photos above:  Death Valley. 

  Two photos below:   Mono County.  

Lee notes: “According to McGowan, they probably are the most common and most universally recognized female fertility symbol.  Not all vulva signs are pecked ovoids; they take other forms, such as horseshoe shapes, wedge shapes, and bisected ovals.”

And further, citing Lee:  “Such symbols were more than simply ‘sexual’ depictions. As Marshack pointed out, depictions of the vulva became, over time, isolated, abstracted, and loaded with symbolic meaning. … Thus, rather than a narrow symbol of eroticism or anatomical study, vulva symbols had a more comprehensive aspect; they stood for concepts, stories, myths, processes.”

How does an image abstracted bear such a weight of symbolic meaning?

First, an embracing definition of abstraction:  The result of mentally abstracting an idea; the product of any mental process involving a synthesis of: separation, despecification, generalization, and ideation in any of a number of combinations. (Wiktionary)

Two photos, above and below:  El Paso Mountains 

Second, Charline von Heyl, a German abstract painter, emphasizes, almost Rilke-like, the force of thing itself:   “the ability of an abstract image to function as a fact—not as an illustration, representation, or evocation but with the force of the thing itself, be it a feeling that comes on sharp and sudden, an emotion that seeps in and aches, or an idea that generates an entire architecture of forms to be understood, and then only fleetingly, as the scaffolding falls away.” —Artforum

 

NOTES
—Pablo Neruda, from The Book of Questions, trans William O’Daly.
—Georgia Lee, "The Rock Art of Soxtonocmu, an Inland Chumash Village" in the Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, 1981 3(1).
Available:  https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8pt4v2wk
—Kaelen Wilson-Goldie reviewing Charline von Heyl, Nov 2013, in Artforum.
—Also:  https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2025/01/tufa.html
—Photos:   Douglas Beauchamp, Mono and Inyo counties, Eastern California
—Above: Charline von Heyl painting. Oil/acrylic/charcoal on canvas; 82x78 inches. Blacksmile: “An abstract painting characterized by layered shapes and surface tensions rather than direct representation.”