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

Born of line

Figures born of line 

familiar in shared simplicity

Of longings lost intent

Striving stilling falling.

Poised.

Arriving as we do on an edge we will not see.

Memory dissolves where does time go?

Journey we may whisper.

Contingencies of Stone

Peoples moving through country 

placing stones in angular embrace

constellating vague terrain

mineral clouds congeal silence

molten oxides spark red patina 

flaming brown starkly russet

each stone accidentally 

atomic star-light dusted 

lichen brushed… hushed… 

shaped shadows drifting

ghosts eluding gravity 

… no more messages

A Matter of Experience

These placed stones, near Dry River, the terrain of the central Oregon lavalands, are among uncountable thousands encountered over many years of wandering around sagelands — SE Oregon, Central Oregon, NE California, NW Nevada.  Placed stones as I use the term is one species in the complex descriptive genus referred to as rock features, for example:  rock cairns, rock piles, stone circles, ring sites, ambush drive walls, kill or traps sites, “vision quest” structures, “prayer seats,” “medicine wheels,” cache pits, rock art sites.  Yet, nothing is as it appears…

Consider: World Observation

“In the first place, an observer observing herself in the act of the world observation will quickly realize that the results of her observation (her respective experiences) will depend on the different points of view accessible to her, and as there are always exists a potential infinity of such points of view, it follows that there will also be a potential infinity of representations (experiences) for each object of reference."

— Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, from Three Notes on Contingency Today (2022)

Condensities

To testify to simplicity

Not asking what this mark means

Look

The mark floats in the densities of stone

In the making without asking

Power humor presence prayer

Modern words stream

In an obedient search

Wait

The mark rises in immensities wind blown

Contrail jetting to Phoenix 

In the sky below

A solitary mark on an extended rim, playa-edge, west-facing; a playa where once i witnessing hundreds of grazing pronghorn while parent falcons shrieked me away from nested fledglings high above.

High above a deep stream-cut canyon, sunrise-facing

Manganesed basalt, fire within... congealing

One of two similar glyph-motifs, each side of a rough arch protecting a rock shelter above a wide creek-bed facing east and a red canyon wall

Further, consider ….

Having fallen outside the realm of the familiar and the useful, these landscapes were overtaken by what Henri Bergson called the “powerless” past, different in nature from the “sensori-motor” present, which propels the body to action. This past, which is without immediate utility, emerges from consciousness and forms the matter of time, Bergsonian “duration”: prepared to return, but only capriciously and contingently, it looks for a fissure in the present. 

— Maria Stavrinaki, in Transfixed by Prehistory: An Inquiry into Modern Art and Time 2022

Petroglyphs: A sampling of  images on basalt rims in the high country of Lake County, Oregon.  Photos by Douglas Beauchamp

Now stand with the image: capricious and contingent

fissure the present

opening the place of no thing

CODA, A gloss

— Condensity: The state of being condensed.

— Simplicity:    The state of being uncompounded.

— Immensity:  The state of being immeasurable.

— Contrail:  An artificial cloud made by the exhaust of jet aircraft or wingtip vortices that precipitate a stream of tiny ice crystals in moist, frigid upper air; condensation trail.

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…