Met my running goal for the first week of 2024 yesterday, so today I biked. Again, no problem with my left knee, which is great. I’d like to do more with the bike this winter — maybe try to bike for a little longer? Watched the tokyo triathlon mixed relay. I don’t remember what I thought about and I don’t remember hearing/feeling/seeing/smelling anything while I biked — oh, one thing: a strand of my hair was out of my ponytail and it kept touching the nape of my neck — irritating.
When I am stuck, I walk. I don’t wear earbuds or headphones when I walk, nor when I travel by train or bus, because I want all of my senses to be centrally alive to what’s around: the music that lurks in the crevices of city sounds, forest sounds, desert sounds. I am reminded of John Cage’s art pieceA Dip in the Lake: Ten Quicksteps, Sixty-two Waltzes, and Fifty-six Marches for Chicago and Vicinity, a map with colored lines and vectors that reconstruct the city transversely from without in the layering of aleatoric drift over cartographic direction. To this end, unstructured walking, the pure derive of walking, can become something like a divinatory practice, chance-based yet ritualized.
4.15 miles bottom of franklin hill (short) 32 degrees
Another Saturday run with Scott. Last night, we got a light dusting of snow which made everything frosty and a little slick at the start. Scott talked about the latest mash-up he’s arranging with the theme from Taxi and Green Day’s Brain Stew, Chicago’s 25 or 6 to 4. Then I talked about my latest focus on doors and windows and how it is allowing me to engage with things (poems, essays, ideas) that I’ve collected previously but were buried in a file folder or a log entry.
As we ran down the hill I mentioned something I had read in an essay by George Orwell, Why I Write. He describes how when he was an undergrad at Berkeley* he wanted to be an intellectual, but when he was supposed to be reading Hegel he would always be looking out the window, admiring the flowers instead.
*Scott didn’t hear anything after I said Orwell went to Berkeley; he was confused, believing that Orwell never left England. I checked the essay when I got home and realized that there were two versions of “Why I Write” in the document, one by Orwell, one by Joan Didion. The reference to Berkeley was from Joan Didion. Sometimes I get frustrated with Scott’s attention to details, but he’s usually right and I’m grateful that he caught this mistake (which was my fault, but not totally; the essays were placed one after the other in a document that was not well marked. His almost always being right can be irritating, but that’s more my problem than his, I guess.
Here’s the quote:
During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with the abstract.
In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral.
Why I Write/ Joan Didion
I love her mention of the peripheral. That’s where I spend all of my time too — literally and figuratively.
10 Things
stretches of the trail were slick and my feet slipped a few times
the knocking of a woodpecker — the sound echoed through an empty field
the ice chunks on the river yesterday had melted and were replaced with swirls of foam
the quiet thuds of a faster runner approaching from behind
after he passed us, he kicked a big branch off to the side (we were grateful and impressed that he was able to do it while running fast down the hill)
there was a thin layer of snow on the top of the concrete wall next to the river
the suspended path on the other side — in the east river flats — looked inviting — I’d like to run it before it’s closed for the winter — maybe it already is?
passing by the ghost bike hanging from the trestle
the curved fence above the big sewer pipe was easy to see below us — no more leaves blocking our view
passing a guy walking a dog on the sidewalk, saying good morning — realizing it was not morning but afternoon — 12:30 — we went out for the run a little later than usual
At the bottom of the franklin hill, Scott used my phone to take some video of the foamy, fast-moving water. Here’s a short clip:
fast moving foam / 5 jan 2024
Here are two passages from Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting that include windows and doors:
But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell–like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter! It is at once revealed and obscured. Here vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows; here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. But, after all, we are only gliding smoothly on the surface. The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks.
—
That is true: to escape is the greatest of pleasures; street haunting in winter the greatest of adventures. Still as we approach our own doorstep again, it is comfortingto feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and the self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed. Here again is the usual door
5.15 miles bottom of franklin hill turn around 30 degrees
Yes! A great run. A brief runner’s high around mile 4. At the beginning it felt cold, but almost early spring-like: chirping birds, soft shadows, humid air, clear paths. In certain spots the path was dotted with ice.
Passed a group of 4 or 5 runners twice. Smelled cigarette smoke. Watched a car driving over the I-94 bridge. Listened to the group of women laughing, cars passing, ice sizzling heading north. Put it Billie Eilish essentials on the way back — maybe I’m, maybe I’m, maybe I’m the problem.
Something to try today, from Richard Siken: one image
The heart of lyric poetry is music and image. Music is hard to talk about but image is easy. It’s not too late to start an exercise. Write down one image every day that was striking. It’s good as a resource to pull from for writing or just for remembering. Date them. >
Today’s image: sizzling ice on the river chunks? sheets? just starting to form, floating on the surface. I took a video:
ice on the mississippi / 5 jan 2024
Standing there, holding my phone, the ice was moving slowly downstream and sizzling. In the video, I can’t see it moving and all I can hear is the traffic from the I-94 bridge just above. I wish I just kept the phone still; it’s moving around too much. The sizzle sounded like the sizzle I heard in my head after I fainted last week. A sizzle or crackle or static-y sound. The movement of the ice was slow and gentle and persistent (or insistent?).
windows and doors
Yesterday, it came to me: windows and doors. That’s what the theme for January should be. Will it stick? Not sure, but today I begin by thinking about windows and doors as I ran. I held onto a few thoughts and recorded them into my phone right after I finished my run:
Windows as in the frame and how often I see what’s just outside of the frame because I feel it off to the far edge (mainly because of my heightened peripheral vision).
A door as being open — focus on what’s through the other door, the room on the other side, as opposed to the door as framing what you see. Whereas the window is about the frame and about this thing in between you and the is/real. The frame is language, our access to the real. The framing of something as a useful limitation, helping to focus a form. The window is a form where the energy goes, where it’s held in, so the poem still has heat.
I’ve collected door and window poems before on this log, so this isn’t a new idea, I’m just adding to it. Here’s a door and window poem for today — actually, an excerpt from an amazing poem by Victoria Chang:
Feb.10.2022 Today the river is in crisis, no horizon dares to go near it. Today my father is in a small jar. At dusk, I went into a painter’s studio, saw his stretched canvas on the table, white, empty. What are we without those who made us? May his memory be your blessing, people emailed me all week. The artist was painting a series of doors, which were so real that I walked through the one that was slightly open. Inside the room was my breath that I had held since January 13, an eyelid, a loose eyeball, the knob the eye fell on, the girl’s hands that tried to catch him, which were charred and still waving.
Feb.11.2022 The white truck went from one frame to the next and I thought of the time when someone lied about me. How day and night I cared so much about the lie that it split into two, one part went out the left window frame, the other out the right. Like the blue car that disappears at the same time as the white one, yet I can see both at once. When they burned my father’s body, I wondered if the eyeballs spread so far on each side that they could see Wyoming, these two panes, me on a small brown chair, looking out the windows, waiting for oblivion to travel through with its eighteen wheels and truth.
Feb.12.2022 At the beginning of our family tree was hope. Or maybe it was just an owl.
Feb.13.2022 The same wind was blowing here eighty years ago, always snapping families in half.
Feb.14.2022 If I keep the window closed, I am stuck inside with language as it buzzes back and forth, trying to get out and start wars.
First, so much of what she writes here (and in the rest of the poem) is echoed in other things I read earlier today and yesterday by Viola Cordova and Jake Skeets. Wow.
On January 4, 1966, On Kawara began his Today series, or Date Paintings. He worked on the series for nearly five decades. A Date Painting is a monochromatic canvas of red, blue, or gray with the date on which it was made inscribed in white. Date Paintings range in size from 8 x 10 inches to 61 x 89 inches. The date is composed in the language and convention of the place where Kawara made the painting. When he was in a country with a non-Roman alphabet, he used Esperanto. He did not create a painting every day, but some days he made two, even three. The paintings were produced meticulously over the course of many hours according to a series of steps that never varied. If a painting was not finished by midnight, he destroyed it. The quasi-mechanical element of his routine makes the production of each painting an exercise in meditation.1 Kawara fabricated a cardboard storage box for each Date Painting. Many boxes are lined with a cutting from a local newspaper. Works were often given subtitles, many of which he drew from the daily press.
In the article, I also found this classroom activity suggestion:
Subtitle Your Days
Many of the Date Paintings have subtitles. Some of these titles record personal anecdotes, such as “I played ‘Monopoly’ with Joseph, Christine and Hiroko this afternoon. We ate a lot of spaghetti” (January 1, 1968). Others record current events, some of them momentous, such as the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Still other subtitles refer to the Date Paintings themselves; one reads, “I am afraid of my ‘Today’ paintings” (May 29, 1966). For this activity, challenge students to record a subtitle for each day of the week for two weeks. These subtitles can be personal, historical, or even arbitrary. What is it like to capture a day with a subtitle?
I like the idea of combining Siken’s suggestion of an image a day with Kawara’s date poems and Chang’s reading of the date as a door into somewhere else. A date as door, an image as door.
A nice day, not too cold and with no snow, but I ran a 10k yesterday and I’m trying to be responsible with my training and not overdo it. But, after feeling frustrated when my password wouldn’t reset and overwhelmed by my haunts obsession, I knew I needed exercise. So I biked in the basement. It felt good, and my left knee didn’t hurt like it did last year. I feel much better now. While I biked I watched an old PTO triathlon race and forgot about my frustration.
Is there a word for experiencing frustration when something won’t work online? It’s not an overall fear or hatred of technology or computers, but a temporary breakdown/panic when I can’t get it to work, or when I need to resubmit a password but can’t find it, or when I know there’s something I haven’t filled out in an online form, but I can’t see what or where it is. It’s also anger at how poorly designed online forms are or how the user experience (UX) doesn’t consider enough people’s differing abilities — especially older people or young-ish people like me, who can’t see very well — or, as Scott just mentioned to me, how UX can be designed to direct people in ways they don’t want. This last thing is called dark or deceptive patterns. An example: a site makes it confusing and almost impossible to unsubscribe or cancel online.
Maybe reading this site, Deceptive Patterns, could give me some better words.
Before — or maybe it was after? — I was derailed by passwords, I came across an interview with the writer/philosopher/nature writer/climate change activist, Kathleen Dean Moore.
Here’s how I got there:
Thinking about water and stone and air I remembered something I read in a beautiful essay by Jake Skeets, My Name is Beauty. Skeets is quoting another writer, Viola Cordova and her essay, “Language as Window” — they’re both talking about moving (swimming) through the world, not walking on it
I searched for that essay and found that it was in a collection by Cordova, How it Is (I was able to check it out from my public library!), which was edited by Kathleen Dean Moore
A link for Moore’s site came up and I was intrigued by its name, River Walking, so I checked it out, and in the media section I found a great interview, Why I Write
I miss the days of wandering through libraries, from shelf to shelf, following footnotes and bibliographies to new ideas and friends, but I’m grateful for the internet and ebooks, especially as my central vision deteriorates.
Anyway, here’s something I just read in the interview about forms of thinking:
everybody – should have an education in three kinds of thinking:
Critical thinking. The essential art of reaching reliable conclusions on the basis of evidence; the ability to defend yourself against flawed arguments or deceptive assumptions. This is the foundation of a rational life.
Empathetic thinking. The art of putting yourself in another’s place, seeing the world through their eyes, and asking what you would believe and do in their situation; the art of asking questions about why they believe what they do and make the decisions they do. This is the foundation of justice and compassion.
Hypothetical thinking, the “if, then” art. The ability to entertain an idea; the ability to consider that things might be different from the way they are now; the art of following a chain of possibilities beyond those immediately apparent. This is the foundation of imagination.
Hooray for great winter runs with clear paths and strong legs and lungs! Yesterday I spent 6 hours in the car — dropping FWA off at college, then going home, then turning around again and going back with a forgotten backpack. Today I’m happy to be outside moving. On the first trip back, as we drove beside minnehaha park I noticed how beautiful it was with the clear view across to the VA home and the open river and the gnarled bare branches, and I thought, I want to run here tomorrow. So today, I did, and it was beautiful. Oh, that river! I hovered above it on the edge of the bluff, and admired it through the bare trees.
My IT band hurt a little, so did my back, but mostly I felt good. I picked up the cadence at the end and sprinted for 20 or 30 seconds — could I call that a “stride”? Thought about how my legs and form felt better after the speed work. Maybe I should try to incorporate this into one of weekly runs?
10 Things
small slivers of ice sprinkled over the path
orange orange everywhere, 1: rusted orange leaves still on the trees
orange orange everywhere, 2: park or city workers in orange vests doing something with a hose near 44th
orange orange everywhere, 3: a compact car in Dukes of Hazzard orange — I stared at it again as it drove north to make sure that it was actually orange
roaring falls, churning bright white
running by the furnace for the old WPA quarry — today I noticed its door, on the other side, a little farther down the bluff
open, flowing, dark gray creek water about to fall over the limestone ledge
a runner running with a big fluffy white dog
the light rail’s recorded bells ding ding dinging
the steady, strong rhythm of my feet lifting up up up up up off the ground
Writing that last item, I remembered something I thought about: how running combines flying (or hovering or floating or flowing without resistance) and striking down hard on the ground (solid, sturdy feet make contact with the surface). As I thought this, I also thought about flying = water and feet striking = stone. Does that work?
Camisha L. Johnson’s wonderful poem, Disclosure, came up on my post for jan 3, 2020. Today I was struck by her explanation:
About this Poem
“A person bumps into me on the street and I instinctively reply, ‘I’m sorry.’ Seconds later, I regret it. I notice the same compulsion towards apology as I navigate the world as a hard of hearing person. What does it mean to feel compelled in this way, to ask forgiveness over and over for interrupting other people’s comfort? Through this poem, I am grappling with what’s happening beneath the surface of those exchanges, the cost of all those apologies, and, ultimately, the unnamed cultural demands of the hearing world.”
—Camisha L. Jones
a fun challenge
Yesterday I used the word supine and remember my beloved high school vocab workshop book. I found it on my bookshelf and had an idea: why not randomly pick a word from each day and spend time with it (ideally, write a poem about it). Yesterday’s word (found after I asked FWA to pick a number between 1 and 162 while he waited for his doctor’s appointment): kudos
Here’s a poem inspired by the clinic waiting room:
Kudos Tuesday you’re off to a great start a crowded waiting room everyone masked deep coughs a long wait for urgent care a confused woman with a respiratory infection uncertain whether or not to wait in this stuffy room for 2 hours — should she stay or should she go? her daughter arrives and says, let’s sidebar for a moment and I don’t care what they decide I just want to know if this is how lawyers talk all the time or she’s just watched too much law and order
4.5 miles minnehaha falls and back 24 degrees 95% snow-covered
Today Scott and I are signing up to run the marathon on October 6, 2024. I believe that the third time will be the charm; I will finally show up to the start line.
Today’s run was a good way to start the new year. Last year had its terrible lows (Scott’s dad dying) and some wonderful highs (being nominated for a pushcart prize). What will 2024 bring? I’ve decided not to be scared or to spend too much time dreading next year’s election. This year is about running and poetry and finding new ways to connect with the world, words, people, a place.
The path was almost completely covered with a thin layer of soft, dry snow. Not slick, but a little difficult in the spots where the snow had covered the potholes. The trick was to notice where the snow was thicker, whiter: that’s where it had accumulated in the potholes.
Greeted a lot of other runners and walkers, noticed the steel blue river — open, no ice, listened to soft crunch of the snow, cars passing by, random voices, the collar of my jacket rubbing against the ear flaps of my cap.
Heard a runner say the number 27. Also heard a noise under the ford bridge that I couldn’t quite identify: brittle clacking which could have been ice or frozen leaves being moved by the wind. Heard the falls rushing over the limestone ledge and at least one kid being obnoxious.
Earlier today I was remembering words related to glitter, like glint and glisk, which is a gleam of light through a cloud. As I ran south, nearing Locks and Dam no. 1, I felt a glisk above me.
I don’t remember any bikes or birds or skiers. No squirrels or music. A few dogs.
Oh–right above the falls I noticed a person with a walker in a bright red coat. I almost called out, I love your red coat!, but I thought better of it. It’s quite possible that the coat wasn’t red but some other color. A strange side effect of my vision: the more wrong I am about something, the more likely I am to announce it to others. Why? I’m not sure.
random thing for future Sara to remember: Over the holiday, there’s been a series of cycle-cross races in Europe, which is biking on a looped course that involves mud and hopping over bumps and carrying bikes up stairs and ruts and steep hills and extremely tight turns. They keep coming up on youtube, and I keep watching them. Very fun to watch. I can’t imagine ever being able to do one of these races. So scary and technical and demanding!
one more thing: I had to return a few hours later to this log to add something I forgot. Geese! In my last mile, running on Edmund, I heard some honking so I stopped running and looked up. A few seconds later, a vee of geese high in the gray sky. A car passed as I stood there, on the edge of the road. Did they wonder what I was doing?