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.

Ogham Stones

 The real constitution of each thing is accustomed to hide itself. —Heraclitus, frag. 123

Standing forth wondering what does this stone remember?  How has the stone itself forgotten. Ogham is an ancient Irish alphabet carved vertically on stones. This early Christian practice traveled in the 5th-7th centuries to about a hundred known places in western Wales, Cornwall and Scotland.

Edge notches and discrete incised lines inscribe memory, as memorial, as boundary.  This 6th century. Ogham stone (above) stands next to this 10th century Celtic Cross (below) cornered by the wall of St. Brynach's Church in Nevern, western Wales.

Looking on, thinking, we need Time to remember, but Time does not need us to forget.

St Llawddog's churchyard, Cilgerran, Wales, an Ogham stone (right) stands with grave-slabs.

Four close-ups of the Cilgerran stone, weathered Ogham notchings are inscribed and can be discerned along the edge. Below, on the dark face of the stone, is a Latin inscription restating the Ogham inscription.

The stone and the rose -- all is transitory, all in the now of presence.  The chalked markings present a re-remembering, perhaps a ritual of forgiving. The Sacranus Stone  stands in the entry way of the parish church of St Thomas the Martyr in the village of St Dogmaels. The church, on the grounds of the Norman abbey now in ruins, holds several inscribed stones connected to an earlier 5th-century Christian monastery.

Inscribing is holy. Words are holy.  The photograph is holy.  All drumming down the halls of the moment called time.

NOTE
Photos: May 2025, Western Wales.  With gratitude to T&B and Jackson for their spirited goodwill. The people and places ever kind and patient with the curious and lucky traveler. Especially helpful, the mother of the Vicar at St Brynach’s, and Sarah with her generous welcoming to St Llawddog’s Church, as it happened, on the 80th anniversary celebration of VE (Victory Europe) Day, May 8 2025, photo below.  -DB

Sundial of St Beuno

my body opened at the knowledge of existence
and of being, confused and diffused
my body trembled and sighed
to a forgotten song
not yet a fugitive of music
I knew the place of time
and the time of place
—Alejandra Pizarnik 

 

Standing next to this 10th century granite slab-type sundial time I wonder... how does time matter, or rather appear? And so, this musing:  time matters. With a gnomon (rod-pointer) extending from the drilled hole, the sun’s shadow would mark the canonical hours as it crossed the linear incisings.

This sundial, a slab-dial with a cross of western Celtic pattern at its head, once marked the monastic daily cycle. The linear incisings, some still visible, marked the canonical hours, the divisions of the day for fixed times of prayers, often the three-hour intervals of religious services appointed by canon law.  Time plays on and on as many come and go.

Located in Clynnog Fawr, North Wales, it is a type also known in Ireland, but thought to be unique in Wales and is a Grade II listed monument. According to Cadw, the Welsh Government’s historic environment service, “probably still standing in its original location on a major religious site.” Perhaps, and No. And yes.

H. Harold Hughes in a 1931 Miscellanea “An Ancient Sun-Dial at Clynnog” notes:  Fenton writes (in Tours in Wales, 1813) that from Clynnog, "In our way to Carnarvon about a mile on our road, observe a long stone of a curious grit, with a cross in a circle on one end which appears to have been a tomb or shaft of a cross.”' Hughes in 1931 learned the stone-slab was used a footbridge and later moved to a farm “to support milk-pails.”  His group helped the Vicar of San Beuno Church relocate the sundial-slab to where they believed it belonged: next to the chapel in the churchyard.

 

With this stone I gaze at the ancient churchyard, populated with inscribed slate stones, some for the ancient monks. Imagining, for a thousand years in place at the corner of the St Beuno Chapel and the 16th century St Beuno Church. And somewhere near a lost 7th century monastery.  

The free-standing sundial is my height. Ambiguously Cadw notes:  “approximately 2m high (reduced by c30cm).”  The “reduced” is not explained. From the rear view the top appears rough. Was there more to the cross?  What does Time not tell?

Hughes, a Bangor architect, doesn’t clarify, but carefully measures the stone and notes:  “The full length of the stone is 9 feet 3 inches, but 2 feet 9 inches is buried below the ground surface.”  Hughes concludes: “The Clynnog dial appears to be unique as far as Wales is concerned. I have little hesitation in assigning its date to a pre-Norman period.” 

NOTES

—Appreciation to Ashley Batten, MA, MCIfA, Regional Inspector of Ancient Monuments and Archaeology North Wales, for his helpful advice after we crossed paths one fine morning in Penmaenmawr.

—Photos May 2025.  Red arrow, left in above photo of St Beuno Church, indicates the Sundial next to the Chapel. (click to enlarge) 
—Alejandra Pizarnik, from Extracting the Stone of Madness (translated by Yvette Siegert, 2016).

—H. Henry Hughes in a 1931 Miscellanea “An Ancient Sun-Dial at Clynnog” in Archaeologia Cambrensis.

—Cadw. Full Report for listed Buildings: Sundial in the churchyard of the Church of St Beuno. https://cadw.gov.wales/
—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clynnog_Fawr

—Speculative binaries:  Marcia Bjornerud, in Timefulness, distinguishes Time as something that simply marches on — chronos — and Time that is defined within a narrative — kairos.  Similarly, Stephen Jay Gould shapes a geologic dynamic as: Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle. 

CODA
And, above all, to look on innocently. As if nothing were happening, which is true. —Alejandra Pizarnik

 

Another Tale of Time in Clynnog Fawr

 

TUFF :: Tule Lake

Time thins.   Memory serves the mirage.

A cliff wall of tuff. Volcanic cone erupted underwater 250,000 or so years ago under the ancient endorheic basin now known as Tule Lake. Terminus of the expansive watershed nourishing Lost River. In turn, nourishing the Modocs in their ancestral territories for thousands of years.

This tumultuous country now sliced by an unwavering geopolitical line, the Oregon-California boundary. In the 19th century this line demarcated a transgressive often violent zone of difference. The Modoc peoples subjugated, displaced, often killed. Gold-seekers, militia, US Army, Wasco scouts hired from Warm Springs reservation, and would be railroaders-turned-ranchers-turned judge and boss.

How do these thousands of rock cut markings gazed at by the modern drive-up viewer align with colonial claiming and naming?  What can we ask that comes close to empathy and release?  

Petroglyphs carved through several millennia now easily accessed and viewed in a protected section of the Lava Beds National Monument:  Petroglyph Point.

 

CODA
… Forgotten now forgetting, no
more the absent-minded in full preoccupation
with the ten thousand things, each separate,
each needing its own space and unique memory.
Years seem to have gone by in this forgetting.
Do thousand lives have to be wasted now
to sharpen this one life? But all the lives
return again into the picture as sun wills me
to wither down to a last flare of love.
—Nathanial Tarn from the poem Recollection of Being

Looking into stone

Look closely into the lower half of this older figure.  A series of precise incisings -- horizontal, vertical, diagonal.  This type of linear marking-into-stone appears some places in the Northern Great Basin and in Owyhee country. 


Various rock surfaces show a rangeof petroglyph intentions and styles.  Look at the rock face upper left. Moving closer in the photo below. An elongated figure. Notable, incisings in the lower area.  Especially the intense repetitive cross-hatching, see close-up, following.


 

 A clear, minimal figuration, lightly marked. Looking closely, one imagines "eyes" in the "head" -- natural, shallow depressions -- intentionally embodied by the carver?  A looking-out and beyond... and through you, the transient viewer.

 

Lower right, another appearance of repetitive incisings.  Perhaps the performative act was of primary importance; the resulting image an artifact.  One wonders.

Below, three other rock faces at this place -- a baffling and intriguing variety of designs and elusive meanings.


 

Photos April 2024, Northern Great Basin, near the arbitrary political partitioning of Oregon, California and Nevada (42nd Parallel in 1819; 120th Meridian in 1849). These resident petroglyphs older and deeply responsive to seasons and terrain.