4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
21 degrees
100% snow-covered
Today the winter I want: big flurries, everything covered in thin layer of snow, not too much wind, warmer, not slick — especially my with Yaktrax on. Nothing was quite easy, but everything wasn’t as hard as my last run on Wednesday.
10 Things
- a white sky
- the contrast between shoveled and un-shoveled sidewalks — both still white, but the shovelled ones had a tint of gray or brown peeking through
- the clacking jawbone of a bird’s beak — a blue jay?
- the river was all white — if you didn’t know better, you could believe it was a field or a meadow
- approaching from above, hearing the falls rushing over the limestone
- kids yelling and laughing at the playground, one loud, high-pitched sound — was it a kid screaming or a whistle?
- amongst the kid voices, a deeper, more knowing laugh — was that from a teacher?
- the contrast on the creek surface: white snow with blackish-gray water
- every so often, a flash of orange — not always sure what it was, just a voice whispering, orange — a snow fence? a construction cone? a sign?
- bright headlights cutting through the sky, which was both bright — everything white! — and heavy
Listened to my “Remember to Forget” playlist on the way back. The first song up, Do You Remember Walter? by The Kinks. Two different bits stuck with me:
one: Walter, you are just an echo of a world I knew so long ago.
two: Yes, people often change./ But memories of people can remain.
This second bit got me thinking about how I can’t always (can I ever?) see faces clearly. When the face is too dark and shadowed, I just ignore it altogether. But when there’s some light and I can sort of see them, I often re-construct the features I can’t see with memories of their face from before I lost most of my cone cells. I’m not remembering their face, but creating it. After thinking that the idea of remembering as re-memembering — putting a body back together — popped into my head. Yes! I take my image of face, only as fragments — the curve of a nose or a chin, a bit of eye — and turn it into something whole.
As I kept running, I thought more about remembering and memories and my vision and how I rely on past experience and habits to navigate. And now as I write this, I’m thinking about how everyone’s vision — not just mine — relies on a building up of past experiences (memories?) with things to be able to see them. Here I’m remembering something that I read in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss:
the sensation of sudden visual awareness is produced in part by the formation of a “search image” in the brain. In a complex visual landscape, the brain initially registers all the incoming data, without critical evaluation. Five orange arms in a starlike pattern, smooth black rock, light and shadow. All this is input, but the brain does not immediately interpret the data and convey their meaning to the conscious mind. Not until the pattern is repeated, with feedback from the conscious mind, do we know what we are seeing.
Learning to See in Gathering Moss/ Robin Wall Kimmerer
I’m continuing to read JJJJJerome Ellis’ Aster of Ceremonies. Wow!
Prayer to My Stutter #2/ JJJJJerome Ellis
You restore
a living
shoreline
between word
and silence
This beautiful prayer moves right into the next offering, Ictagon of Water, Movement 3, which was titled by its first line when it was published in Poetry:
excerpts from The name of that Silence is These Grasses in the Wind/ JJJJJerome Ellis
1
The name of that silence is these grasses in this wind, and the name of these grasses in this wind is that other place on the other side of this instant. This instant is divided by curtains of water and the sound of shuddering time. A sunflower reeling with sun, six hands stretched in offering. This unsearchable, uncancellable instant wraps the shoulders of the grasses like a shawl stilled by the stoppage.
How is/isn’t the instant similar to Marie Howe’s moment? If you listen to the recording on Poetry, you can hear the stretched silence as Ellis’ voice stops before pronouncing certain words.
2
This morning come shyly or boldly into the fertile field, however you are, come, come and stay in the rearrangement, the pressure of thumb on fescue blade, a year wheeling within a day, two round moments of warm mouth, finally at peace. The psalm is a key if only we can find the door. Do not swallow your dysfluent voice. Let it erupt in its volcanic flowering. Stoppage thence passage, aporia, poppy bursting with fragrant seed.
What a beautiful description and reclaiming of a stuttering voice on the other side of the stoppage! The erupting bursting flowering dysfluent voice.
I’m inspired by how Ellis takes his stutter and turns it into this beautiful instant between silence and word. For them, the stoppage is a/the key aspect of the stuttering. What are the most important elements of my strange vision?