What Does Lizard Know? 3

Lizard knows patience. 

Desire.  

Lizard knows they are not lizards.  

Lizard-becoming knows stone. 

Crackings. 

Darkness bright; stillness glimpsed.  

Cracklings.

Lizard sees you seeing.

iPhone photos (above)

Adapted from Woodward (1982) who claims “emergent lizard”

Adapted from Keyser and Poetschat (2004) who claim “spirit helper”

Not-lizard guesses a percent of reptile-extinction embodied in reciprocal recognition

You see Lizard seeing You

Not saying what cannot be said

Lizard not quaintly “emergent”

Lizard ain't no-body's “spirit helper”

Lizard-becoming as close as Dare.

iPhone photo (above) edited in DStretch, modified in MacOS Photos

Lizard sees you seeing.

Sees the attention economy.

The roll-on Columbia River.

The pulsing surge of server farms.

Dairy farms. Wind farms.

Lizard stopped counting eons.

Glacial floodings energy channeled.

Concreted dammings power corridored.

BPA budget borrowings corrupted.

Salmon lusting, waning, wallowing.…  

Lizard knows The Swallowing.

Columbia River as Lake behind The Dalles Dam

In the distance The Dalles and Mt Hood 

Lizard considers Critical Theory.

Seriously considers:

Philosophers, psychologists, and theorists of social interaction have long understood that recognition is crucial to Lizard flourishing. The idea that we can only be fully lizard if we are recognized by others is a central theme of the tradition of political thought, in which the political sphere is conceived not as an empty stage for individual pursuits but as a common realm in which we first appear to one another and find our completion as earth beings.

Google Data Center at The Dalles, courtesy Google

 Photos by Douglas Beauchamp except as noted, click to enlarge.

NOTES

— Recognition paragraph above borrowed, with three alterations, from:  “In Search of Recognition,” a review by Peter E. Gordon of Recognition: A Chapter in the History of European Ideas by Axel Honneth, in the New York Review of Books, June 23, 2022.

— Previous What Does Lizard Know? posts:

March 23 2022: 

https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2022/03/what-does-lizard-know.html

May 1 2022:

https://rockartoregon.blogspot.com/2022/05/what-does-lizard-know-ii.html

Lizard ran out on a rock and looked up, listening
no doubt to the sound of the spheres. 

— DH Lawrence

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….

Memorial Millennia

 Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?

—Juan Ramón Jiménez

NOTES

Hands in Stone, Basin and Range, Oregon country. (Photos Douglas Beauchamp)

Poem, below, Who Knows What Is Going On by Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958), Nobel Prize in Literature 1956.  (Trans Robert Bly)

Who knows what is going on on the other side of each hour?

    How many times the sunrise was

there, behind a mountain!

    How many times the brilliant cloud piling up far off

was already a golden body full of thunder!

    This rose was poison.

    That sword gave life.

    I was thinking of a flowery meadow

at the end of a road,

and found myself in the slough.

    I was thinking of the greatness of what was human,

and found myself in the divine.

MAMMOTH: The Passing

Detail of first photo; High Desert canyon

Protrusions polished along canyon walls. Desert boulders emitting earthly sheen. Manganese, Iron adhering to congealed lava, basalt. Ancient walkways, passages, of now-extinct Mammoths in lands now-known-as Oregon, California, the Southwest. Rubbing on just-right rock for pleasure, need, ritual - affirmation. Certain heights, certain angles, perhaps one boulder among hundreds. We speculate about intent, time, seasons, passages. In their times, grasses, sedges, water abundant. Now, too often, these places -- the edgelands and expanses -- desiccate, heat, crust.

Details (left & right) of above boulder

Another view of same boulder

PASSING... conjures going-by, going on, going away -- changes. In terrains, in states of being. So, Ghosting Mammoths remind us, as they moved through.

PHOTOS. Oregon’s lava lands: high-desert basin-and-range block-fault country, Douglas Beauchamp, 2022. With appreciation to an anonymous guide. Below, canyon in High Desert central Oregon.

NOTES. Internet search: Mammoth Rubbing Rocks reveals many fine pictures. The walkway goes on… follow awhile? ... and rub on...

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