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.” 

Solstice Dreaming

I dreamed among the ice caps long ago,
Ranging with the sun on the inward slope,
Down the wheel of seasons and the solstices.
                —N Scott Momaday from Prairie Hymn

Summer Solstice 2026: A watery dream accelerates as the ice melts. This Earth, a place of stone, knows molten density. Knows solar intensity. Thinking to and fro, this boat rocking through gateless sky. What do we know?

 

Photo: Petroglyph, detail. High Lakes, Lake County, Oregon. Douglas Beauchamp. 

 

CODA
What follows the light is what precedes it:
the moment of balance, of dark equivalence.
            —Louise Glück from the poem Solstice

Night Diamond

There are few smiles in this universe.
 

He who moves through it has an infinite
 

number of encounters that wounded him.
 

However, you don't die in it.
 

If you die everything starts all over again.

 
— Henri Michaux

...

There are two nights. The second one comes behind the night that everybody sees. This second night is under the darkness. It tells the shaman where the pain is and what caused the sickness. When the second night comes it makes the shaman feel that he is a doctor. The power is in him to doctor. Only shamans can see this second night. The people can only see the darkness. They cannot see the night under it.
— Joe Green, Pyramid Lake

NOTES
— Henri Michaux (French 1899-1984) from the poem Night of Inconveniences in The Night Moves (La Nuit Remue 1935 Gallimard), trans David Ball.
— Joe Green, speaking in English of the spirit of the night as the source of power, recorded by Willard Z Park, in Shamanism in Western North America: A Study in Cultural Relationships. (1938 Northwestern U)
— This presentation of the image of this northern Great Basin petroglyph boulder with the juxtapositions of disparate poetic insights does not imply any cross-interpretation or attribution. I do so with the greatest respect for each.  So, why do so?  To open space for absence, losses, solitary gestures — a fourth dimension, perhaps. On this planet today millions on the move, hope for shelter, for food, for safety — one more night, one night at a time.  Some never find it. The wounding, the healing, a hoping.

CODA
Glance at the sun. See the moon and the stars. Gaze at the beauty of earth's greenings. Now, think.
— Hildegard von Bingen (German Benedictine abbess, c. 1098 – 1179)

 

Swallowing II: A Singular Petroglyph Boulder

  

Nature is a temple where living pillars
Sometimes let out confused lyrics
Man passes through, across forests of symbols
Each one observing him with a familiar gaze

Like long echoes, from afar confounding
In a dark and profound unity
Vast like night and like clarity
Fragrance, color, and sound all resounding
    — Charles Baudelaire, 1857

1953. Five Mile Rapid, Swallowed in 1957

Near the lower end there are several dangerous rocks in the rapid, and at the foot large masses of rock divide it into different parts the main channel empties into a capacious, deep basin of rectangular shape, called Big Eddy.   

-- Captain. Chas. F. Powell, Corps of Engineers, 1882

1954. Boulder during evaluation by archaeologists

The investigation of the petroglyphs (in spring 1956) was made by Samuel C. Sargent, a Geologist with the Corps of Engineers, on The Dalles Dam project. Mr. Sargent called attention to petroglyphs existing on islands in Fivemile Rapids, which can be easily removed and are in an excellent state of preservation. These petroglyphs are located in areas 6 and 7. I would urge that these petroglyphs be salvaged, since they represent unique forms for this area. 

-- David L. Cole, University of Oregon, 1956

In attempting to raise the petroglyph from Area 7 (by the Corps of Engineer’s Derrick Barge “Cascade” after the formation of The Dalles Dam Pool), the connection to the lift line parted and the petroglyph and lift line were lost. In the near future, an attempt will be made to recover the petroglyph with the help of a diver.
-- Joseph F. Garback, Lt Colonel, Corps of Engineers, 1957

1956. Army Corps of Engineers assessment for relocation

Area 7 was on a small island at the lower end of Fivemile Rapids. One rock was to be removed from this island. This rock was approximately seven feet high, eight feet wide and eight feet deep, weighing approximately seventeen tons. It was lying loose on a level area. Jacks were used to lift the rock enough to slip the cables under … the petroglyph was … bound with a cable which was attached to a float. In the attempt to lift this petroglyph a cable clamp slipped and it fell back into the water. The last report received was that the Corps of Engineers planned to send a diver down after it.
-- David L. Cole, University of Oregon, 1958

The Columbia River today pooled by The Dalles Dam

It is unfortunate that the petroglyph from Area #7 was lost in the efforts to raise it from the bottom of the pool. Naturally, $1,000 to attempt to recover this petroglyph is out of line with the value of the petroglyph, and we feel that this petroglyph will have to be considered as lost.
-- Herbert Maier, National Park Service, 1958

Dislocated from one another, we are now flooded,
resting in place.
We suffocate in the backwater of decadence
and fractious contempt.
Purity of the ancient is the language without tongues.
The river elegantly marks swirls on its surface,
a spiral that tells of a place
that remains undisturbed.
— Elizabeth Woody 

NOTES
— Charles Baudelaire from the poem Correspondences in Les Fleurs du mal, 1857. Translated by Ariana Reines.
— Elizabeth Woody from her poem “Waterways Endeavor to Translate Silence from Currents” in Luminaries of the humble. U of Arizona Press, 1994.
— In 1956 a cast of this petroglyph was made by James Hansen for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) in Portland. Also in 1956, a rubbing made by Sari Dienes is now in the archives of the Burke Museum in Seattle.
Other NOTES & References available on request

Columbia River Petroglyph: The Swallowing

In 1956 artist Sari Dienes draped burlap of over a boulder and, using a brayer, produced a stone “rubbing” with red and black paint —  an image of petroglyphs.

Dienes produced another rubbing of this boulder on paper with black ink now archived at the Burke Museum in Seattle along with several hundred other petroglyph rubbings completed under a contract. 

This distinctive figure is described as a “monster” and its design elaborated in 1956 notations by Mark Hedden. A reductive -- and misleading -- labeling seems to me.  Several versions of cautionary stories of indigenous river peoples do tell of a swallowing monster in the depths of the river.  A leap from those often terrifying stories to conjuring this spirited figure carved in stone as monster.   

A real swallowing concrete monster in 1956 was under construction:  The Dalles Dam on the mid-Columbia River which the following year devoured miles of canyon, traditional fishing places, ancient villages, untold graves — and hundreds of the petroglyphs of the mid-Columbia River. 

Above, the boulder face:  64” wide, 40” high. The primary figure (top) is 32” in height. Below, another detail.

NOTES

— The stone rubbing: red and black in on burlap, 64” wide, 40” high. The primary figure is 32” in height. A gift to us from the family of David Cole, an archaeologist who worked on contract with the Army Corps of Engineers in the mid-1950s.

— Curiously, without explanation, a Burke Archaeology article was titled:

“Sea Monsters and Mountain Sheep: Preserving Images of Columbia River Rock Art.” We are left to imagine what the writers imagined… as the river ripples on...

— Sari Dienes, a prolific, daring and eclectic artist had done manhole covers in New York City and in 1956 recently completed street rubbings in Oakland CA. Her petroglyph rubbings from the Columbia River were exhibited that year in San Francisco at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. Next, she traveled to Kyoto Japan and produced other petroglyph rubbings.

http://saridienes.org/life/1940-1959.html

https://www.moma.org/artists/8085

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sari_Dienes#Sidewalk_Rubbings

https://vimeo.com/859777002

— Notably, in the1920s, surrealist artist Max Ernst explored frottage (rubbing on textured surfaces) as the basis for an multitude of drawings and paintings. Dienes, born in 1898 in Hungary, would have known of Ernst's work.

https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/frottage

Sari Dienes at work on the Columbia River, 1956.

Point of waking

 How line begins
Point of waking

 How image appears
Shapes congeal

Who is the who in the making?

 

 

Story slides sideways
Memory adheres to stone

 

 

 Story ends
Yields to rain

 

  The Diamond thins
Mirror remains

 

 

Who is the who in the remembering?

NOTES

Photos: Fractured water-worn basalt boulders, manganese-iron patina, petroglyphs, lichen, moss, grasses. Southeast Oregon basin and range, June 2023.   (click to enlarge)

Dome

Looking in

Seeing with figurations enfolding place, time. 

How boundary dissolves between seer, seen.

Was there once such a boundary?

Such wondering will get us no where.

Stone dome, base of basalt rim. Basin-and-Range country, near what-is-now the boundary - as imagined - between Oregon and Nevada.

(click photos to enlarge)

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

Gliding...

Standing on this rim

watching hawks below in the canyon

gliding.

Hawks watching stone cliffs for movement. 

What moves is the earth. 

No rim. 

No standing. 

Only the gliding,

the gliding…     

 

drop of dew

There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable — a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown. —Sigmund Freud

In the mist of lavalands, the one spot becomes manifold.

Red arrow indicates glyph

An unplumbable dream of turtle; an unknown between the familiar and the haunting. Further, a metaphorical signal: Turtle Island.

Issa:

I know this world
is a drop of dew —
and still . . . still . . .

NOTES

— Sigmund Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)

— Issa (1763-1828), Japanese poet and haiku master

— Photos: Uplands of basin and range country, June 2022. Above: Mist; Golden Eagle ledge-nest/nest-fall; Canyon wall, glyph, pool; Pronghorn tracks.

CODA

Re-turned last week from eastern Oregon, sagelands, lavalands, dustings and dreamings. Embracing Cascade oscillation: open country to thereabouts east; valley envelopment here out west.  

Not away long enough for Eugene not to seem normal. Then, reading the news, seems “fatigue" is the operative word of the month. Virus fatigue. Ukraine fatigue. Climate-heat fatigue. And the general malaise of politics what with inflationary-inflammatory. 

Yet, ever aspiration, sensing a mystery who provides all the possibilities of these experiences. We will never know how the galaxies wheel. We are fortunate in ways we do not understand for a brief cycle to participate in something grand.  That’s a guess….

What Does Lizard Know? 2

"Lane County has an abundance of prehistoric artifacts. This example of pictographs have defied the elements for centuries. Writings can be see along Highway 395 near Lake Abert. County contains almost a fourth of the state’s Indian writings.”
— 1959: Caption of a featured photograph of a petroglyph boulder, Sunday Oregonian. [1]

“Indian Pictographs in Lake County. Such Indian picture writings are usually not very old, because the desert wind and sand tend to obliterate them in about two hundred years as a rule.”  
— 1964: Caption of a photograph of a petroglyph boulder published as the full-page frontispiece of The Oregon Desert (1964) [2] (Image above, adapted)

“The boulder was blasted by a maintenance crew about 1967, and the fragments graded into the ditch on the west side of the highway.”

— 1967: Noted by Malcolm and Louise Loring (1982) [3]

The identical petroglyph boulder is imaged and imagined in all three publications; The Oregonian and Oregon Desert photographs are almost identical.

Drawing adapted from the Lorings's sketch of the boulder’s face prior to the 1967 blasting, noting: "On one large lizard petroglyph the rock surface in the body was polished and painted with red pigment." [3]

Hwy 395 and Abert Rim these days: Lizard Boulder disappeared

Lone-Lizard sees it coming: Ancient-History in not ancient. Lone-Lizard sees it going: Ancient-History is not history as a rule.  Ancient-History sees Lone-Lizard not as Lizard, sees as dreamtime highway lake-shore fragmentings.

From slope above Hwy 396, view west over Lake Abert toward Winter Rim; rock wall an "historic" cattle fence.

NOTES
[1] "Pictographs, Petroglyphs Premium Lake County Attractions,” Sunday Oregonian, August 23, 1959, by Paul Laartz, The highlight of this feature story was a photograph of the boulder with petroglyphs on the southeast shore of Lake Abert. The story was part of series in partnership with the Oregon State Motor Assn to promote  tourism during Oregon’s centennial year —1959.  

Eerily, this 1959 article also included a second photograph: “Lakeview, well known as a center of lumbering, cattle raising, has recently added this uranium reduction mill to its list of contributors to a thriving Lake County economy.”  

With tabloid-ready names, Lucky Lass and White King, two 1950s uranium mines a few miles NW of Lakeview on Fremont Forest lands, were later designated Superfund sites. The “disposal” and “processing” sites were near town: Lakeview Uranium Mill operated 1958-1961. A 2017 fact-sheet: “The Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act of 1978. Title I processing site and disposal site near Lakeview, Oregon. This site is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Legacy Management.” 

Legacy? Ask Lizard…  

[2] The Oregon Desert, 1964, by E R Jackman and Reub A. Long, Caxton Press (Idaho).  Chapter 11, titled  “Indians in the Desert,” offers folksy observation, opinion and hearsay, vague (mis)information, and condescending pronouncements typical of late 19th- and early 20th-century attitudes. This enduringly popular volume has been continuously in-print since 1964; distributed by University of Nebraska Press. The full-page frontispiece photograph is the petroglyph boulder destroyed in 1967.

[3] Malcolm and Louise Loring in 1967 visited the Lake Abert shore location of petroglyph boulder highlighted in the two photographs. In the description for Site 140 the Lorings reference the 1959 Oregonian story.  Loring, J. Malcolm, and Louise Loring. Pictographs & Petroglyphs of the Oregon Country, Parts I & II. (1982, corrected 1996) 

[4] Dreamtime Highway: not a completely original phrase. In Dreamtime Superhighway (2008), a superb book about the rock art of New South Wales, Australia, Jo McDonald proposes, “the rock art in the Sydney region functioned as a prehistoric information superhighway.”  ... Something to ponder as one traverses the (now desiccating) Lake Abert eastern shoreline along the snaking US Highway 395.

[5] MORE?! 2022:  “Oregon’s Lake Abert is ‘in deep trouble.’ The state shut down its effort to figure out why”  by Rob Davis, The Oregonian, Jan 16, 2022

Ever the... 2021: US Senators Merkley and Romney introduced legislation to protect long-term health of saline ecosystems. (Status unknown April 2022)

Abert Lake looking south -- 2016 a year with water!

Photos and Conjurings Douglas Beauchamp

What is this life if, full of care,

we have no time to stand and stare?

— W.H. Davies (English poet, 1871-1940)

On a plaque on his Cotswolds stone house

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