Cracks are material events that emerge as the result of force contradictions. They progress along paths of least resistance, exploiting and tearing through different material substances where the cohesive forces of aggregate matter are at their weakest. Each crack is a unique result of a specific disposition of a force field and material irregularities on the micro level. … Leonardo Da Vinci filled his notebooks with the studies of cracks. Elsewhere, he recommended staring at cracks for training the imagination.
Climatic imagination. From patinaed figures, to cracking ice-shelves, to congealing plastic bottles, to precision drone strikes, all action becomes geologic. Assimilate? No, no need for that burden. Articulate: Lament, inspire, deny, confirm, confront, resign, reflect — visually apprehend presence, the beating heart of imagination.
Early naturalists talked often about "deep time" — the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. What lies in store for us (with climate change) is more like what the Victorian anthropologists identified as "dreamtime," or "everywhen": the semi-mythical experience, described by Aboriginal Australians, of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage.
How to imagine an everywhen or an everyhow in clear view of the now. DeepTime, DreamTime, ever will be. Today, shrouded in "fossil capitalism," my view of past time and future time emerges as a melancholy vision of personal and planetary demise: BoomTime. Anchored in 1945, marking the uplift of a sharp and devastating increase in emissions of carbon into Earth's atmosphere. Coincidentally the year the first atomic bombs dropped; the following year the Boomer Generation swept forth with unrelenting desire.
The eye that sees the things of today, and the ear that hears, the mind that contemplates or dreams, is itself an instrument of antiquity equal to whatever it is called upon to apprehend … and perhaps … we are aware of … time in ways too difficult and strange for the explanation of historian and zoologist and philosopher. -Edward Thomas, writing in 1909 .
Photographers and researchers during recent decades have recorded and studied this terrain, its places, stones, and images, with a variety of approaches and understandings. However, the immensities – and intensities – elude. In part I think because boundaried and linear frameworks can't contain the cyclic fusing of time and space. An observer may choose to look, then see. Further, may participate. Then, hopefully, with a mind's eye equal to the apprehension.
 Edward Thomas, The South Country (1909), in the chalk hills of southern England, as cited by Robert MacFarlane in The Old Ways : A Journey on Foot (2012).
Petroglyphs from two of the smaller lake rims north of Long Lake. June 2014.