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)

Lizard on the fault line

Consider certain tiny lizards, and that

long before
anyone could count
there was still math.

— Linda Kasischke

Is Art matter? Does Lizard matter? Ontological questions. What is not in doubt: Gravity. Matters every moment. Dark crevice, weightless.

Humans take gravity as granted. Antique certainty, wheels spin, rain falls, ice melts, water drips. Trickles. Remembers.  Rivers flow, flood, pool, press dams. Gravity “generates” in the techno-version of Genesis spinning magnetic jostling electrons spawning Electricity. Bonneville: god of appliance desire.

None of this new to Lizard. Lizard knows gravity. Lizard Is Gravity. Actually and metonymically. Lizard stands forth. Lizard not to be seen, omnipresence unknown. Simply gets by, gets on with it. Lizard still, then gone. We say dart, dash, disappear, adios. Gravity has its verbs.

“Climate Change” no longer grasped. Idea cracking, concept fracturing, spalling, spilling.  The Great Fault where no fault lies like polycrisis lies. Bar graphs, peaks, valleys, picturing nullspace, glacial shimmer. Cards on the table. Shards in the dust. Gravity wins. Lizard knows.

 

NOTES
— Photos: Block and Fault country, Northern Great Basin; waters seeking the deep do not run to the sea. Lizard abides, memory lingers, dreaming.
— Foreground of second photo: groundstone mortar for grinding or crushing.
— Linda Kasischke from the poem The Accident in The Infinitesimals (2014 Copper Canyon Press)

What Does Lizard Know? 4

On the scales of your life, give as much to forgetting as to remembering. Watch for their point of equilibrium. 

 — Juan Ramón Jiménez

Lizard knows evennight; the glimpsed light, the unblinking dark.

Equinox. The crevice, crack, disappearing, mirroring an appearing; equilibrium?

Twinning between worlds, Lizard/s consider/s mythtime/s. Know they weren’t heroes, won’t be.  

Lizard eyes forgetting of stone, gazes, remembering bone.

No heroes, only the here, and the gone.

Lizard dreams the before, and after

Click to enlarge photos

Dark Edge of Awe

Things rock-solid change places with thoughts tenuous, then change back again. —Ellen Meloy

Absorb light emit dark

a turning edge

rhythmic notchings carved 

millennia before now

wind burnished

blackly varnished 

clay dust adhered

manganese 

a mirroring absent reflection

on gazing an inner space

opens 

outer time congeals

dark edge tilting swinging

toward stars

…

Across the flat desert

of Carson Sink

of a bright morning listening 

music across the expanse

several miles distant

from loudspeakers 

of the US Naval Air Station

Star-Spangled Banner

Images: Ancient carvings on boulders on shoreline terraces formed by waves of Lake Lahontan, known as Grimes Point, east of Carson Sink (central Nevada) and bordered by US Highway 50. Poem & Pictures Douglas Beauchamp. As always... Click to expand.

In the 20th century, the material reality for this place, these stones, has often been one of destructive impacts and disregard. Roads through the site, bulldozing, quarrying, boulders displaced, removed, damaged or destroyed, painted signs and graffiti.  Beginning in the 1950s, the area was used as a trash dump for Fallon, a few miles to the northwest. Only since the 1970s have protective measures by the BLM encouraged care and respect.

The stones abide; the petroglyphs resound. Though the rock art meanings may seem mute in this presence, the carvings induce listening and looking, as unfurling intimations - there and here, past and future.  A necessary and material sense of change turns, refolds, embraces this earth.

NOTES

— Ellen Meloy in The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on desert, sea, stone, and sky. (2002) 

—Grimes Point Archaeological Area (BLM).

https://www.blm.gov/visit/grimes-pointhidden-cave-archaeological-site

—Naval Air Station Fallon:  “Home to the Fighting Saints of VFC-13, the Desert Outlaws of Strike Fighter Wing Pacific, and the Naval Strike Air Warfare Center, NAS Fallon serves as the Navy’s premier tactical air warfare training center.” A scattered patchwork of five bombing ranges comprising 100,000 acres inscribe on the nearby terrain of Northern Nevada. http://www.cnic.navy.mil/regions/cnrsw/installations/nas_fallon.html

—Modern research on the region’s rock art began with Julian Steward (1929); enhanced by Martin Baumhoff and Robert Heizer (1958; 1962); followed by Karen Nissen’s detailed documentation in the 1970s (1982).  

—References/sources provided on request

CODA

Away from you 

Away from you, 

alone, I can come 

—a leaf flickers
on the river's light skin 

Together 

we are two stones like one stone rolling 

rolling down on the riverbed   two

light black stones 

we have always been here 

once we were one stone 

—the other thing holds us 

in its mouth 

—Jean Valentine in The Cradle of Real Life

In recognition of the courageous and resilient people of Ukraine in this time of darkness