HISTORY: Paths in the Fog

Ghostly intervention facing east appeared several years ago, old shed west of  I-5 in Oregon between MP154 & MP159, Creeks Elk & Anlauf.

Our desire for simplicity is understandable. We like our stories to have plots, for life’s messiness to form a neat arc. In reality, we don’t get to start at the beginning. We’re thrown into the middle of things, into the chaos of history. Hari Kunzru

Embi:  Whether the world has been created or is still in the process of being created, must we not, since we are here, whistle at one another in that strange dissonance called human speech? Or should we be silent?
Pastor Jón:  History is always entirely different to what has happened. The facts are all fled from you before you start the story. History is simply a fact on its own. And the closer you try to approach the facts through history, the deeper you sink into fiction. The greater the care with which you explain a fact, the more nonsensical a fable you fish our of chaos. The same applies to the history of the world. The difference between a novelist and a historian is this: that the former tells lies deliberately and for the fun of it;  the historian tells lies in his simplicity and imagines he is telling the truth. Halldór Laxness

With his conception of history In War and Peace, Tolstoy lays out the metaphysical space in which his characters move.  Knowing neither the meaning nor the future course of history, knowing not even the objective meaning of their own actions (by which they "involuntarily" participate in events whose meaning is "concealed from them"), they proceed through their lives as one proceeds in the fog. I say fog, not darkness. In the darkness, we see nothing, we are blind, we are defenseless, we are not free. In the fog, we are free, but it is the freedom of a person in fog: he sees fifty yards ahead of him, he can clearly make out the features of his interlocutor, can take pleasure in the beauty of the trees that line the path, and can even observe what is happening close by and react.
Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog.  Milan Kundera

Poetry,

        suspension bridge between history and truth,

is not a path toward this or that: 

                            it is to see 

the stillness in motion, 

                                the change 

in stillness.
                History is the path: 

it goes nowhere, 

                    we all walk it, 

truth is to walk it.

                        We neither go nor come:

we are in the hands of time. 

Octavio Paz

HISTORY: Behind the Seen/Scene

In distance: Historic Interstate 5, following Historic Highway 99, following the Siskiyou Trail, following an older network of Native American footpaths connecting the Pacific Northwest with California's Central Valley, following...

BUT WAIT.   California artist Ed Ruscha has something to say: I had a notion to make pictures by using words and presenting them in some way and it seemed like a mountain was an archetypal stage set. It was a perfect foil for whatever was happening in the foreground.

HISTORY KIDS, 2013, lithograph 29”x28”, from the Mountain series

NOTES

Hari Kunzru, from Complexity, Harper’s Magazine, January 2021

Octavio Paz, from Vuelta (Return, 1969-1975. Eliot Weinberger, trans.

Milan Kundera. Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, 1995, Linda Asher, trans. 

Halldór Laxness. Under the Glacier, 1968 in Icelandic, trans 1972.

Ed Ruscha  https://edruscha.com/works/

https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2016/ed-ruscha-mountain-prints/

CODA

History. Inscription. Revision. Version.  Translation.  Interpretation. Memory. Story. Myth. Legend, Fragmentation. Obscurity. Erasure. Disappearance. ...

Ghosting Pronghorn

Petroglyph, Northern Great Basin

Pia wantsipe toowenene’ iten
Pia wantsipe toowenene’ iten

Pennan tapai tatawento toowenene’ ite

The big antelope buck-pe slowly grazing while standing

The big antelope buck-pe slowly grazing while standing

Sun beams flashing, hitting him while he stands and grazes.

    --Antelope Song, a Western Shoshone round dance song

Gaming, shooting. This year's hunt for pronghorn in Oregon began in August and continues until late September in various “Hunt Units.” The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) manages “Big Game” hunting permits (tags); this year permitting the shooting of over 2000 pronghorn, about 10% of the estimated Oregon population. (70 tags provided for Hart Mountain Antelope Refuge.)  “Open Season” dates vary among weaponry:  archery, muzzleloaders, “youth only,” and rifles.  With all hunting east of the Cascades, wildfire, smoke, and access restrictions are always wild cards.  And: Water.   

Watering, waiting. Water needs and patterns of pronghorn have been studied and documented for decades. Generally, some spring-season food sources may by sufficient, with many variables. However, in late summer and early fall, pronghorn need to drink water daily, usually mornings. Hunters in Oregon know this. “Blinds” are set up near the few water places. In this year of extreme and exceptional drought, access to limited water sources is crucial. Drought is unforgiving for most wildlife, feral horses, and compels ranchers to herd-in cattle early from “open range,” usually public lands grazing allotments. If and when maintained, stock watering troughs may be helpful to wildlife. Or the water-hole-catchments where BLM -- primarily for livestock -- has bermed streams or backhoed playas in SE Oregon. Hundreds now bone dry.

Above: Rifle blind on desiccated playa; Map Oregon east of the Cascades, August 24 2021: Fresh Red=Extreme Drought, Congealed Purple=Exceptional Drought (highest on scale, a dubious honor); A bow-hunter's "disguised" hut near BLM waterhole (Lake County OR); she was kind but noted that me hiking by meant pronghorns would not now approach -- the hut was a complete surprise to me. 

Imagining, fantasizing. Pronghorn, hunted to near extinction by the early 20th century, from millions two centuries ago to a few thousand.  Since the 1920s, policies and protections have augmented a robust return of the “Prairie Ghost” with populations sufficient to permit hunting. And to become an icon for running "wild."

Above: Game Stamp for the 50th anniversary of the Order of the Pronghorn (Lake County OR) with art by Tom Beecham; Logo for the now-closed Umatilla Chemical Weapons Depot (Boardman OR); Illustration promoting High Desert Museum's fundraiser August 28, 2021 (Bend OR);  Petroglyph (detail) Lake County OR. 

Is there a way to be logical about this? I am not sure. I do know pronghorn have been pursued and killed for food by humans for thousands of years in western North America. Indigenous peoples hunted and killed pronghorn for at least 10,000 years as testified by the remains in some archaeological excavations. “Procuring” has been documented from the early Holocene in SE Oregon. Evidence in the Northern Great Basin shows communal hunts, usually with traps at drive sites with barriers/fences of stone, juniper, or brush, was an important method of capture and killing. Countless methods, strategies, and devices are evidenced among hundreds of archaeological studies, ethnographic reports,19th-century journals of Euro-americans, eco-bio studies, and Native American stories.  

Above: Drive wall, 2 photos; (Petroglyph All Northern Great Basin)

NOTES

All Photos by this Blog's author; click to enlarge.

Another blind: September 2020 post: SIMULACRA: A la playa

https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2020/09/simulacra-la-playa.html

Antelope Song transcribed and translated by Beverly Crum, ca. 1975. Cited by Steven J. Crum in Julian Steward’s Vision of the Great Basin (1999).

In 1915 in the western US about 13,000 remained of the estimated 35 million roaming a century earlier.  Some experts were resigned to the species’ eventual extinction due to killing, grazing, and partitioning of open lands.

Drought.  Uncounted thousands of acres of Juniper trees have been clear-cut in Oregon in recent years sanctioned and funded by federal agencies and the State of Oregon. This devastation, studied and strangely rationalized, doesn't cause drought directly.  Global heating, air currents, damming and draining, are among many complex factors.

Over a hundred hunting features and kill locales are now documented in Nevada and Eastern California.  For example, the archaeological research and ethnographic studies in the Great Basin by Brooke S. Arkush, Brian Hockett, and Patrick M. Lubinski.

An interesting article, undated without documentation: “What is the cultural significance of pronghorns to native americans?” https://www.aaanativearts.com/what-is-the-cultural-significance-of-pronghorns-to-native-americans

Recommended: Prairie Ghost: Pronghorn and Human Interaction in Early America

Richard E. McCabe, Henry M. Reeves, Bart W. O’Gara. 2010. 

Fabulation at Devils Lake

How can Devils Lake not be fable?  A recent lava flow from the active South Sister, 2000 ybp, congealed, sheeny.  A body of water, shallow, alive, reflecting.  A half-spirit red on dark stone, magical, alluring.

Click to enlarge

To USGS it’s contouring topographies and living rifts.  To ODOT a National Scenic Byway closed in winter.  To the USFS an access and conservation challenge.   To an American Astronaut the source of the only rock placed on the moon, 1971.  To Geo-Names Boards a cautionary dilemma of pioneers encountering satanic landscapes and indigenous peoples’ stories of skookum power.

To an Oregonian staff writer traveling in Central Oregon in 1920: “Devil's lake, where the water and its undertow cast a peculiar dread over the Indian.  Even yet, in dyes that would be the height of attainment of any manufacturer of commercial colors, on a rock beside the lake remains the red warning, a line of picture writing, undoubtedly a dread message to the red man telling him not to bathe after sundown.” [1]

Most of the bright chips on the central figure are recent, July 2021, not present on my last visit, 2014. This figure, about 18 inches, is one of several along this lava flow. See Loring & Loring 1982 Site 81 

To a design-artist, one Jennifer Lake, based lower in the watershed in Bend, an item in the fungible global dazzle: “Devils Lake Pictograph” fabric by the yard.[2]

To this writer, a palimpsest of places —Devils Chain, Talapus Butte, Devil Hill, Katsuk Pond, Kaleetan — and tumultuous re-rememberings — red rock paintings facing the rising sun.[3]

Drawing from Luther Cressman, Petroglyphs in Oregon, 1937. 

Cressman did not visit the site; drawing from a photo provided by the editor of the Bend-Bulletin.

NOTES

About Devils Chain and South Sister:

https://www.usgs.gov/volcanoes/three-sisters/future-eruptions-around-three-sisters

https://volcano.si.edu/gallery/ShowImage.cfm?photo=GVP-03093

Northwest Research Obsidian Studies Laboratory, which uses the most distinct and notable image as its logo, provides a summary of the geology:

http://www.obsidianlab.com/domeart.html

[1] Lucille F. Saunders, Sunday Oregonian, July 25 1920.

[2] https://www.zazzle.com/devils_lake_pictograph_red_fabric-256010813198478509

[3] In Chinook jargon, the trade language of the Columbia Plateau, Talapus=Coyote.  Kaleetan=Arrow, Katsuk=The center of anything, between, crossing…

Among the density of two centuries of study and writing about Chinook jargon, David Douglas Robertson presents on an extraordinary website:  https://chinookjargon.com/

CODA

As is true of most places, in Oregon country who does the mapping does the naming. Those names have a staying power.  When unraveling the markers and messages in old maps, language studies, journalings, and USGS surveys, a constant temptation: erase boundaries. This is not simply one of topography; it’s profoundly one of memory transforming itself.

As Octavio Paz wrote: Un archipiélago de signos/An archipelago of signs … and further in Blanco (1966):

I lose my shadow, 

I walk

 through intangible forests,

sudden sculptures of the wind, 

endless things, 

sharpened paths,

I walk

my steps 

dissolving 

in a space that evaporates

into thoughts I don't think

FAHRENHEIT 2021

Grattage is a surrealist painting technique that involves laying a canvas prepared with a layer of oil paint over a textured object and then scraping the paint off to create an interesting and unexpected surface. TATE

You must always live on the brink said Breton

& so the brink cut through our backyards.

Most days it felt like nothing

We didn't think of the street as old seafloor

Tess Taylor from Three Dreams, 2018, in Rift Zone: Poems (2020) 

Our quest for language to describe weather, climate, the precise dynamic of atmosphere, amatory water and skippery beings eludes, elides.  Words morph in and out of register, ghosts linger on the edges, transpire,  Spolia of placed stones unsettles true beginnings. We all have an Origin Story. How-It-All-Began. Time Immemorial. To arrive at an End Story we make it up as we go along. A looping road trip of mind mood and matter.

Famously, Ray Bradbury conjured Fahrenheit 451: the temperature at which books burn. A 1950s guide framing how we think with what we sense.  Do we read writings on the wall, messages ‘twixt dreamy lines, cries abandoned? Forecast fortune in the ash heap? Is Post-Fahrenheit — our here-now-and-then Fahrenheit 2021 — fiction metastasizing or factoid mutating? 

Numbers abstract, turn away; the impossible inner temperature of the Sun. Earth’s molten iron core billons of years, no longer counting in the clockwork. Drive-time in the Solar System, once Mercury rising now accurately acute digitals telling on a scale normal more or less so.   

Fahrenheit transcends personality, measurement, fear; enters the loving realm of metaphor. Lurking dynamics leer, beg for telling — and now they have it! A spoken picture, a cautionary tale: appearing as waxing moon. Circulating as desiring tide. Rising as blazing fire: The Original Fahrenheit; all spanking original, endlessly repeating… until you recall what was told.

IMAGES: Ridgeline Edgelands, Eugene Oregon 2021

… life and death are not opposite worlds, we are a single stem with two twin flowers, we must unearth the lost word, dream inward and dream outward, 

decipher the night's tattoos and look face to face at the noon and tear off its mask, 

bathe in the solar light and eat the nocturnal fruit, spell out the writing of the star and of the river, 

remember what the blood, the tide, the earth, the body say, return to the point of departure, 

neither inside nor outside, neither up nor down, at the crossroads, where the roads begin … 

Octavio Paz, from The Broken Waterjar (Mexico City, 1955)

(trans. Eliot Weinberger, The Poems of Octavio Paz (2012), New Directions Books)

Paz (1914-1998) in 1990 was awarded the Nobel Prize.

VEXICON 2021: Loves & Forebodings

Watch out, the world's behind you

There's always someone around you who will call

It's nothing at all  

— Velvet Underground & Nico

1967 in Sunday Morning, written by John Cale & Lou Reed

Apothegms Claims Forebodings.  Loves Cries Angers.

An undercurrent of Culture2021 appears and disappears in hyper-public sediments and erosions. A visual lexicon I have called VEXICON envisions the domain of language art inhabiting streets, walls, poles, sidewalks, underpassages. VEXICON tilts attention to The News as the Immediate Real now and again fading into gauzy past.

Click any photo to enlarge.

As regards signs, I see clearly that it is in the interest of the Republic of Letters and especially of students, that learned men should reach agreement on signs.

—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, 1696.

Leibnitz, one of the major developers of mathematical notations, cited by Margaret Mead, 1968.

Previously...

VEXICON 2: Signs as signs as signals. January 25, 2021

https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2021/01/vexicon-2-signs-as-signs-as-signals.html

VEXICON:  Signs of the Times 2020. October 9, 2020

https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2020/10/vexicon-signs-of-times.html