Time, Opaque

And so the days go by here, without incident.
    Even the occasional memorable event is soon erased without a trace under time’s huge, opaque mass. 
    —Han Kang

"For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations," Mary Austin wrote, "deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars ... wheeling to their stations in the sky, they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls.” ...

 ... To be like the lean coyote is a comfort beneath a sky that is full of fog or full of sunlight and either way impenetrable. Such comfort is not a reason for carelessness. Precisely because you might not know everything — because the night answers but not with words you can understand, and the stars swing above you, moving, as Austin tells us, as if "on some stately service not needful to declare,“ you must accept certain responsibilities — among them the task of taking care.
    —Kendra Atleework

 Click photo, zoom in for detail

What is the meaning of our brief stay in this world? How difficult is it for us to remain human, come what may? In the darkest night, there is language that asks what we are made of, that insists on imagining into the first person perspectives of the people and living beings that inhabit this planet; language that connects us to one another. 

 

Literature that deals in this language inevitably holds a kind of body heat. Just as inevitably, the work of reading and writing literature stands in opposition to all acts that destroy life. I would like to share the meaning of this award, which is for literature, with you – standing here in opposition to violence together. 
    —Han Kang from her Nobel Prize speech (December 2024, translated from Korean by Maya West)

NOTES
—Han Kang, top: Greek Lessons: A Novel (2023). Han Kang awarded the Nobel in Literature, 2024
—Kendra Atleework, Miracle Country: A Memoir (2020)
—Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (1903)
Both write of the country east of the Sierras, the Owens Valley, Inyo County, California
—Photos:  Inyo County, California, March 2026, Douglas Beauchamp

 

Rock Varnish

The extraordinary patience of things! 

—Robinson Jeffers

In particular I will mention Rock Varnish.

Carving, hammering, abrading —  the making of petroglyphs — interacts with layers of being and becoming by cutting through.  To reveal.  From within and through a thin “patina” layer the rock-art design motif emerges.

This rock varnish, compounded by dust or clay adhering to stone, accumulates and concentrates manganese and iron. The characteristic rich blacks, browns, reds of exposed basalt. Cyanobacteria find a home here as do a variety of micro-fungi.  Tiny lichen often complicate this living surface. A microcosm of Gaia. 

Time stands still having no place else to go, rather here, deposited, metallic sheen glistening in the slow eye of duration.

The English words rock and varnish yearn to grasp this living changing realm. Yet the petroglyph as action, as image, transforms our understanding of formation.  The inspirited expanse of the matrix. Earth matter.  A marked language decipherable with guess and luck in the context of changing light and weathers.   Allowing for a certain grace of presence.

CODA

As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

—Robinson Jeffers, Carmel Point

Photos:  Douglas Beauchamp, Oregon's Northern Great Basin; High Lakes region

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

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