Year: 2024

march 26/SHOVEL

25 minutes
4 or 5 inches?
still snowing
25 degrees

earlier today: As I write this, it is 9 am and snowing. We (Scott, me, FWA, RJP) are about to leave for the airport — the kids are flying to Chicago. . . . Happy 150th birthday Robert Frost! Recited “Out, Out –” to RJP in honor of it. I don’t get it, was her response. Oh well.

now — 12:40: Just finished shoveling. Such heavy, wet snow and still coming down. Decided to do a pass now for future Scott and Sara. Plus, I wanted some exercise.

The kids are at the airport, waiting for their flight; it was delayed by an hour and a half. That sucks, but it’s a good reminder to them of how flying sometimes works — lots of delays and getting to the airport way too early and sitting around.

look them in the eye

Wanted to archive some more examples of “looking people in the eyes” that I heard on a podcast and read in a book yesterday:

During the pandemic I had started saying hello to people and looking people in the eyes. We had masks on and gloves on, so you really had to connect with people by looking them in the eye. And one of the things I started to notice was people who are down on themselves — and, you know, they sort of taught us how to see if someone was smiling through eyes — and so, when someone was having a bad day to really make sure I connected with their eyes and be like, here’s a little bit of my light. You’re having a tough day, I want to pass something to you. . . . And I find connecting with people, for me, really reduces my anxiety.

episode 156

I like archiving these examples because sometimes I wonder if I’m making a bigger deal out of losing the ability to make eye connect and see people’s faces. I also like archiving them because I am a former academic who needs evidence and examples to prove my points. Now that I’ve done more reading and thinking about eye contact, I know that making eye contact, even during the masked faces of the pandemic, is not the only way we can connect with others, but it still is alienating and exhausting and anxiety-inducing not to be able to do it.

And here are two other “eye-looking” examples, both from the book I just finished, The Thursday Murder Club:

You can really see in the eyes of the couple which one wants to move, and which one is just going along with it.

describing the show, Escape to the Country

You know when you look into someone’s eyes for the first time and the whole world breaks apart? And you just think, “Of course, of course, this is what I’ve been waiting for all this time”?

telling a story about “love at first sight”

This idea of being able to see who wants to move by looking in someone’s eyes reminds me of a great chapter from Georgina Kleege, in Sight Unseen, “Here’s Looking At You Kid.”

When the sighted describe facial expressions, the eyes are more central and more active. Eyes glow, twinkle, sparkle, shimmer, smoulder, flicker, projecting emotions the viewer readily understands. But what I know about the visual system tells me the eyes cannot do all this. They receive and respond to light but cannot emit it. The “flash of recognition” or “spark of understanding” the teacher sees in his students’ eyes is merely a trick of lighting. The lids rise, in wonder and surprise, exposing more of the slick surface of the eyeball to reflect light back to the beholder. Illumination. The downcast eye beneath half-lowered lids cannot catch and throw back the light, and so seems dull and unenlightened. The eyes themselves are passive. Without the context of the mobile face around them, and the play of light upon them, they remain unchanging and vacant. But in the language of the sighted, where seeing is believing, the eyes must be the focal point of every expression. All the wrinkles and crinkles of emotion occur only to funnel meaning into the eyes.

And this:

I worry that the sighted delude themselves, and put themselves at risk. Because when most of them look into my eyes, they see me as sighted. If eye contact matters so much surely it should be harder to fake. Perhaps it is only the expectations of the sighted. When I aim my eyes in more or less the right direction, the sighted see it as close enough. But if a mere millimeter could make an inquiring look into a menacing stare, shouldn’t my fraud be instantly obvious?

Be honest. Look at me when I’m talking to you. Do you really see all that you say? Or is it a convenience of language to ascribe to my eyes those qualities, emotions, messages you derive from the rest of my face, our surroundings, or the words I speak? Aren’t you projecting your own expectations, interpretations, or desires onto my blank eyes? And if you’re really being honest, really looking closely, my eyes are no more vacant than a sighted person’s eyes. My eyes and their eyes send back the same reflection. Of course this hypothesis comes full circle. If I see your eyes as blank, it is only because I am projecting what I see (or don’t) onto you. But only you can say for sure. Go ahead. Take a good look. Pull the wool off your eyes. Tell me what you see.

march 25/RUN

3.5 miles
treadmill
outside: rain

Yesterday snow, today rain. Slick and slushy. Yuck! Decided to skip the bike and go straight for the treadmill. Listened to a Hit Play Not Pause podcast about fixed and open mindsets during perimenopause. In the past, I’ve been critical of the mindset concept, especially how it was preached to my daughter who was struggling with crippling anxiety in elementary school, but I appreciated the episode. I like the idea of excavating the fixed ideas we tell ourselves — but I prefer story or narrative — and transforming them. Many of these stories are buried deep and take some work to uncover. As I was listening to it, and agreeing with a lot of it, I was also thinking: it’s hard to do that work when you’re coming undone with anxiety. I remember my daughter feeling so frustrated and overwhelmed and pissed off when some adult would tell her, Just open your mind! Don’t be so fixed and stubborn! I know when I feel like I can’t breathe because I’m all worked up for something, I don’t have the ability to expose intractable beliefs!

Here are some fixed stories I’ve been telling myself for a while about doctors, some of which I inherited from a mother who had been traumatized by doctors as a kid: They can’t understand what’s happening with me. They won’t believe me. They will just give me useless advice or advice that makes me worry even more or want to do a bunch of unnecessary tests. I’m better off figuring it out for myself — you’re on your own, kid. Some of this is true, but not all of it. And there are doctors who can help me, at least sometimes; I just need to find them. And, if not doctors, there are other people too, like physical therapists. Which is all to say: my calf still feels strange and I should look into scheduling an appointment!

Okay, no more writing. I have 10 hours left to read my wonderful book — The Thursday Murder Club — before it is automatically returned. Can I do it? With my eyes, it will be close.

update: I finished the book! It wasn’t a long or difficult book, but still a challenge for me to read with so few cone cells. Yesterday, when I was trying to read, I kept falling asleep after every sentence. But I did it.

march 24/BIKERUN

bike: 15 minutes
run; 1 mile
basement
outside: snowing

A big storm, just starting, but not quite. Now, light snow. We’re expecting 5-9 inches. I wasn’t sure how icy the sidewalks were or how ready my calf was to run, so I decided to work out in the basement.

calf update, for future Sara (and maybe her physical therapist?): during the race yesterday, my calf felt a little strange a few times — a slight tightening? no pain — but was otherwise fine. After the race: some soreness and tightness. today during the bike: a few more flares, an occasional twinge with a little pain. during the run: started feeling sore about 8 minutes, then a little strange. It’s so hard to know what the right thing to do is — stop running? ignore it as nothing, or as a calf that cramped and is now recovering? schedule a pt appointment? If I can get an appointment, I’d like to see a pt. Even if the calf is nothing, it would great to be checked out before serious marathon training begins.

Watched the women’s road race (cycling) from Tokyo while I biked. When the silver medalist, Annemiek Van Vleuten, crossed the line, she thought she had won gold; she didn’t realize that someone in the breakaway had stayed away. background: A. Van Vleuten had been about to win the gold in Rio but had a horrific crash into a cement barricade. She put off retiring for another 5 years just to try and win the gold in Tokyo. Wow. How do you recover from that disappointment? I’m always amazed at the resilience of athletes.

While I ran, I listened to a winter playlist. Other than my calf, I felt good.

Earlier today, I found an article about James Schuyler and this wonderful poem, which I may have read before, but was delighted by today:

The Bluet/ James Schuyler

And is it stamina
that unseasonably freaks
forth a bluet, a
Quaker lady, by
the lake? So small,
a drop of sky that
splashed and held,
four-petaled, creamy
in its throat. The woods
around were brown,
the air crisp as a
Carr’s table water
biscuit and smelt of
cider. There were frost
apples on the trees in
the field below the house.
The pond was still, then
broke into a ripple.
The hills, the leaves that
have not yet fallen
are deep and oriental
rug colors. Brown leaves
in the woods set off
gray trunks of trees.
But that bluet was
the focus of it all: last
spring, next spring, what
does it matter? Unexpected
as a tear when someone
reads a poem you wrote
for him: “It’s this line
here.” That bluet breaks
me up, tiny spring flower
late, late in dour October.

The analysis in this essay is all helpful to me, but I was particularly struck by this bit:

. . . Schuyler’s description of the flower transforms it into art, and that this kind of transformation is his signature poetic activity; it happens again and again in his poems: he describes what he sees before him as if it were a painting so that observation of the natural world becomes ekphrasis. That’s why—to skip down a little—the leaves are likened to a rug, crossing outside and inside, nature and culture, and those leaves “set off” the gray the way a painter or sharp dresser uses one color to set off or complement another, why the air is like a made thing, too, if one you eat, and why the bluet is called “the focus,” the way art critics say something is “the focus of the composition.” Schuyler’s words are paintbrushes, what he describes becomes a painting (though he treats it as already painted)—paint, a medium that splashes and then holds. There are examples of this everywhere in his books. In “Evenings in Vermont,” for instance, a rug again mediates between inside and outside, art and nature: “I study / the pattern in a red rug, arabesques / and squares, and one red streak / lies in the west, over the ridge.” In “Scarlet Tanager,” the bird in the tree provides “the red touch green / cries out for.” In “A Gray Thought,” “a dark thick green” is “laid in layers on / the spruce …” And so on. Touches, layerings: color as paint, natural phenomena perceived as art.  

It’s This Line / Here” : Happy Belated to Birthday James Schuyler

This idea of natural phenomena as art and of Schuyler as describing flowers with painting terms and of him doing ekphrastic poems might be a way into my “How I See” ekphrasis project!

march 23/RACE

10k
Hot Dash
18 degrees

Not a fast run, but I felt relaxed and strong, and I powered up the big hill. No difficulty at all. I picked it up a little at the end and enjoyed crossing the finish line. A victory! Maybe the hardest thing about the race was holding back — I kept wanting to go faster than Scott, but I kept it slow and relaxed. My goal is not a fast time, but to be able to run the marathon with Scott.

For most of the race I recounted stories — probably the same stories — about past races: having to run ahead to get water for FWA in our 5k, RJP being very disturbed by a runner who was dry heaving as he neared the finish line, a wheezing runner dying on a hill, running way too fast in the first 5k of a 10k then dying and having to stop and walk several times for the second 5k.

10 Things

  1. 2 women behind us lamenting how they were both such bad singers — I played an instrument, but I just can’t hear the notes. I turn the radio way up to drown out my own voice. I wanted to turn aroudn and say, Me too!
  2. the crappy pre-recorded version of the national anthem before the race
  3. cold, cold fingers and toes for the first mile
  4. Scott yelling, Banana!, when a guy in a banana costume ran by
  5. Overheard: Oh right — I get a beer when I’m done with this! note: our bibs had a ticket for one free beer at the end
  6. Overheard: runner with a 1/2 mile before she would reach the turn around: where is the turn around anyway? I wanted to say, a long way, but didn’t
  7. a few patches of snow and ice near the edges of the road
  8. snow on the grass
  9. the cobblestones at the end were in bad shape — lots of holes, rough, uneven
  10. on the cobbles, I heard someone behind sprinting and yelling but they never passed. What happened? did they think the race finished sooner? did they sprint too soon and run out of gas? I’ll probably never know

march 22/SHOVELWALK

20 minutes
3? inches
28 degrees

3 or 4 inches for round 1 of winter. We might get more snow in last night’s snowfall, combined with expected snow on Sun/Mon/Tues, than in all of Jan and Feb. Of course, that’s not saying much because our total prior to today was 7.3 inches. I wonder if what we got today will be melted by Monday? Future Sara, let us know!

six hours later: The snow has already melted off of the deck, the sidewalks, the road. Will the snow on the grass be gone before Sunday? Still not sure.

the secret life of plants

sources:

Yesterday afternoon, driving back from picking FWA up for spring break, we were talking about trees and how they communicate and their underground networks and how much sentience they have, and I remembered, and tried (unsuccessfully) to explain, the 1970s talking-to-plants craze. I mentioned how Stevie Wonder did an album about it. Scott didn’t remember the album. This morning I looked it up and . . . jackpot! Stevie Wonder’s album: Journey Through The Secret Life of Plants. I’m listening to it right now — ah, 1979! It is the soundtrack for a documentary, The Secret Life of Plants, which may or may not be a reliable source of “accurate” information about plant science (botany?) discoveries in the 1970s — wikipedia doesn’t seem to think so. I dug a little deeper and found an article about the plant craze of the 1970s — The 1970s plant craze / Teresa Castro

In the early 1970s, a general plant craze caught on in visual and popular culture alike. Against the background of New Age spirituality and the flourishing of ecological thinking, the 1970s plant mania came as an eccentric blow to the belief that sentience and intelligence are a human prerogative. It also relied massively on the cybernetic paradigm: envisaged as self-regulating biological systems, plants were recognized as communication systems in themselves. In this essay, I sketch a brief portrait of this complex cultural moment, as visual culture, and in particular film, came to be permeated by references to plant communication, plant sentience and plant intelligence.

intro to 1970s plant craze

In the first line she mentions a 1972 video, Teaching a Plant the Alphabet. Love it!

In her discussion of “The Secret Life of Plants,” Castro describes the author as a “botanist and science vulgarizer” and places the work in the context of a large anti-science and anti-intellectual moment; a hippy desire to heal the crisis in human/nature relationships; and significantly for this article, the mediation of visual and other technologies, like the lie detector. The book takes up the “experiments” of Cleve Backster in 1966 in which he hooked a plant up to a lie detector and noticed a surge in electrical activity similar to a human’s emotional response when he watered the plant. Then, an even greater one when he imagined setting fire to the plant and watching it burn. His conclusion: This plant could think! It “could perceive and respond telepathically to human thoughts and emotions.”

Her conclusion about the book/documentary and its impact:

The Secret Life of Plants badly impacted serious scientific research on plants’ sensory and perceptual capacities. Widespread press coverage of Backster’s pseudo-experiments contributed to this backlash. Work on plant communication and plant signaling “was somewhat stigmatized, and the limited availability of funding and other resources constrained further progress.”

In our present dire ecological crisis, to acknowledge the richness and complexity of plant-life is an invitation to withdraw from a centric reason that separated humans from “nature,” situating human life outside and above it. In what constituted a striking ecological critique of Enlightenment science and its holy dualisms, “hippy times” attempted to tell a different kind of story about “Man” and “Nature” and grappled with a fundamental epistemological shift. Most of all, they experimented widely with alternative modes of engagement with what poet Gary Snyder described as “the most ruthlessly exploited classes”: “animals, trees, water, air, grasses.” As we emerge shell-shocked from a global pandemic, what are we to do now? Maybe we can learn from the past: instead of imagining that “plants are like people”, as suggested by “America’s Master Gardener” in 1971,57 we can focus instead on what it means to be human on a shared planet.

This discussion of plants and communication reminded me of a study I read during my mushroom month: April, 2022. Looked it up and found the entry: 10 april 2022

After a discussion of study about fungi language, I posted this quotation from Alice

Oswald:

I exert incredible amounts of energy trying to see things from their own points of view rather than the human point of view.

It’s a day long effort to get your mind into the right position to live and speak well.

citing Zizek: we can’t connect, be one with nature. It’s extraordinary, alien. It’s this terrifying otherness of nature that we need to grasp hold of and be more courageous in our ways of living with it and seeing it.

Landscape and Literature Podcast: Alice Oswald on the Dart River

Instead of “plants are just like us; they can think and feel!” of the 70s plant craze, Oswald is holding onto the strange otherness of plants. I wonder what Oswald, a former professional gardener, thinks about the sentience of plants?

I googled the question, but before I could find an answer, I found her amazing lecture on the tradition of rhapsody, the litae women in the Iliad, back doors, and Marianne Moore. Wow!

Sidelong Glances: Oblique Commentary on the Poetry of Marianne Moore / Alice Oswald

I listened to the lecture, going back again and again to try and transcribe some of her brilliant words. Her “obliquely, slightly, slowly” approach to Moore with a description of rhapsody and the “squinting, limping old women” of the Iliad (litae) and the need for coming through the back door and repeated image (and sound) of iron bell resounding like the voices of dead poets that came before us was amazing. I’ll have to listen to it again, I think.

a few passages to remember

The poet, especially the female poet, must labor not only to hear the voices of the literate dead, but my leaning and hushing and listening beyond listening to hear the illiterate, anonymous, marginal voices of rhapsody.

Literature has a front door and a back door, and the labor of moving through poems, opening the back doors to let in the fresh air of the unwritten, if you do it for long enough, finally compels you to leave the house altogether, since the tradition inherited by the oral tradition goes right back into birdsong, windsong, heartbeats, footsteps, rivers, and thickets. Not to mention all the oscillating sounds of tides and seasons and waves and why shouldn’t rhapsody include the stitch work of plants?

Go in through the back door?! Love this idea and what it mean for how I understand doors being opened through poetry! And connecting it to birdsong and wind song and all those amazing sounds heard while running above the gorge! And plants!

[not nature poetry but] natural pattern which includes and aligns the poem making habits of the mind with the metrical structures of physics. That is what I mean by rhapsody and that is what I want you to listen for when you put your ear to a written-down poem: backwards and beyond male literature, as far as the first repetition of a leaf on the first repetition of a morning.

Aligning the poem-making habits of the mind with the metrical structures of physics: the biomechanics of running, the drip drip dripping of water due to gravity, air being forced out of and welcomed into the lungs. And the repetitions — the first repetition of a leaf on the first repetition of a morning — very cool.

And, where to place Robin Wall Kimmerer within this conversation? I think I have an answer, but I decided to read another section of Gathering Moss about the Standing Stones. After writing about scientific names for mosses and reflecting on the power in self-naming, she writes:

I think the task given to me is to carry out the message that mosses have their own names. Their way of being in the world cannot be told by data alone. They remind me to remember that there are mysteries for which a measuring tape has no meeaning, questions and answers that have no place in the truth about rocks and mosses.

Gathering Moss

As I typed up the title of RWK’s book, I just realized something great about the title: gathering moss can refer to us (readers) gathering up stories and lessons from the moss, but it can also mean moss gathering — an image of a complex community of mosses and the agency of moss to gather themselves, independent of us. Nice.

random: Last night I discovered that a cartwheel is named after the wheel of a cart. When you are doing a cartwheel, you are acting like a wheel of a cart. Duh — I guess it seems obvious, but I associated the words so strongly with my memories of gymnastics as a kid that I never thought about it referred to outside of that.

march 20/RUN

4 miles
trestle+ turn around
22 degrees
wind: 21 mph gusts

Straight into the wind running north. Not fun, but not nearly as bad as yesterday. Felt stronger, faster for parts of it. Running up the hill just south of the lake street bridge my calf tightened up a little. I stopped, walked, then started again, more cautious this time. Thought about Thomas Gardner and Poverty Creek Journal and his brief descriptions of sore calves after a tough session of hill repeats. After lots of anxiety for weeks, calf pain is now just a normal/regular part of my running. I’m glad — not for the off and on pain, but for the everydayness of it.

Some shadows — soft, crooked, in motion: birds, gnarled tree branches, broken fence rails. Other shadows — dark, on trees, looking like someone standing there. Don’t remember seeing the river but I do remember the floodplain forest — open, bare, beautiful. No chain across the top of the old stone steps. Wondered what will happen in a few days; big snow predicted, well, possible.

Listened to birds and cars and grit on the trail running north, my winter playlist running south.

before the run

Encountered these lines on twitter this morning, from Charles Wright:

When what you write about is what you see, what do you write about when it’s dark?

Charles Wright

I like thinking/reading/writing about the dark. Imagining it otherwise, not as the absence of light, where light = life and happiness and safety, but as where more things are possible, outside the scrutiny of those watching and judging and classifying. The dark, soft. The dark, no need for sharp vision or eye contact. The Dark, where Emily Dickinson’s little men hurry home to their house unperceived and robins in a trundle bed try and fail to hide their wings under their nightgowns. Where Carl Phillip’s willow wants more for compassion than for company. The dark: the moon, the stars, louder silence. The dark, where reds and greens and blues and yellows are no longer necessary —

A strange thing I’ve realized about my color vision. I can still see colors — the light green placemat my computer sits on, the purplish-reddish-blueish of my computer desktop, my bright blue hydroflask. And I can still see when things are in color. But, when something lacks color, like a movie in black and white or the middle of the night in my bedroom, I can’t tell that there isn’t any color. It looks and feels the same.

4 moments when I noticed this:

one and two: from a log entry on 13 nov 2022

1 Yesterday afternoon, in the chapel at Gustavus, which was not dim but not bright either, I started to notice that looking one direction, toward the far window on the other side, the only color I could see was an occasional red square embedded in the walls (I double-checked with Scott; there were also a bunch of blue squares too). The hymnals 15-20 feet away, which I know are red, looked dark but colorless. Staring out at the crowd of people, everyone looked like they were dressed in dark or light — not quite black or white, just dark clothes or light clothes. No variation, no purples or blues or oranges or anything but dark and light. It was strange, partly because it didn’t feel strange. It wasn’t like I thought, where is all the color?

2 It felt more like when I wake up in the dark and, after my eyes adjust, I see the room and it looks like the room, but just darker, dimmer and without color. And, usually I don’t think there’s no color — sometimes I might even think I see color because I know my robe is purple or the pillow is yellow, or I don’t see yellow, but I recognize the pillow on the couch as that yellow pillow because I already know it’s yellow.

three: from a log entry on 12 jan 2024

The other day, Scott, FWA, and I were discussing the scenes in Better Call Saul that are set in the present day and are in black and white. Scott and FWA both agreed that those were harder to watch — they had to pay more careful attention — because they lacked color, which is harder because visual stories often rely heavily on color to communicate ideas/details. I said I didn’t realize that they were in black and white; they didn’t look any different to me than the other scenes, which are in vivid color (at least that’s what they tell me). I realized something: it’s not that I don’t see color, it just doesn’t communicate anything to me, or if it communicates it’s so quiet that I don’t notice what it’s saying.

four: this week

A few days ago, we decided to finally watch Maestro. Wow! We haven’t finished it yet, but Scott and I are really enjoying it. The first scene is in color, which is intended to represent the present, at least the present as it exists in the movie. The second scene is in black and white and represents Bernstein just before his big break. After watching it for a minute or two Scott said, you see that this in black and white, right? And I said, oh, is it? I didn’t notice. I was focused on the contrast — the dark, closed-curtain window and the outline of brightness around it.

Color exists, it just doesn’t speak to me in the same ways (as it used to, or as it does to other people). It’s not a foreign language, it is just turned down, whispering. Yes, it does make it harder to understand visual stories that rely on color to tell part of the story — a favorite: present times = color; the past = black and white — but it doesn’t bother me that much. Instead, I find it fascinating, the opportunity to notice the constructs of color and to see the world (and color) differently.

Okay, that was a long ramble about color and black and white, but I think I’d like to write another color poem about it.

Now back to the quote from Charles Wright on twitter. As is often the case, there was no mention of where it came from, other than it was from Charles Wright. I always find this frustrating. But, I found it easily enough: Littlefoot, 32 in The New Yorker, 2007. Such a wonderful poem!

Back yard, my old station, the dusk invisible in the trees,
But there in its stylish tint,
Everything etched and precise before the acid bath
—Hemlocks and hedgerows—
Of just about half an hour from now,
Night in its soak and dissolve.
Pipistrello, and gun of motorcycles downhill,
A flirt and a gritty punctuation to the day’s demise
And one-starred exhalation,
V of geese going south,
My mind in their backwash, going north.

my old station: love this way of describing a usual spot to sit
the stylish tint: oh, the softness of near-night!
everything etched and precise: I love walking at night in the winter and noticing the contrast between the sky and the bare branches, which I can see more clearly than at any other time. During the day, those branches are a fuzzy blur, but at night they are etched!
Hemlocks and Hedgerows: sounds like a musical act or a comedy duo Scott adds: proto Prog rock/psychedelic band, Margaret’s Electric Forest or Garden, first album: Hemlocks & Hedgerows
a pipistrello is Italian for bat, or “small mouse-like animal that flies”
sounds of day’s demise: a flirt of a bat, the gritting punctuation of a motorcycle’s gun downhill
one-starred exhalation: me, almost every night — o, look at the stars!
I love hearing, then seeing, a V of geese in the evening. The choice of backwash instead of wake is interesting — and flying south/mind going north is a wonderful way to suggest being out of sync

Wow, that is one packed first stanza! I’ll skip the next one to get to the quoted lines:

When what you write about is what you see,
what do you write about when it’s dark?
Paradise, Pound said, was real to Dante because he saw it.
Nothing invented.
One loves a story like that, whether it’s true or not.
Whenever I open my eyes at night, outside,
flames edge at the edge
Of everything, like the sides of a nineteenth-century negative.
If time is a black dog, and it is,
Why do I always see its breath,
its orange, rectangular breath
In the dark?
It’s what I see, you might say, it’s got to be what my eyes see.

I’ll have to think about these lines some more. Right now I wonder, when your peripheral vision is fraying, do you see strange things, like flames, at the edges? What do edges look like to me in the dark? I’ll try to remember to notice when I wake up in the middle of the night tonight, like every night. In the light, they are fuzzy and dance a soft shimmy.

It’s real because we see it? Different ways to respond to this. I’m thinking about how so much of what our eyes see is illusion or guessing based on habits and repeated practice and context and other brain tricks. Even so, most people believe that what they are seeing is real. If they believe, and act as if what they are seeing is real, why can’t I believe and act as if what I’m seeing is real too? All those soft, generous things; those strange headless and legless torsos walking towards me; that river burning with a white heat that sets the trees on fire?

Okay, it’s almost 11 am. I need to go out for my run before I finish this!

during the run

Did I think about this poem at all while I was running? I can’t remember.

after the run

During the run, I noticed bird shadows crossing my feet, both of us flying, the birds in the air, be just above the trail. I decided to add it into a fun poem I’m writing called “Birding.” It’s a series of small verses in my 3/2 form in which I describe how I see birds with my cone-dead eyes.

Not sure if this works:

vi.

a shadow
travels

over feet
running

downhill — flight
4 ways:

the moving
shadow

the descending
runner

a belief
shadows

signal some

thing and

the small form
gliding

closer to

the sun.

shadows

1

And just like that, my plan to return to Wright’s poem will have to wait. Instead, I’m thinking about shadows, which is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I realized, earlier this month, that shadows see more real to me (as in, having more substance, easier to see as solid) than the object from which they’re cast — is that the most awkward way to say that? Here’s what I wrote on march 9, 2024:

As I was admiring the fence railing shadows I thought about how clear and real they seemed to me. Much more there than the actual fence railing, which was staticky and vague.

log / 9 march 2024
2

So, in the draft of my poem, I wrote: a belief/shadows/signal some/thing. In a different version, I wrote: a belief/shadows/have substance. Do I like that better? I can’t decide. I think it was inspired by a passage I read in Becoming Animal (which was a recommendation from my super smart niece):

One of the marks of our obliviousness, one of the countless signs that our thinking minds have grown estranged from the intelligence of our sensing bodies, is that today a great many people seem to believe that shadows are flat. If I am strolling along a street on a cloudless afternoon and I notice a shapeshifting patch of darkness accompanying me as I walk, splayed out on the road perpendicular to my upright self, its appendages stretching and shrinking with the swinging of my limbs, I instantly identify this horizontal swath as my shadow. As thought a shadow was merely this flatness, this kinetic pancake, this creature of two dimensions whom one might peel of the street and drape over the nearest telephone wire.

Becoming Animal / David Abram

I haven’t finished the chapter yet, but I was able to access it through the reading sample on amazon — so I’ll return to finish later.

3

The line about draping the shadow over a telephone wire enabled me to remember a delight poem I read by Paige Lewis a few years ago:

When I Tell My Husband I Miss the Sun, He Knows/ Paige Lewis

what I really mean. He paints my name

across the floral bed sheet and ties the bottom corners
to my ankles. Then he paints another

for himself. We walk into town and play the shadow game,
saying Oh! I’m sorry for stepping on your

shadow! and Please be careful! My shadow is caught in the wheels
of your shopping cart. It’s all very polite.

Our shadows get dirty just like anyone’s, so we take
them to the Laundromat—the one with

the 1996 Olympics themed pinball machine—
and watch our shadows warm

against each other. We bring the shadow game home
and (this is my favorite part) when we

stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled
my husband grips his own wrist,

certain it’s my wrist, and kisses it.


march 19/RUN

4.2 miles
minnehaha falls and back
43 degrees
wind: 31 mph gusts

So windy today! My legs felt heavy. I wonder if part of the problem is that I’m running so late in the morning? I didn’t start until almost 11:30. Still glad I went for a run, but I wish it would have felt a little easier and I would have worn less layers — maybe skipped the buff?

Listened to kids on the playground, birds, random voices, falling water for the first half of the run. Put in headphones and listened to Taylor Swift for the second half.

before the run

Reading through an entry from March 19, 2017 about the new poetry class I was taking, I found this:

In the editor’s note it’s mentioned that Mayer writes hypnogogic poems. I looked up the word and found the definition (a state between waking and sleeping, when drowsy) and an interview with Mayer about how, after suffering a stroke, she experimented with using a tape recorder to record her thoughts in this drowsy/dreamy state. So cool. Currently, I’m writing about running and I’d like to experiment with ways to express the dreamlike state I sometimes enter during long runs.

Reading this bit, I got an idea, which I typed up in my “Notes for Haunts, fall 2023” pages document:

the dream like state of running, when the mind is shut down
haunting = possessing or being possessed — what if haunting was not just being taken over by someone/thing else (possessed) or taking over someone/thing else (possessing) but becoming untethered or loosely tetered from your body — floating on the path in-between in that strange empty space between banks between sky and ground between worlds between You and I? this could be another form of haunting — what if I started writing small-ish poems that offered different definitions of haunt? 

A few definitions of haunt I’m thinking about right now: feeling disembodied, having an out-of-body experience and being obsessed/preoccupied/consumed by a thought or idea — having a bee in your bonnet.

bee in your bonnet

Here’s an article about the origins of the phrase. According to the article, the phrase is still being used in popular culture. I use it, usually when I notice Scott hell-bent on some task — and usually it seems like a task, or idea, that is fool-hardy but that he needs to work through and figure out for himself.

Sometimes instead of saying, bee in your bonnet, I say that someone (or me) is hellbent. Of course, writing that immediately makes me think of Jackie from the 1979 Death on the Nile:

Jacqueline De Bellefort : One must follow one’s star wherever it leads. 
Hercule Poirot : Even to disaster?
Jacqueline De Bellefort : Even to Hell itself.

When I envision a bee in my bonnet, I see something that is relentless, impossible to ignore, urgently needing to be dealt with. That’s not quite how I imagine my preoccupation with haunts and ghosts and writing about the gorge. Still, I like the idea of bees in bonnets, and bees in general, so maybe I’ll spend more time with them this morning?

Reading through several ED “bee” poems, I suddenly had a thought: could the bee in your bonnet be your soul, trying to escape the confines of the body?

This thought was inspired by a poem I wrote about in an On This Day post: Body and Soul/ Sharon Bryan. I didn’t mention it in the post, but the description of the soul in the poem, as leaving the body at night to roam around, reminded me of an ED poem I read a few weeks ago, when I was thinking about the difference between the brain and the mind:

If ever the lid gets off my head/ Emily Dickinson

If ever the lid gets off my head
And lets the brain away
The fellow will go where he belonged —
Without a hint from me,

And the world — if the world be looking on —
Will see how far from home
It is possible for sense to live
The soul there — all the time.

So much to think about on my run (I’m writing this before I headed out). Will I see any bees about by the gorge? Very unlikely, I think.

during the run

Thought about a bee in my bonnet as an obsession that I wanted to release, so I imagined opening the top of my head like the door of a cage and letting the bee fly free. What would/could happen if I did this? Would I find some new ways to think about my experiences?

Also, randomly remembered something about bees in a horror movie, then remembered the movie, Candyman. Looked up, “gothic horror bees” and found this 1978 movie, The Bees.

Not too far into the run I think I forgot about the bee. I was too distracted by my heavy legs and wondering if my calf would do something strange, and the wind. No escape from my body today.

after my run

Now, ED’s poem about the lid of her head coming off makes me think of a favorite Homer Simpson bit:

Homer reluctantly listens to Ned Flanders drone on about the differences between juice and cider. A voice says, You can stay, but I’m leaving, and Homer’s brain exits his head and floats away as we hear a slide whistle. A few seconds later his body collapses on the floor and we hear a thud.

I love the image of the brain floating away. And, instead of a daydream where Homer’s brain gets to wander while his zoned-out body stays and pretends to listen, his body collapses, unable to continue without the brain. This idea brings me back to the Sharon Bryan poem I mentioned earlier:

then they [body and soul] quarrel over which one of them 
does the dreaming, but the truth is, 

they can’t live without each other and 
they both know it, anima, animosity, 

the diaphragm pumps like a bellows 
and the soul pulls out all the stops— 

sings at the top of its lungs, laughs 
at its little jokes . . .

. . . the soul 
says, with a smirk, I was at the end 

of my tether, and it was, like a diver 
on the ocean floor or an astronaut 

admiring the view from outside 
the mother ship, and like them 

it would be lost without its air 
supply and protective clothing,

Okay — I’ve been thinking about a few things here: being weighed down/preoccupied with ideas/thoughts/subjects (obsessed); a desire to be released from the body and obsessions; images of bees in bonnets and bees in general. Maybe I’d like to explore some different images of bees, especially in Dickinson? Also, here are 2 other ways to think about obsessions as repetition and habit:

Camille: Some of the obsessions are never going to leave you, and to me, that was part of what I loved. With each page I thought, Oh, I’ve seen this before, but how is she going to manage it differently? It reminded me of the Miles Davis quote about John Coltrane that was a guiding force for me as I was writing my first book, when I was really worried that I was doing the same thing over and over and over again. And I read the liner notes where Davis wrote about Coltrane’s first solo album. He said, “I don’t understand why people don’t get John Coltrane’s music. All he is trying to do is play the same note as many ways as he possibly can.”

Writing a Grove: A Conversation with Poet Laureate Ada Limón

FADY JOUDAH: There is no life without repetition, beginning at the molecular, even particle level. There is no art without life. To remain viable, art, inseparable from the circularity of the human condition, also repeats. What is a life without memory? And what is memory if not repetition. But not all repetition guarantees what we call progress, a euphemism for wisdom. Repetition with reproducible results, for example, is a foundational concept of the scientific method. Yet science can be an instrument for the destruction of life as for its preservation. This suggests to me that repetition in art is our unconscious memory at work: art mimics the repetition of the life force within us. All art is a translation of life. Take Jackson Pollock’s so-called action painting. What is it if not a rhythm of a life force in all of us? In those paintings, the pattern is recognizable yet unnamable. It’s like watching electrons bounce off each other. The canvas contains entropy. We understand this at a cellular or quantum level.

When It Takes Root in the Heart: Conversations with Fady Joudah

march 18/BIKE

30 minutes
basement

A 10k run yesterday on a recovering calf means no running today. Decided to bike in the basement just so I could move a little. I should have watched Dickinson, but I watched an old Ironman instead.

All day, I’ve been reading my old Haunts notes, trying to pick one thing to write about. Am I getting somewhere? Maybe. Maybe not.

Here’s a beautiful poem I just discovered from Terrain. Wow!

Prayer of a Nonbeliever/ Tim Raphael

Cathartes aura—purifying breeze—
is one name for a turkey vulture,
and what if prayer is like that—
praise song for a scavenger?
What if prayer is like this walk,
the same one every day,
a mantra of footsteps on mesa rock,
raptors in the wind?
What if it begins as a hint
on the piñon stippled hills,
unfurls like a scent the dogs sense
with raised snouts?
I suspect there’s prayer in the primrose
come into flower,
flake-white blossoms
blanketing the path,
in the rhythm of my quickened pulse
on the climb.
And if prayer takes its time on ridgelines,
in scant shade,
if it lingers by a petroglyph picked
into basalt—two figures with hands on hips
as if ready to dance—
then perhaps I am learning to pray.
Today, another friend’s diagnosis,
and who am I to scoff at believers?
I too like the idea of prayer as a stand-in
for clumsy words like hope,
wonder and love—for this green
green valley slaked on spring runoff,
for the whorl of dihedral wings
and the uneven heat of rising air.

that turn — another friend’s diagnosis — wow, those 3 words recalibrating the poem! I’d like to do something like that with my poems about the gorge!

march 17/RUN

6.2 miles
minnehaha dog park and back
wind: 13 mph / gusts: 27 mph

Another weekend run with Scott. We talked about Ada Limón’s National Park project and I recited Scott’s favorite line from one of the poems featured in the project. The line — Surely you can’t imagine they just stand there loving every minute of it. The poem — Can You Imagine/ Mary Oliver. Scott likes the line because it’s also a line from the Loverboy song, “Loving Every Minute of it.” As we ran into the wind I mentioned the terrible wind (and rain and cold) in the 2018 Boston Marathon. Scott talked about a dream he had last night that he went to a friend’s gig and how, when he woke up, he realized that that friend did actually have a gig last night. He also talked about birds — wild turkeys and his favorite encounter with them when he saw two walking side-by-side down a busy sidewalk near lake street.

When we started running, it was snowing — small flurries. At some point it stopped, but it stayed cold and windy. Writing this now, a half an hour later, I’m still cold.

image of the day: a robin on the edge of path, hopping along then flying across the path. Having noticed the leaves skittering in the wind on the other side of the path, at first I thought the robin was a leaf. But then, when it landed on the fence, I could tell it was a bird. After mentioning it to Scott, I recited a line from ED’s “A bird came down the Walk –“. I think I’ll write a little birding poem about this Robin!

10 Things

  1. skittering leaves
  2. a robin — first on the ground as a dark form that could be anything and that I thought was a bird, then fluttering across the path, then landing on the top of the fence
  3. flurries in the air — steady, then swirling, then a clump of them dumped
  4. water falling at the falls, a few bits of ice near the edge
  5. the creek, mostly flowing, but still on the edge, and low
  6. a walker with an unleashed dog, wandering around the trail
  7. the view of the river obscured by a screen of thin, unleafed branches
  8. the fake bells of the light rail on the other side of Hiawatha
  9. the curve of the river below us as we ran south toward fort snelling
  10. a steady cadence — the lift lift lift of my feet, slightly slower than Scott’s

march 16/RUN

2.2 miles
neighborhood
39 degrees / feels like 30
wind: 16 mph / 30 mph gusts

Windy! Colder. Winter layers: black running tights, black shorts, black shirt, purple jacket, pink ear band, black gloves, hat. Thought about running more but remembered that Scott and I are doing a 10k tomorrow. So I ran 2 miles through the neighborhood. My restraint was partly due to the wind, which I ran almost straight into heading north.

10 Things

  1. some dull wind chimes — it wasn’t the clunk clank of wood chimes, but also not the tinkle-tingle-shimmer of metal ones — an unpleasant cacophony
  2. right before starting: a crying kid on the next block — by the time I reached then and their entourage (mom, dog, stroller) — they were laughing — oh to be a kid and to shake anger or disappointment or whatever bad feelings they were having off that quickly — my 8 year old self used to be that way
  3. the trail on edmund between 32nd and 33rd started muddy then turned into hard, packed dirt
  4. heavy gray sky — the type of light that makes it hard for me to see anything completely
  5. the sky was dark enough that a house had on their garage light — I felt a flash of light! as I ran by
  6. harder to see the dirt trail and the roots
  7. voices across the road and below, on the trail — next to me, then ahead of me, then gone
  8. smoke from a chimney on edmund — reminder that winter is still here
  9. a loud rush of noise — an approaching car? No, the wind moving through a pine tree
  10. the swishswishswish of my ponytail hitting the collar of my jacket

Thinking about the wind, I reread ED’s poem, “The Wind.” Here are some ways she describes the wind:

  • old measure in the boughs
  • phraseless melody
  • fleshless chant

Searched “wind” on poems.com and found this amazing poem by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, “All Wild Animals Were Once Called Deer“:

High up a plane droned, drone of the cold, and behind us the flag
In front of the Bank of Hope’s branch trailer snapped and popped in the wind.
It sounded like a boy whipping a wet towel against a thigh

Or like the stiff beating of a swan’s wings as it takes off
From the lake, a flat drumming sound, the sound of something
Being pounded until it softens, and then—as the wind lowered

And the flag ran out wide—there was a second sound, the sound of running fire.
And there was the scraping, too, the sad knife-against-skin scraping
Of the acres of field corn strung out in straggling rows

Around the branch trailer that had been, the winter before, our town’s claim to fame
When, in the space of two weeks, it was successfully robbed twice.
The same man did it both times, in the same manner.

This whole poem is amazing, but too long to post here. What a storyteller BPK is! I should read her collection, Song.

more Lorine Niedecker and “Lake Superior”

On Thursday and Friday I read more of “Lake Superior.” I came to these lines and stopped:

Ruby of corundum
lapis lazuli
from changing limestone
glow-apricot red-brown
carnelian sard

Greek named
Exodus-antique
kicked up in America’s
Northwest
you have been in my mind
between my toes
agate

Huh? I am not an agate expert, so I had to look up everything but the last three lines. Without explaining it all (if I even could), I noticed how fascinated she is with language and culture and the history of the agate as it traveled across cultures.

Of course I might have understood more of the references if I had read her journal first, LN opens her travel journal with this:

The agate was first found on the shores of a river in Sicily and named by the Greeks. In the Bible (Exodus) this semi-precious stone was seen on the priest’s breastplate.

A rock is made of minerals constantly on the move and changing from heat, cold, and pressure.

On the next page, she writes: So—here we go. Maybe as rocks and I pass each other I could say how-do-you-do to an agate.

Then, a few pages later:

The North is one vast, massive, glorious corruption of rock and language—granite is underlaid with limestone or sandstone, gneiss is made-over granite, shales, or sandstone and so forth and so on and Thompsonite (or Thomasonite_ is often mistaken for agate and agate is shipped in from Mexico and Uruguay and can even be artifically dyed in the bargain. And look what’s been done to language!–People of all nationalities and color have changed the language like weather and pressure have changed the rocks.

And then:

I didn’t miss the Agate Shop sign. Woman there knew rocks. whole store of all kinds of samples, labelled. Sold them cheaply too, i.e. agates mounted on adjustable rings cost $1.75. I bought one of these, not the most beautiful but a Lake Superior one, I was told. Also bought . . . a brilliant carnelian from Uruguay. There were corundum samples—also from Canada, the stone that is next to diamonds in hardness. (Deep red rubies, which are corundum minerals, are valued more than diamonds.)

and:

The pebble has traveled. Long ago it might have been a drop of magma, molten rock that oured out from deep inside the earth. Perhaps when the magma coooled it formed part of a mountain that was later worn down and carried away by a rushing stream. Of the pebble may have been carried thousands of miles by a slowly moving glacier that finally melted and left it to be washed up for someone to pick up.

I love how LN took all of her notes and ideas about rock and language and culture and commerce and turned them into this small chunk of the poem. So much said, with so little words! And then to end it with: you have been in my mind/between my toes/agate Wow!

The trails above and beside the gorge have not been between my toes but under my feet and in my mind — maybe I could add a variation of this line to the first section of my poem?