4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
18 degrees / feels like 6
The bike path was clear and not crowded. The air was cold. I heard a few birds, kids on the playground, dry leaves still on the trees imitating the waterfall. My legs felt heavy, my lower back a little sore. Waved a greeting to almost everyone I encountered. Thought maybe I heard some kids on the sledding hill at minnehaha park but couldn’t see anyone.
About a mile in, I started thinking about how purple represents both very hot temperatures and very cold ones. Purple = extreme. Then I thought about Basho’s line about poetry as “a fireplace in summer, a fan in winter.”
small victories: thought about stopping to walk under the ford bridge but kept going until I reached my favorite observation spot, stopped to put in a playlist, then kept running until I reached the double bridge. also: have mostly reached my winter goal of lowering my average heart run to under 160 — today it was 157.
10 Things
- cloud-covered sun
- yellowed leaves on an otherwise bare tree — a compliment to the violet air
- the river was covered in white and looked wider and colder than usual
- at least 10 people were standing near my favorite observation spot by the falls
- through the slats of the double bridge on the walking side I noticed bright blue graffiti
- one car was parked in the far parking lot at the top of the sledding hill
- the bright pink plastic bag I mentioned last week was further in the woods today — was it filled with snow?
- the falls were frozen and not falling
- stopped at the bench above the edge of the world: open, empty, a few tracks in the snow
- a small part of the fence near 38th is missing a panel
the purple hour — 2 days
3:18 am (bedroom floor) / 13 jan 2025
Still life painting
Heavy shadows and light
Sitting in the dark, wanting to keep the quiet and how I’ve adjusted to the dark, I’m reluctant to take out my iPad and write or to speak into my phone. Now, later (10:00 am) in the morning, I remember the moon (a full moon!) coming through the slats — not as dramatically as the past few nights — and the window-sized square of light with its soft slat shadows and the deep, solid shadow of the couch and the dark almost emptiness of the closet — almost empty because I could see the hint (inkling?) of the exercise ball with the slightest outline of light. The image of the ball just barely emerging from the shadow reminded me of a still life painting — the one that Diane Seuss writes about in Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber/ Diane Seuss (see 3 may 2024).
At night, when others are asleep and it’s more dark than light, the world stills for my restless eyes. The static stops. Finally objects freeze. Mostly I do too. A chance to look for longer, to stare and study.
I like “seeing” the darkness in the closet — its accordion doors wide open — as a deep purple. It’s not pure black; there’s color there but it’s dark and deep.
Writing this last sentence prompted me to search for Monet and purple. Why? I can’t remember now, a few minutes later. Jackpot. First, a quotation wrongly attributed to Claude Monet on the search, but actually spoken by Manet — poor Manet. How often is he overshadowed by Monet? Anyway, here’s the quotation:
I have finally discovered the true colour of the atmosphere. It’s violet. Fresh air is violet. I found it! Three years from now everyone will do violet!
found in The Secret Lives of Color, which sites Bright Earth: The Invention of Color, 208.
Bright Earth? This books looks great. Just requested it from my local library!
The impressionists were enamored with violet. Critics claimed they were afflicted with violettomania. Some theories on why:
- a belief that shadows were never merely black or gray but colored — this sounds familiar!
- complementary colors: bright yellow and soft purple. Robin Wall Kimmerer and Goldenrods and Asters!
- vision problems — Monet and cataracts
*
Talking with my sister on the phone in the afternoon about my purple hour, she mentioned a paint color made from human remains. I think she meant this one:
Caput mortuum, Latin for “dead head,” is a dark brown paint that looks violet in some lights, maroon in others. It is earthy and intense, and like many browns, it can run in opposite chromatic directions when diluted. Some versions of caput mortuum paint tend toward the yellow end of the spectrum, while others wash into a light, yet slightly murky lavender. Despite its foreboding name and strange history, it is a rather simple, homey color. The substance reached the height of its popularity in the 18th and 19th centuries. It gets its hue from pulverized, mummified bodies (both human and feline) and its name from alchemy.
source
2:06 am / dining room / 14 feb
That moon! noticed a thin line of light on the kitchen floor then went over to the side (south facing) window and noticed the moon through the thick wooden slats. wow!
sitting at the dining room table, the heat kicked in — creaking everywhere through the vents. I have a short, repeated passage from one of our community band pieces running through my head. looking off to the side I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror, my face-blob glowing from the computer screen — wistful wisteria — all parts of wisteria are toxic to humans — small purple flowers
I’m not sure why the phrase “wistful wisteria” popped into my head. Where do I know wisteria from? Searched for poetry wisteria and found a poem by Lucie Brock-Broido, Extreme Wisteria
Wisteria is, first: a hardy, deciduous, capable-of-earnest-grasping shrub which bears small flowers. After that, it can be pressed (violently if you will) into an attar of its former self. In this poem, wisteria is also a state (of mind), the place one heads toward when feeling wistful.”
QA with Lucie Brock-Broido
7:53 am / dining room / 14 feb
- aubergine, agitated, almost/approximate
- bathos, bruised
- cancer: pancreatic, cough medication
- Dino or Daphne, deep
- eggplant, emperor, Easter dress
- fibs faint falsehoods, fake fruit flavor, FWA’s favorite color
- Grape Ape, grief, (ornamental) grass
- heliotrope, haze, heaviness, hair color?!
- iris, ink, iffy, iodine
- jealousy, jazz, jackets
- kingly, Kristen’s post-college car
- lilac, lavender, Lumpy Space Princess
- mauve, magenta, mold, mystery, magic
- non (binary/entity/sense)
- orchid, outrage(ous)
- pansy, petunia, plum (fruit and Professor)
- queer, question
- restless, rusty/rusted
- shadows, slant, snail-snot, scar
- Tyranian, tantrums, teletubby, toe
- unfenced, undulating, underwater, unique, uncertain, undecided
- violet, violence, vapor
- wisteria, wispy, whelk, wood with soft inhabitants, wet, wild
- eXcessive, exasperated, extremities — oxygen-starved, excess
- yellow’s compliment, yelling
- zeal
10:30 / front room, my desk / 14 feb
Wandering with purple: Part of this purple hour project, part of any of my projects really, is to find reasons to wander and wonder about new, unexpected things that I might not otherwise encounter or care about. Mission accomplished! It started last night with a random phrase that whispered to me, wistful wisteria. This led to reading about the purple-flowered vine, wisteria, then Lucie Brock-Broido’s poem, then her Q&A about the poem in which they discuss Emily Dickinson, especially her poem, “Essential Oils — are wrung –“. Then the idea of ED as a hard nut to crack. Then this line from some commentary on ED:
When I read Walt Whitman, we jauntily walk side by side down the road within his multitudinous world of wonder. When I read Dickinson, I don’t know if I am inside her mind or if she is inside mine. But I am always in a mysterious, perplexing, deeply thought-provoking, sometimes scary but always beautiful place.
source
Which led me back to the Q&A:
I think we’re all in conversation on the page with that which came before us, or even during us. We inherit whatever canon we’re in the midst of, a great collective influenza.
*
What I mean to say is that, in my own work, often, I may have been with Dickinson, but she was not with me.