It’s all relevant for a moment, or should I say, a simple harmonic motion. The cycle, in the big scheme of things maybe 10,000 years or maybe 500,000 years.

Will your psychic apparatus find contentment during your journey ?

There is so much to say about this subject, and on so many different levels. I could write a lot, but I’ll just drop three quick bits here and move on.

1. My story about time and who I am… Perhaps 10 years ago I was in Death Valley at the Mesquite Springs campground. I won’t tell the who story but it had been a crazy two days. In the morning I wandered across the wash and up the small bluff on the other side and found a rock to sit on quietly for a few moments and just take in the vast space in this area. I looked down and saw an oddly shaped rock on the ground. I picked it up and quickly realized its shape had been produced by human hands, those of much earlier residents who fashioned rocks into this shape to use as knives, residents who had certainly had full and rich lives around this spring and in the valley, lives that were almost fully beyond my comprehension but which suddenly became palpably real to me as I held the rock for perhaps ten minutes. I replaced to rock where I found it and wandered back to camp, changed.

2. In some sense a bit of the artist as a person is contained in whatever bit of his/her work survives. In the same way that I imagine that I can be inside of that early Death Valley person’s mind just a bit after holding the stone that he or she carved, when I really confront (not just superficially “look at”) the creation of another person I am confronting the way they viewed the world and the way they thought. (Which is most certainly not to say that I can understand them completely.) I first understood this in music, where the literal thought processes of the composer are captured in the composition, but it can be as true with a photograph.

3. I don’t know what to say about the “self promotion” part of art that you mention, except to first acknowledge that it exists and that it makes many of us very uncomfortable, especially in those cases in which it is hard to see that there is a whole lot there to promote. I won’t cite examples or go into details – I’m sure you can think of your own. On the other hand, I think an artist has to have a certain confidence that what he/she creates is valuable and interesting to others. Finding the right accommodation is a tricky thing.

Thanks,

Dan

Just this morning as I was cleaning up the breakfast dishes I thought of some of the festivals that occur in countries like India, Japan, Africa. These are events that hundreds of thousands of people come to. People walk for days, weeks, and months to get there. To my knowledge there is no such thing here.

Petroglyphs have such staying power, and there is no protection, no backups, no armed guards, usually not even a velvet rope. Without heading out to a piece of sandstone or maybe even some tree bark there isn’t much hope that our creations will be here thousands of years from now.