Incised petroglyphs: Threading stone

This selection highlights petroglyphs delicately incised on rimrock. These images, often geometric or organic, are incised in thin lines on stone with a sharp tool, an edge of stone, possibly metal.  They are often near or in relationship with pecked or scraped petroglyphs, yet do not appear to be attempting to mark out other figures.  Rather, perhaps, to partake or extend the presence of the other markings, a form of participation in place.  All are located in the northwestern Great Basin.  (Click to enlarge)

The first, in Lake County, Oregon, web-like, insect-like.

In the group of below, Lassen County, NE California, lines are carefully incised inside an existing petroglyph circle. It is likely the pecked petroglyphs are older, perhaps a different cultural practice. Overall, the flow and combination is very unusual.

These final four, located at three distinct places in Malheur County, Oregon, illustrate some of the range of incisings on stone. 

The first comprises a complexity of incised markings layered and combined with older petroglyphs. 

The second photo, below, a close-up of the above, shows the precise detail of the tiny intentional and carefully incised compositions. In my imagination, the top left appears to be two eyes and a nose of a skull. The vertical and incised lines possibly the teeth. That day in driving, sleeting wind, with the blizzard on the way, invited a free-ranging imagination, while on the move. (Click to enlarge)

The third is an organic image: plant-like, leaf or root, perhaps, illustrating a range of intention and expression.

The fourth, a strong geometric, globular appearance; its meaning a mystery.  

Photos Douglas Beauchamp

Groundhog: Double trouble on the rocks

In those days there was lots to eat, but they destroyed it. They used to get game easily, but Coyote and Wolf made it hard to get food. Wolf went hunting. He was going to hunt groundhogs. He went and stood under a rock cliff. He said, "Rocks, come after me,’ and all groundhogs came down to him. Then he killed what he thought would be enough for a meal and went home. Coyote was his brother. He was home, and he asked him, “How do you kill so many like that? Then Wolf told him how he did it. Coyote thought he would try. He did what his brother had told him and got many groundhogs. Then he ate them, and afterwards he stood there and said the same thing again. Then all rocks rolled down after him. That's how Coyote spoiled easy hunting.

—Daisy Brown, told in her Northern Paiute language, Summer 1930, Fort Bidwell, Surprise Valley, CA. Interpreter: Nora Henderson. [1] [2]

In the Northern Great Basin, Groundhog seeing Shadow is not a concern. Survival — and the good life — compel action and hibernation. Basic, yes? A lot like Human — and Wolf and Coyote. Yet, an ontological issue complicates. One of identity. Is Groundhog actually a groundhog? Wildlife biologists say no, there are no groundhogs (Marmota monax) in the Great Basin. Oh yes, they concede, there is a cousin — Yellow-bellied marmot (Marmota flaviventris).

Have Wolf and Coyote been let astray? No, it's common out-West for these high-rock marmots to be called groundhogs. Something to do with whites from the East occupying country and translating Gidü or Kidü to how they remembered. Yet, I believe Groundhog and a groundhog hold close in the mythic realm of the real. As Coyote is ever-greater-than-and-the-same-as a coyote.

At times, when I am studying rock rims in high country for petroglyphs, a small furry head and nose will pop up over the edge, curious. Stare at me, an intruder, quickly disappear. Yellow-bellied marmot prefer to be near rocks. Rocks shelter burrows. Wolf and Coyote know this. Too, I’ve seen Coyote out there, loping along, hungry, going somewhere. Above photo: Marmot top center, dot petroglyph far right.

Shadow? Yellow-bellied marmot has Shadow, as do we all, however until emerging from hibernation in late Spring it lingers in dreams.

Rock-dreaming

NOTES

Photos by this blog's author at a rock-rim-place in the Warner basin watershed, SE Oregon. Click to enlarge.  

[1] An excerpt from a longer story about two brothers, Coyote and Wolf, going hunting. This story is one of six variations of this theme each by a different Northern Paiute speaker. Five contain a groundhog sequence. In some versions Coyote is killed by the rocks (and of course comes out alive); in some his tail is cut-off. The stories were solicited and transcribed, with some grammatical corrections, by UC Berkeley graduate student Isabel T. Kelly and published in Northern Paiute Tales, The Journal of American Folklore Vol. 51, Oct-Dec 1938.

[2] Daisy (Limpy) Brown was born in the Warner Valley about 1870 according to Kelly. She provided many stories in Kelly’s Tales and was an important source of knowledge in Kelly’s 1932 Ethnography of the Surprise Valley Paiute. Brown was the aunt of Nora Henderson of Alturas who served as her interpreter.

[3] Gray wolves living in North American today came from Eurasia between 70,000 and 24,000 years ago; https://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.12765. Wolves were extirpated in the Northern Great Basin by the 1920s; efforts to repopulate remain contentious.

VEXICON 2: Signs as signs as signals

Framing is how chaos becomes territory.
-- Elizabeth Grosz, following Deleuze

Sign as message, code fragmented. Agitated. Messy. A rattled multiplicity. “The signal is breaking up.” An old language reclaimed. Re-mapped.

VEXICON 2 looks into the gap between display and the re-cognition. The material labor; the incisive, mercurial evidence.

You view my view: fleeting image-signs sliding sideways as the light shifts. As colors meld, fade. As the signs’ torn-edged and hermetic claimings occupy public places. As undeniable ideogrammatic instigators.

VEXICON 2: an assemblage of 54 photo-images in public places, Eugene, Oregon, October-December 2020:

https://photos.app.goo.gl/4MokCJZviDiopPCy7
VEXICON 1: Blog October 9 2020:

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

https://photos.app.goo.gl/YPzfE6tjatavRPdEA

Infinitude of Bedrock and the Accident of Deep-Time

The sea is spouting upward out of rocks.
—Wallace Stevens

The work of a rock is to ponder whatever it is,
an act that looks singly like prayer,
but is not prayer.
—Jane Hirshfield

The rock found me. Manganese. A trail along a wooded slope near the Willamette River downstream from the confluence of Middle and South forks. Cascades water. To the mighty Columbia. Willamette Valley was not an inland sea as was the great central valley of California. A sea shelf, bedrock, sedimentation, oceanic rising as the North American plate moved west. Emerging. This rock, a manganese nodule, a concretion encased with the sedimented remnants of old seafloor.

Manganese nodule. Its growth one of the slowest of all known geological phenomena. About a centimeter over several million years. Several. Million. 6 zeros. 000,000. Six-megayears. This rock, a dense core of Manganese and Iron, now weighted in my hand is 6 cm in diameter (2+ inches). 6 cm x several 000,000 = 00,000,000. Years. A year: one Earth-circuit around Sun. The calculation, not the rock, an accident of deepening time.

L'imprécision du temps a besoin, elle aussi, d'etre vécue. Comme l'accrue du mot. / The imprecision of time too needs to be experienced. As the word increases.
—René Char, from his poem Pierres Vertes /Green Stones

Since John McPhee coined “Deep Time” some 40 years ago in his book Basin and Range, the phrase’s easy appearance has spawned a variegated plenitude of modern offspring jostling for attention. Relatives seeking measurability, calculability, appeared: Past-Time, Lost-Time, Real-Time, Dark-Time, End-of-Time, ad infinitum. Time sells. The shadowy “Timeless” does not produce best-sellers. Tao/Dao Time is simply: The 10,000 Things. Ten Kiloyears. A start on the immense journey of Time-Being.

Can it be that ambitions
rest in the indifference of stone?
—Terry Tempest Williams

NOTES
—Wallace Stevens, from Someone Puts A Pineapple Together, in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, 1951.
—Jane Hirshfield, from ROCK in Given Sugar, Given Salt, 2001
—René Char, from Pierres Vertes / Green Stones
—Terry Tempest Williams, from Ode to Sanity: Desolation Canyon Wilderness Study Area, Colorado Plateau, Utah, in Erosion, 2019, an assemblage of essays.

Addendum1. Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, 2009: People did not bow down and worship a rock tout court; the rock was simply a focus that directed their attention to the mysterious essence of life. 
Addendum2. Loren Eiseley, The Firmament of Time, 1960: I make no apology for my attempt to treat simply of great matters, not to promote that humane tolerance of mind which is a growing necessity for man’s survival.

Addendum3. Rock Art.  Manganese figures in petroglyph studies as rock varnish also called desert varnish, rock patina, etc. 

Petroglyph, Owyhee Canyonlands, Oregon. Photo: Douglas Beauchamp

Also in some rock and cave paintings, notably the Great Black Bull and the famous (and much discussed) La scène du puits in the Lascaux caverns, below.

Addendum3. Sidenote in GeoPoetics: “Several processes are hypothesized to be involved in the formation of Manganese nodules, including the precipitation of metals from seawater (hydrogenous), the remobilization of manganese in the water column (diagenetic), the derivation of metals from hot springs associated with volcanic activity (hydrothermal), the decomposition of basaltic debris by seawater (halmyrolitic) and the precipitation of metal hydroxides through the activity of microorganisms (biogenic). Several of these processes may operate concurrently or they may follow one another during the formation of a nodule.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule

Nuance and Immediacy v.2020

The dramatic prevalence of the image over the written word in our present moment is akin to a return to the Lascaux caves: immediacy has its advantages, but nuance isn’t one of them. -Claire Messud, Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, 2020

2020 as narrative, as a story of starts and stops. The gaps where memory seeks the link to before and after. How to picture this? Does the word immediacy imply a fleeting lack of depth? Does absence of nuance suggest a claustrophobic space? To me a picture can reverberate, a sonic, temporal extension of the contingent place of the moment. Modulation shapes nexus, rain drops begin to fall, a toss of pebbles onto the shining, intersecting ripples across a stilling pond, a cave wall flickers in firelight.

Along the urban edges during my walkabouts I take-in instances of graffiti — spray-can writing/marking/painting — which I will name chromotope, morphing from chronotope to extend an obscure and complicated metaphor, convergent chromings, images rippling. A year disappears, time becomes space, folds into place. Nuance? Dunno. 2021 may tell…

Note: In general I am fascinated by spray-can “throw-ups” (large, bold, mural-like letters, words, names), especially when layered. (I do not like generic tagging.) By moving in closely and photoing detail-as-rectangle an abstract image emerges. This form of appropriation creates a new apprehension of color, texture, and depth.

Note2: Claire Messud, an accomplished and prolific novelist and critic, in her essay, from which the above epigraph appears, writes: "The written or printed word enables the transmission of thoughts and experiences across centuries and cultures. … The dissemination of the written word, from the time of Gutenberg, has enabled us to tell stories of great depth and complexity, and to share our analyses of these stories. I don’t just mean literature: history, too, is the analysis of human stories; as are psychology, anthropology, law, and philosophy."

Note3: I was drawn in, intrigued, by Messud's characters, her style of storytelling, in her novel The Woman Upstairs, 2014.