Month: January 2025

jan 18/RUN

2.6 miles
river road, south/north
8 degrees / feels like -1
25% snow-covered

I didn’t feel exceptionally cold, but it felt hard, my legs thick. I stopped at the bench above the “edge of the world” and looked out at the covered river. Someone wrote the name “Davidson” in the snow earlier this week and it’s still there. As I ran, I started chanting in triples:

strawberry/raspberry/blueberry
winter cold/winter snow/winter ice
arctic air/sizzling leaves/crusty snow

10 Things

  1. BLUE! sky
  2. crunch crunch crunch
  3. the river was white and closed except for a few spots that were dark and open
  4. a (non-fat tire) bike
  5. a runner’s raspy, hello
  6. running into the wind, being exhausted by it, wondering how the runners at Boston 2017, when it was cold and windy and raining, managed to run the whole marathon
  7. bright, blinding sun heading south
  8. some of the ice on the path was smooth, more of it was jagged and rough
  9. empty benches
  10. a truck driving by, then the strong smell of weed

My Heart Has Known Its Winter/ Arna Bontemps

A little while spring will claim its own, 
In all the land around for mile on mile 
Tender grass will hide the rugged stone. 
My still heart will sing a little while. 

And men will never think this wilderness 
Was barren once when grass is over all, 
Hearing laughter they may never guess 
My heart has known its winter and carried gall.

gall? I looked this word up and dismissed the definition I knew — gall as bold, impudent, he had the gall (read: nerve) to — because it didn’t make sense to me. Instead, I decided the poet meant

abnormal growths that occur on leaves, twigs, roots, or flowers of many plants. Most galls are caused by irritation and/or stimulation of plant cells due to feeding or egg-laying by insects such as aphids, midges, wasps, or mites. Some galls are the result of infections by bacteria, fungi, or nematodes and are difficult to tell apart from insect-caused gall

Plant Galls

I wasn’t satisfied with Merriam-Webster’s online definitions, so I logged into my library and accessed the OED (very cool that I can do this!) for more definitions. This one sort of works:

Something galling or exasperating; a state of mental soreness or irritation.

this one, too:

A place rubbed bare; an unsound spot, fault or flaw; in early use also a breach. Now only technical.

and this:

A bare spot in a field or coppice (see gall v.1 3). In the southern U.S. a spot where the soil has been washed away or exhausted.

Erosion, exhaustion.

I love the way the word gall with its plant/ field meanings and its human meanings reinforces the association being made between human’s exposed than covered grief and the ground’s exposed winter stone covered in spring’s grass.

I wanted to remember this poem because of the grass and the stone and the forgetting of winter when spring arrives. I don’t totally agree with its use of winter as metaphor for misery.

I like winter. I like breathing in the cold, the sound of snow falling, smelling the air. The silence and the sharp sounds. The view of the river — vast and bare. The subdued colors — pale blues and grays and dark browns. The less crowded trails. The bare-branched silhouettes. Movement slowed, stilled, suspended. Layers. The bright, cold sun.

jan 17/RUN

5.4 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
37 degrees
20% snow-covered

37 degrees and a mostly clear path! A great run. I felt relaxed and strong and able to shift gears and keep going. I greeted almost every walker, runner, or biker I encountered by raising my right hand. At the bottom of the hill I stopped to check out the water — open, moving thickly, a few flat and wide sheets of ice floating by. Smelled weed. Heard birds — laughing and chirping. Slipped (only a little) on a few bits of ice. Stopped at the sliding bench to admire the view — so bare and quiet and alone. Put in my headphones at the top of the hill and listened to my “Remember to Forget” playlist. Some of today’s lyrics made me think about regret and longing for the past, some of them about the joy of forgetting, and some of them commanded, remember! or don’t you forget it!

added a few hours later: I almost forgot to post the picture I took. It’s of the pile of rocks under the franklin bridge that I keep thinking is a person sitting up against the wall. I know these are rocks, but I always first think: person

limestone mistaken for a man

Inspired by my triple berry chant exercise (see below), I chanted in triples. Can I remember 10 of them?

10 Triple Berry Chants

  1. empty bench
  2. grayish sky
  3. ritual
  4. down the hill
  5. ice and snow
  6. soaring bird
  7. sloppy trail
  8. lake street bridge
  9. noisy wheel
  10. 3 stacked stones

confession: I did chant a few of these, but the rest I created as I wrote this list. I just can’t remember what I chanted.

early morning coffee

1 — strange sleeping habits

A morning ritual: coffee, Facebook, poets.org, poetryfoundation.org, poems.com, “on this day.” While scrolling through Facebook I found an interesting article about sleep: The forgotten medieval habit of two sleeps. The concept isn’t new to me; I read the book that it’s based on, At Day’s Close, more than a decade ago. One new thing, or thing that I had read in the book but forgot, was about the author’s initial research and how he looked to court transcripts for information about daily life:

he had found court depositions particularly illuminating. “They’re a wonderful source for social historians,” says Ekirch, a professor at Virginia Tech, US. “They comment upon activity that’s oftentimes unrelated to the crime itself.”

I started thinking more about sleep. Last night was not very good: restless legs, sore hip, getting up 3 or 4 times, walking up earlier than I’d like because of my restlessness. At one point, the author, Roger Ekirch, mentioned how recognizing the long history of getting up in the middle of the night as normal and natural could relieve some anxiety for those of us who can’t sleep straight through the night. I suddenly thought, and not for the first time: I need to accept my crazy sleep instead of fighting or worrying about it, and I should turn it into something creative. Track it, or write into it, or . . . . I wonder if there are “insomnia writing experiments?

a list-writing experiment

The first thing that came up in my google search was a scientific study about writing and falling asleep faster. Perhaps if I had searched, “insomnia writing exercises” or “insomnia poetry prompts” I would have gotten different results.

Bedtime worry, including worrying about incomplete future tasks, is a significant contributor to difficulty falling asleep. Previous research showed that writing about one’s worries can help individuals fall asleep. We investigated whether the temporal focus of bedtime writing—writing a to-do list versus journaling about completed activities—affected sleep onset latency. Fifty-seven healthy young adults (18–30) completed a writing assignment for five minutes prior to overnight polysomnography recording in a controlled sleep laboratory. They were randomly assigned to write about tasks that they needed to remember to complete the next few days (to-do list) or about tasks they had completed the previous few days (completed list). Participants in the to-do list condition fell asleep significantly faster than those in the completed-list condition. The more specifically participants wrote their to-do list, the faster they subsequently fell asleep, whereas the opposite trend was observed when participants wrote about completed activities. Therefore, to facilitate falling asleep, individuals may derive benefit from writing a very specific to-do list for five minutes at bedtime rather than journaling about completed activities.

The Effects of Bedtime Writing on Difficulty Falling Asleep

Lists? I love lists! I think I’ll try this, or my own version of it. Maybe I’ll start with a to-do list, another night a completed list, then a things I love list, or a things that bother me list, my favorite poets list, things I notice in the dark, reasons I can’t sleep list, and on and on. Eventually, maybe I can turn this into a series of list poems?

2 — idea/poem starters, an inspiration

The visual poem on poems.com for today, Good Riddance, reminded me of something I started thinking about in march 2024. The poem is a grid with a fragment of thought in each box. There are arrows directing you across or down, or across then down then across again. However your eyes choose to read the boxes creates a slightly different poem. Anyway, I started thinking about the different boxes and mixing and matching the phrases and I remembered this idea from my “to do list for 2022, 23, and 24”:

a 3/2 idea: create fragments of 2-4 lines with a “complete” thought that can be the start of a new poem, or be put together in new ways to create new poems — almost like prompts:

a shadow

crosses

And now I’m remembering an even earlier experiment from 3 may 2019 with triple (3 beat) chants:

Speaking of chanting, I have a new exercise I want to try. First, I want to think up a bunch of 3 syllable phrases (down the hill, walk to work, eat down town, out the door, sunday best, monday worst, turnip greens, climate change, just say please, in and out…). Then I’ll write these on small slips of paper and put them in a hat or a bowl or a bag. I’ll randomly pick out 8-10 and turn them into a poem (either in the order I select them or in an order of my choosing). Maybe the phrases should be a mixture of things from the run and popular or whimsical expressions? So much fun!

added an hour later: While reviewing old entries from June of 2024, I came across a delightful typo. Instead of writing “the tunnel of trees” I wrote, “the tunnel of threes.” I love it! Maybe the title of a poem that uses triple berry chants?

jan 16/WALKRUN

walk: 30 minutes with Delia
neighborhood
35 degrees!
morning

Sun! Above freezing! Shadows!

10 Walking Things

  1. the sharp clang of something metal dropping on hard concrete
  2. low-note wind chimes, bing-bonging in the breeze
  3. standing tall, lifting out of my lower back and hips, feeling my legs ground themselves on the sidewalk
  4. soft snow
  5. the contrast between bare black pavement and white sidewalks
  6. drip drip drip
  7. bare branches 1: the welcoming oaks, the shape of their thick, sprawling branches making silhouettes
  8. bare branches 2: a maple’s small twigs at the bottom looking like hair
  9. a sizzling sound in the trees: wind on dead leaves
  10. a beautiful blue sky peeking through fluffy, fast moving clouds

run: 3.5 miles
godfrey and back
33 degrees
afternoon

Less layers this afternoon: running tights, shorts, tank top, long shirt, pull-over with hood, headband, gloves, sunglasses. My face was a little cool, especially the ears which weren’t quite covered by the headband. The sidewalks were sloppy and so was the trail. No ice, but some slushy snow. Encountered a few fat tires, walkers, at least one other runner. Stopped at the bench and remembered looking out at the river, but I can’t remember what I saw other than white. Oh — I saw a person climbing up and out of the winchell trail

Before the run I was listening to an interview with Jenny Odell that I first heard last May. I started thinking about different notions of time and then how memories rarely follow linear time. They don’t move forward in a row, confidently attached to years. They’re all over the place and in the wrong place and on top of each other. I tried to think about that as I was running. I imagined a mess of memories filling up the gorge, but not taking up any space. Then I imagined myself running through and beside them. These memories barely left a trace and I couldn’t feel them.

yesterday’s delights

Driving us on the river road, RJP pointed out two delightful things to me: one — a biker on a fat tire doing a wheelie for at least a minute and for dozens of feet. They were pedaling forward on one wheel, the other wheel was hanging in the air. That seems hard! added 17 jan: I looked it up and found this video. And two — turkeys! one flying!! and dozens more spread out all around turkey hollow.

jan 15/RUN

4.1 miles
trestle+ turn around
15 degrees / feels like 1
75% snow-covered

Hooray for getting back outside! I never felt cold. Hands and feet were fine, torso too. About halfway in, I overheated. Off with the mittens, down with the hood. The run didn’t feel easy; my legs were sore. But I bargained with myself — make it to the trestle, keep going until the sliding bench, don’t stop until after the hill! And I was able to shift gears, settling into something different with my legs (hard to explain). I lifted out of my hips, relaxed my shoulders and kept going for longer than I thought I would. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker. Stopped running to witness a wedge of geese flying overhead. Heard the rattling jawbone of some bird. Noticed that the river was open and dark under the trestle. Everywhere else it was white.

10 Things

  1. a honk cutting through the quiet then less than a dozen geese flying in a loose formation — I think I heard the swish of their wings as they passed directly above me
  2. the smell of tobacco beside me — did it come from the open window of a passing car?
  3. the smell of weed below me
  4. 3 stones stacked on the ancient boulder, half covered with snow
  5. a runner approaching from behind with a dog on a leash tethered to their waist, running faster than me through the snow
  6. the constant view beside me: slender bare brown slanted branches white river a white brown bluff on the other side of the river
  7. a flash of BRIGHT orange to my left — someone in an orange jacket walking below near the old stone steps
  8. a big dog — golden retriever? — squatting and pooping on the side of the path, their owner waiting with a bag
  9. a light brown cobblestone carriage walk in front of a fancy house on edmund
  10. the sharp crunch of one foot striking the crusty snow in my alley, the soft grind of the other foot leaving the snow

shades, shadows, memories

Before the run, I was reviewing May 2024 entries. This bit about the children’s book, The Shades, inspired some thoughts:

 . . .they live in the garden. All of their food comes from the shadow’s cast by real food, their house cast from the shadow of the old summer house that “broke Emily’s heart” when it was torn down. Most of the time they do what they want, but when a human enters the garden, whichever of them best fits that human’s form must shadow them around the garden. Sometimes this shadowing is fun, other times it’s tedious, and occasionally it’s dangerous: if a human climbs over the garden wall, the shadow must follow and be lost to the outside world forever.

log entry 20 may 2024

Thinking about the shadow’s independence from the object that cast them and their attaching forms that approximately fit, I started thinking about memories and the gorge. I imagined countless memories (as shadows?) living there, made and left behind by everyone that has spent time at the gorge. Then I imagined running through/with/beside them and some of them attaching to me (in some way). The memories weren’t mine exactly; they were independent of me with their own experiences and histories and feelings. But, beside the gorge, we become entangled. Maybe I can add this to the poem I started about shadows. I’d also like to add this idea: the silhouette as “a radical condensation of faith in shadows” from 17 may 2024.

jan 14/BIKERUN

bike: 30 minutes
run: 2.7 miles
basement
outside: 7 degrees / feels like -9

Tomorrow it’s supposed to be slightly warmer, so I decided to wait until then to run outside. While I biked, I watched the 2017 5000m men’s world championships with Mo Farrah. While I ran, I turned on an Apple Music made “Energy” playlist. It was great. I don’t really remember the environment — oh, except for that I was cold at first, in our unfinished basement, but then warmed up fast — but I remember my body during the bike. I was working on keeping my back straight and long over the handlebars. During the run, I remember the music and the stretches when I only noticed my legs when they were off the ground. Listening to the music and getting lost in my thoughts about vision and faces and names, I forgot chunks of time.

before the run — remember/forget: names and faces

Last night, I drifted off to sleep thinking about names and nobodies and how I wanted to gather past accounts about them today in this entry. During my “on this day” practice, while revisiting 14 jan 2020, I came across the documentary, Notes on Blindness, and John Hull’s description of losing all of his sight and the ability to remember faces. Hull asks, 

To what extent is the loss of the image of the face tied up with the loss of the image of the self and with the consequent feeling of being a ghost or a mere spirit?

So now I’m expanding my thinking to names and faces.

First, a question, prompted by a bit of the Hull that I listened to/watched just now: What senses produce the strongest memories? answer: smell

a short from the longer documentary

I watched the part after Hull’s quote about the face and the self, and it helped clarify the quote more. First, his wife says:

I can’t look into his eyes and be seen. There’s no beholding in that sense of being held in somebody’s look.

To be seen is to exist. This is what lies behind the thought my older daughter has expressed, Oh Daddy, I wish you could see me!

It is not the person who cannot see the face that is the ghost, but the person who cannot be seen. Even as I often feel like a ghost moving through the world, I also feel like everyone else is a ghost or a specter, that I’m the only real and living thing. It’s complicated because I feel both: haunting and haunted.

Of course, sometimes I can see faces, or at least parts of faces, and I can still see gestures and bodies, so my feeling of loss and disconnection is much different from Hull.

And there’s more messiness about my understanding of all of this. To be sure, there has been a tremendous feeling of loss over not being able to see faces clearly, or to hold someone with a look; to behold and witness others seems to be part of what makes us feel human. But (or and?), some of this is illusion and cultural construct. Sight and seeing someone is not the only way we connect with them, or see them as a self. In fact, it’s not the most reliable. For me, there is something exciting (is that the right word?) about gaining a new perspective on vision and its limits, and about being motivated to care about the process of seeing, which I used to ignore.

Wow — how far am I wandering from remembering and forgetting here?

Now I’m thinking about names and faces and phrases like, put a name to the face. For a little less than a year, Scott and I have been regularly going to a pub near our house, The Blue Door. Much of the time, we’ve had the same waitress. I always recognize her — less by her face than her gestures — but I haven’t known her name. A few days ago, Scott finally realized he could check the bill for her name so now we know it. I wonder, what difference does it make? (How) do I feel more connected to her now that I know her name?

after the run: music

All of the songs I heard were good for energy and distraction, but a few of them felt especially connected to what I had been thinking about prior to my workout.

Reputation/ Joan Jett and the Blackhearts
An’ I don’t give a damn ’bout my reputation
Never said I wanted to improve my station
An’ I’m only doin’ good when I’m havin’ fun
An’ I don’t have to please no one
I don’t give a damn ’bout my reputation
I’ve never been afraid of any deviation
An’ I don’t really care if you think I’m strange
I ain’t gonna change

I think it was around the time she sang about not wanting to improve her station, I started thinking about names and “being somebody” and notoreity/notoriousness and when wanting to be known is desirable and when it’s not. Usually it’s not for me. I like to be left alone to do what I want to do. I also thought Alice Oswa

Poker Face/ Lady Gaga
Can’t read my, can’t read my
No, he can’t read my poker face
(She’s got me like nobody)
Can’t read my, can’t read my
No, he can’t read my poker face
(She’s got me like nobody)

Wow, these lyrics! Yikes. Anyway, I’m interested in the idea of an unreadable, stone face. That’s how most faces are to me all of the time. I can’t see small gestures or tells that help you to make sense of what’s being said. Now I’m wondering about non-facial poker tells. Here are two that I found: how they handle the chips/cards and table talk.

Rhythm Nation/ Janet Jackson
With music by our side to break the color lines
Let’s work together to improve our way of life
Join voices in protest to social injustice
A generation full of courage, come forth with me

As I heard these words, I thought about my discussion below about seeing, looking, beholding each other as the primary way to recognize each other’s humanity/selfhood. What about hearing and listening and playing music?

Bonus: It’s Raining Men/ The Weather Girls

Not directly related to faces and names, but hearing this song reminded me of one of my favorite sections in the blindness documentary. It is nine and a half minutes in and it’s about rain and how its different sounds on a tree or a roof or a garbage can help us to “see” a place with our ears.

jan 13/BIKERUN

bike: 30 minutes
run: 1 mile
basement
outside: 3 degrees / feels like -3

Cold and icy and windy outside, so inside in the basement for me. Watched an old track race while I biked, listened to my remember to forget playlist as I ran. Happy to move my legs and work up a sweat. What did I notice? I don’t remember.

remember — inheritance

gestures, ways of speaking, expressions, eye diseases, anxiety disorders, curiosity, persistence, restlessness, strong legs, a love of water, a need for being outside, the impulse to run away, an edge dweller, conflict avoider, a storyteller

for more on inheritance, see 4 nov 2021

Mary Ruefle and I Remember

I remember a lecture I read by Mary Ruefle in Madness, Rack, and Honey.

Thinking about “I Remember” and remembering, origins and when things began. I thought about how there is a sort of origin point to all of this (my writing poetry) and it’s my eye doctor diagnosing me with a rare eye disease then saying, you should write about it which prompted me to want to work on my writing so I could better explain what I was experiencing. But, I had already been writing and already had those desires, so it was really more of a slight shift, a stutter step or a quick stumble off the path, just briefly, which changed the trajectory, slightly, incrementally. Difficult to pinpoint what all changes your path.

9 may 2023

remember my name

The first song that came up on my playlist was Fame. As I listened to the lyrics — Fame! I’m gonna live forever / Baby remember my name — I started thinking about being remembered forever and fame and names and immortality and Emily Dickinson and JJJJJerome Ellis and their “Liturgy of the Name” in Asters of Ceremonies.

from Liturgy of the Name/ JJJJJerome Ellis

My name, in the time when I cannot utter it, maps the space within me. In an instant the Stutter shuttles me from the present–the barber just asked me my name, my voice fluttering in my throat, struggling not to tremble as the razor presses on my temples–to an ancient place of breath, name, silence, time, creation.

. . .

When the door of my vocal cords closes, another opens. And through that open door I escape into a region I do not know what to call but which is vaster than the space of my body. You could say: my name is the door to my being, and in that interval when I’m stuttering, the door is left wide open and my being rushes out. What rushes in?

jan 12/RUN

2.45 miles
2 trails
20 degrees
100% snow-covered

A short run because it snowed last night and they haven’t plowed the trail yet. I wore my yaktrax but the soft, uneven snow seemed too much for already sore muscles.

Interruption: as I sit at my desk writing this, after my run, a dog zipped by my window. Ace — the dog two doors down who likes to break out his backyard and roam the neighborhood. I used to worry about him, but I know he’ll return….just after finishing that last sentence, I saw a blur of movement — Ace again, across the street.)

It was a nice, relaxed run through a wonderfully wintery world! Snow covering everything — path, trees, river. Occasionally I heard a crunch when my foot hit some icy snow, but mostly the snow was soft and silent. I descended to the Winchell trail at 42nd and ran closer to the river. The path was a mix of snow and dead leaves. I continued past the 38th street steps and down into the oak savanna. Then beside the ravine and over the icy slats — that part was slippery! No running, barely even walking, at this part.

10 Things

  1. river hidden under snow
  2. a pack of runners approaching — the movement of their thin, muscular legs made them look like galloping horses
  3. a fat tire up ahead — at first, all I could see was a dark figure and I thought it might be a dog or a bear or the territorial turkey
  4. hi! — hello! greeting an approaching walker
  5. the heavy breathing of a fast runner passing by me
  6. a flash of orange — was it a snow fence?
  7. the wind heading north on the upper trail was cold and harsh
  8. the slow trickling of water below the ravine
  9. a tree bent over the trail so low I almost had to duck to get under it
  10. all the benches were empty

Happy 8th Anniversary to this log! On January 12th, 2017 I posted my first entry for this RUN! project. I had no idea where it would lead. What a life it has given me! It seems fitting for my love of the approximate that I started on the 12th instead of the 1st. It also seems fitting that the post began with no fanfare or introduction to some big project and that it was about restlessness. 9 years and 7660.2 miles of running (and around 500 miles of swimming) later, I’m just as or more restless. Wanting to move, to be outside, to connect with the world. To read, to write, to experiment with new ways to be. My restlessness drives my creativity and curiosity and also my unease and discomfort (and anxiety and suffering).

remember — inheritance

This Be the Verse/ Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

I first encountered this poem after . . .

Interruption. Sitting here at my desk in front of the window before my run, someone just walked by pushing a shovel. I think they decided to walk and shovel everyone’s sidewalk at the same time. That’s feeding two birds with one scone. Nice!)

. . . reading then memorizing Philip Larkin’s The Trees. I didn’t like it. That last verse — so harsh and unforgiving. But this morning my study of remembering and forgetting led me to the idea of passing down/inheriting trauma from past generations, and I came across this poem again. I continue to struggle with the conclusion, but I’m reading the rest of it differently — as a daughter who is beginning to understand the trauma she inherited from her mother and how she responded to abusive parents, and as a mother confronting the impact of her parenting choices on her kids. I had planned to write more about this now, but I don’t have time; FWA is returning to college today!

When I have time, I want to read/summarize this article: How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children. And I want to think about epigenetics and slavery and how inheritance works on a broader, more systemic level, within communities. Whew — that’s a lot!

jan 11/WALKYOGA

walk – 30 minutes
neighborhood
26 degrees

Winter white. White sky, white grass, white sidewalks — at least some of the sidewalks are still white. Warmer. Still, quiet, calm. Deep breaths — ahhh! cold air! A happy dog. Walked past 7 Oaks and thought about how it’s a sinkhole. then wondered how long it’s been this way. “Thousands of years” was as specific as I could get. While looking for its age, I also found a Sinkhole Study from a few years ago. I’ll have to look through it when I have more time.

yoga – 30 minutes

Two days ago, I promised to try out a low vision yoga video. Loved it!

The slow and careful way that the instructor described the movements was very helpful. Similar to audio descriptions on shows and movies, I didn’t realize how much I needed a description of the moves until I had one and could feel the difference — easier, less stressful.

grass

This morning, during my “On This Day” practice, I re-encountered these lines from Victoria Chang in her poem, “Left Behind”:

We are carriers
of grass yet to be grown. We
aren’t made of cells, but of fields.

Then, while reading JJJJJerome Ellis’ “Benediction” in Asters of Ceremony, I encountered these beautiful lines,

The more I live with my stutter, with the Stutter that I steard in my body, the more I feel and know, or unknown, that this stutter is no less a part of the earth than the rest of my body. This stutter has come from the land and the water. It knows the Plant Elders, and there is much I can learn, and have learned, about my stutter by spending time with these Elders. Names run through the Grasses, and when I stutter on my name, I am brought into the field.

Benediction from Asters of Ceremony/ JJJJJerome Ellis

Both Chang and Ellis, but especially Chang, reminded me of Mary Oliver’s mention of grass in The Leaf and the Cloud:

Listen, I don’t think we’re going to rise
in gauze and halos.
Maybe as grass, and slowly,
Maybe as the long-leaved, beautiful grass.

jan 10/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
21 degrees
100% snow-covered

Today the winter I want: big flurries, everything covered in a thin layer of snow, not too much wind, warmer, not slick — especially with my with Yaktrax on. Nothing was quite easy, but everything wasn’t as hard as my last run on Wednesday.

10 Things

  1. a white sky
  2. the contrast between shoveled and un-shoveled sidewalks — both still white, but the shovelled ones had a tint of gray or brown peeking through
  3. the clacking jawbone of a bird’s beak — a blue jay?
  4. the river was all white — if you didn’t know better, you could believe it was a field or a meadow
  5. approaching from above, hearing the falls rushing over the limestone
  6. kids yelling and laughing at the playground, one loud, high-pitched sound — was it a kid screaming or a whistle?
  7. amongst the kid voices, a deeper, more knowing laugh — was that from a teacher?
  8. the contrast on the creek surface: white snow with blackish-gray water
  9. 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?
  10. 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, Octagon 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?

jan 9/YOGAWALK

hip/lower back yoga – 20 minutes

I tried out a new yoga routine this morning for hips and lower back release. I liked it (mostly), but it was difficult to follow; I couldn’t see the movements she was making very easily. I’m sure some of it was because I wasn’t familiar with the movements, but I also think it was her (visually) busy set-up. Of, maybe it’s the dark floor? Yes, there’s not enough contrast with the floor and I couldn’t see what her body is doing.

yoga / difficult to see

The yoga routine I usually do has a light/white floor so I can the yoga instructor’s arms and legs more easily — at least where her arms and back are bare:

yoga / easier to see

It’s possible that I could see the second yoga instructor more easily because I’ve watched this video hundred of times and I started watching ir when my vision was better than it is now.

I decided to look up “low vision accessible yoga” on YouTube. I found, Yoga For People with Low Vision, which I think I’ll try tomorrow. There’s not enough contrast (for me) between the instructor and the mat, but I imagine the emphasis on describing the movements might help. Thinking more about why it was more difficult for me to follow in the first video, I’m remembering how chatty the instructor was about random stuff. Some moments she offered great descriptions of the movements, but other moments she went too fast or spent more time talking about something else. In my favorite yoga video, there’s no chatting. Just a clear, straight-forward, rehearsed voice-over.

I found a video with advice on how to instruct blind or low vision yoga students, and I found this part about intentionality particularly important:

Yes! Intentionality, mind-body connections, listening — and not just for the students with low vision.

walk with Delia – 20 minutes
neighborhood
20 degrees

Scott and I took Delia on a walk around 2 blocks. Brrr!! It felt colder than 20 degrees. Was it sunny? Now I can’t remember. Wait, it was, I wore my sunglasses. The thing I remember most about the walk were the talkative birds in a neighbor’s bush. I think they were sparrows? I didn’t see them, but I sure heard them! Another thing I remembered were the bare branches of the trees — gnarled and sprawled and looking straight out of a dark fairy tale.

Memory and Forgetting

I came across a Radiolab episode from last spring on memory and forgetting. The first section was particularly great.

SCIENTIST: On a literal level it’s an act of creation.

SCIENTIST: Yeah, exactly.

SCIENTIST: We’re reconstructing those memories.

SCIENTIST: Construction.

JAD: Maybe it’s more like painting or sculpture.

SCIENTIST: Everyone’s constantly their own artist.

SCIENTIST: We take bits and pieces of experience.

SCIENTIST: Some things get sharpened, other things leveled.

SCIENTIST: And infused with imagination and …

SCIENTIST: Out of that construct …

SCIENTIST: Construct. Construct.

*

A memory is a structure that connects one brain cell to another.

Associations! Another thing that creates connections and associations: metaphor

JONAH LEHRER: That the act of remembering on a literal level, it’s an act of creation. Every memory is rebuilt anew every time you remember it.