Hands, Reaching

Consider the splayed human hand, dipped in ochre or paint and pressed against any firm surface-cave wall, church wall, school wall, rock wall. … this universal hand mark … presented at full stretch … is radiant, reaching out from its singular base to establish the eternally mysterious space of just where it is. It confirms presence while not engaged or proclaimed in directing or manipulating anything at all. It is empty-handed presence.
    —Susan Murphy

How can it be that we only live once— 

the body constantly wishing for 

what only the hands can do: reach 

and grasp, reach and grasp. Something 

like the foaling of eternity, born 

and reborn on spindles. 

    —Keetje Kuipers

NOTES

—Hand prints on stone, Owens River Valley, Inyo County, CA. Photos: DB, 2026

—Keetje Kuipers, from the poem For All The Dead Lovelies from her collection The Keys to The Jail (2014)

—Susan Murphy, an Australian Zen teacher, from A Fire Runs Through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis — Teachings on Earth, Mind & Not Knowing (2023). 

—Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, June 1944. From Mon Cher Amour: The Love Letters of Albert Camus and Maria Casarès, 1944–1959 (trans from the French, 2026)

CODA

When someone has a soul, they tend to call what frustrates them lucidity, and what eludes them, truth. But that lucidity is just as blind as anything else. There is only one type of clairvoyance: the kind that wants to grasp at happiness. And I know that, even though it might be short-lived, endangered or fragile, happiness awaits us, if we reach out our hands. But we must reach out our hands. 

    —Albert Camus to Maria Casarès, June 1944.

(Maria Casarès and Albert Camus met in Paris on June 6, 1944, the day the Allies landed in Normandy. She was 21; he was 30. His last letter to her was December 30, 1959. On January 4, 1960 Albert Camus was killed in a car accident on his way back to Paris.)

Grotto Trio

 

Three figures. Painted on the limestone wall of Grotto Canyon with several other faded, glazed figures. Small, discrete, focused. Spirit beings. Glazed by a sheen of a translucent silicate deposit. Enhanced here via DStretch.

This physical veiling enhances the mystery and speculation of the origin of these figures.  Elements of Columbia plateau motifs, with distinct figures suggesting origins in the southwestern US. Including (not pictured here) a possible hunched flute-player, or more popularly supposed: a Kokopelli.  The possibilities sprinkled over the decades by several technical studies, casual observation, far-ranging wonderments.  Now, AI queries generalize the question of origins.

Do an Internet search for Grotto Canyon pictographs and enter the realm. Or better, when you find the leisure, or are compelled, journey to Alberta and enter Grotto Canyon. Varies by season, as do all things.

Upper figure:  a DStretch version of the photo below by Douglas Beauchamp.
Note: DStretch developed by Jon Harman:  https://dstretch.com/

Figure / Ground / Paint / Rock

We / fit together as tectonic plates do — / one of those rare natural puzzles.  —Jennifer Richter in Dear Future

This series of animated finger markings in red (ochre? blood? berry?) on the lower section of the stone face contrast with the more precise and intentional forms on the upper -- the lightning snake, the circles....

Here, the paint appears as pressings, slappings, draggings -- wondering.... acts of inquiry? supplication? yearning? The stone itself so very complex pulls all meaning toward a magnetic core of origin.

Figure and ground, the red markings emerge from stone bearing invocation, offering in-sight.

 

This outcrop roughly furred and fractured bears forth seasons of knowing and forgetting. 

 

CODA
Smelt the gold and silver
Hiding in the rock. 
Glimpse what can't be glimpsed. 

Wherever the soul soared, 
Fire was there first. 

Everything I don't know, 
Love will tell you.

 

    —Rumi. (trans Haleh Liza Gafori in GOLD (2022) 

FURTHER… A 2023 post of this stone offers views in a dappling morning, deepening a fading field of shadows. SHADOWING RED

The Oblique Angle of Time

Every act of memory is an act of forgetting. 

 

The tree of memory set its roots in blood. 

 

In forgetting lies the liquefaction of time.
—Lewis Hyde, Aphorisms

A grotto in the Ochocos holds rock paintings. How and when the cave has been occupied, the impulse shaping the graphic rock paintings, remains unknown. This deep, obscure cave, on private property, requires permission. 

To view details, click on photo to enlarge

 

These red ochre-based paintings envisioned with clear focus and intention. The markings appear to be done using fingers or a softened twig as a brush. The style similar to others on rock faces scattered at various places in central Oregon. Likely influenced by the traditions of the indigenous peoples of the Snake River (moving west) and/or Columbia River (moving south) regions.

 

To decipher the invisible: to recall not the past exactly but the atemporal suchness of things, their otherwise obscure being. —Lewis Hyde in A Primer for Forgetting

 

Below, at the deep end of the cave fire blackening carbon stains the ceiling and walls.

 

It has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left by your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating. —Paul Bowles

FIRE : Murderers Creek

Murderers Creek, a tributary to the wild and scenic South Fork of the John Day River, lies  at the heart of the Rail Ridge Fire: 175,000 acres September/October this year and not fully contained as of this writing.

Murderers Creek, a 19th century naming of a valley in traditional Northern Paiute country. The Northern Paiute arriving several centuries before Euro-American incursion, conflicts, and displacements began 200 years ago. The Creek’s name holds diverse tellings of origins.  What is to be believed?

Indigenous Peoples’ Day, recognized on October 14 in Oregon, offers a time to reflect on dramatic changes in the lifeways of the Northern Paiute beginning with the Hudson Bay fur traders in the 1820-1830s.  Murderers Creek figures prominently, yet elusively, in the 1850-1870s — an era of movement, mining, fighting, tracking, killing, capturing, and claiming in Oregon. Including the infamous and devastating Paiute War, 1864-1868. Well-documented, by Anglos — military, newspapers, settlers reports, histories, etc. — in various ways and styles.

Another kind of document:  I speculate that some of the many rock paintings in places of movement and conflict in Central and SE Oregon were made during that era, 1840s-1870s.  This may apply to some of Murderers Creek’s complex of rock paintings by indigenous people. 

Unusual image combines incising and abrading, appears to intentionally connect with the visible power of the natural stone.

Black grid/net: origin and intent unknown

NOTES
— Rail Ridge Fire Sep-Oct 2024 LINK with maps and updates
— Aurora Borealis over the Rail Ridge Fire and other photos LINK
— Photos above May 2018. Click to enlarge. Feel free to inquire. Most of these images, in Grant County, documented by the intrepid Lorings in the 1960s.

— Murderers Creek also imaged and discussed July 20 2023: https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2023/07/beneath-us-other-order-already-moves.html

 

CODA

        The Valley of Birds

We'll lock the door
and head for the valley of birds.
Hold on,
while I douse the fire
to ensure that no one
can block our path.

Sit down for a minute and rest
by the tree where the doves sing.
And if I don't appear,
don't turn around,
don't let out a scream.
Let the silence protect you.

If I don't appear
it means the fire is unquenchable.
But a swift is flying circles
above you!
Lift your head up
and watch it.
        — Anzhelina Polonskaya

Evanescence

Above:   1. Canyon wall, Warner Basin Uplands.  2. Original photo.  3&4. To reveal detail of this very faded rock painting, two enhanced versions (DStretch) with further modifications in Photos editor.

Observations & speculations. The shape of the stone commands attention, evokes a certain power essential to the placement of the painting's figure. Hands or paws may have been painted on this ghost-like figure in a different pigment, now disappeared. Or, perhaps the intent is approximately as we see in the enhanced images. The horizontal strokes may be ribs, or perhaps they represent cut marks. Whether the painting is gendered or sexualized, is a warning or invocation, is a spirit presence, all suggestive yet remain unknown ... in the fading...

 

CODA

The song that sang itself
had no time
knew no season
it sounded with the power of the end
— Suzan Shown Harjo from The Song Called "White Antelope’s Chant”

Blessed
are those who listen
when no one is left to speak.
— Linda Hogan from the poem Blessings

Both poets included in When The Light Of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (2020), Joy Harjo, editor

Solstice : Emerging

 

Red

In the face of the unknown, humans have always left their mark: handprints on cave walls, painted suns on rocks, flute solos to the stars. Sometimes words are inadequate for communication. Elements must be transformed. Mineral pigments into paint. Sound into song. Fire into smoke.
— Anita Endrezze, from Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon

 

 Red sees us seeing
wavelengthening
the vibrating heart

blackening stone

fear wavering
sharpened tension 

ignites desire
congealing fire
staining shadow

 
a fine willing cry
wonder of blue sky

how many passed

this way before
now
after
blood spilled
spilling still

Photos:  Autumn 2023, a Cascades tributary to the Deschutes River flowing north to the Columbia River then to the Pacific, finding peace.
To honor in this one world the peoples bloodied, bound and displaced by the machines of war, then and now. May they also find peace.