60 minutes
winchell trail / dowling community garden / neighborhood
61 degrees
Even better than yesterday! What a wonderful late morning. Delia and I walked to the Winchell trail, then up to the mesa in the oak savanna. More winchell until the folwell bench, then across the road through the 1960s neighborhood and into the community garden. So many birds! Lots of green and white flowers too, blooming all over the hillside in the oak savanna. I found out what these white blossoms were called a few years ago, but I can’t remember — maybe it’s one of these?
10 Things
- a steady dripping down in the ravine
- 2 dark holes — caves in the rock
- more of the chainlink fence is ripped away from the posts
- yesterday I noticed ugly red graffiti on the 38th street steps. Was it still there today? I forgot to check, but surely I would have noticed, right?
- less mud, more dirt
- sometimes sunny, sometimes overcast / sometimes blue, sometimes light brown
- in a wood near the community garden: 2 (or more?) birds making a racket up in a tree, sounding like the drum at the beginning of Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” — nice!
- the river: patches of smooth water, patches of rougher water — not from wind, but from sandbars?
- calm, still, the water was barely moving — only after staring at it for a moment could I see a slight shimmer out of the corner of my eye
- a woman in bright pink, sitting near the 38th street steps, silent except for the repeated clearing of her throat
before the run
Reading through my entires from april of 2022, I’m returning to thoughts of entanglement and mushrooms and precarity and ruins. Here is today’s inspiration from 23 april 2022:
- a different sort of We, not a me or an I, but a we, an us
- a different way of looking/sensing/becoming aware: not seeing straight on, but feeling, looking across and to the side, down, beneath and below
- stop looking up to the heavens, start feeling/sensing what’s below
- a hope that is not predicated on evidence, when evidence = seeing and Knowing and fully understanding (seeing things as parts or discrete categories or individual things)
- entangled is not separate or pure but messy and enmeshed
this is why we are all here — from my haibun and what I heard coming out of the little old lady’s phone
this
why
we
all
here
why = curiosity, wonder
The why is not an explanation — this is why/this is THE reason — but an invitation to imagine differently, expansively, wildly.
we all = ecosystems, organisms, networks, asemblages
Organisms are ecosystems.
I find myself surrounded by patchiness, that is, a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, with each further opening into a mosaic of temporal rhythms and spatial arcs (Tsing, 4) .
here = a place, located in history, a specific place, not transferable or easily translatable, can’t be scaled up or turned into assets
I picked up Mushrooms at the End of the World, and found this in the preface:
The time has come for new ways of telling stories beyond . . . Man and Nature . . , such stories might be simultaneously true and fabulous. How else can we account for the fact that anything is alive in the mess we have made?
The Mushrooms at the End of the World/ Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (viii)
fabulous = resembling or suggesting a fable : of an incredible, astonishing, or exaggerated nature
invented and true
[about this book] what follows a riot of short chapters. I wanted them to be like the flashes of mushrooms that come up after a rain: an over-the-top bounty; a temptation to explore; an always too many.
explosion / too much, too many / after the rain eruptions of excess
This explosion bit reminded me of Arthur Sze in an interview with David Naiman:
I began to think I love this idea that the mycelium is below the surface. It’s like the subconscious, then when the mushroom fruits pops up above ground, maybe that’s like this spontaneous outpouring of a poem or whatever.
during the run
I thought about something else I read in the entry with this Sze passage. It’s a fragment of a poem I wrote in response to Sze and a few Mary Oliver lines:
Maybe like mushrooms, we rise
or not rise, flare
brief burst from below
then return
to swim in the dirt…
I was thinking about not wanting to swim in the dirt, but be out in the air, exposed, vulnerable to erosion and rust/ing.
after the run
In The Mushrooms at the End of the World, Tsing discusses how matsutake mushrooms develop their fungi networks in locations of ruin — edges of volcanos, forest destroyed by logging and lumber companies. So, there’s a relationship between the flare/the fruit (the mushroom) and decay/ruin/erosion. Now I’m thinking about my version of what the moment of ruin can produce, where the moment of ruin = ruined eyes. What poetry might burst forth as I reckon with my dying/dead cone cells?
Mushrooms came up in the fiction book I’m reading, too: The Bog Wife.
But when he returned to the bog, he found a row of trespassers sprouting where the swale met the hinged door to the Cranberry River. These trespassers retained their heads, and Percy knew as soon as he saw them that his suspicions were correct; they were mushrooms. His heart sank. He sometimes saw mushrooms in the sparse forest on the west end of the property, modest white-headed clumps strewn across the soil or fringed gray dishes sticking out like frills from the trunks of trees. But he had never seen any of their ilk here, where the soil was not mushroom soil because it was bog soil, a dense wet batter that supported only the shallow-rooted and perpetually thirsty.
They would never tolerate any of the mushrooms, Percy thought. The mushrooms had all been trespassers. He tore out the orange mushrooms and gathered up the torn stems for burning, but he knew it wouldn’t make a difference. Mushrooms could not be dug up. They could not be evicted.
The Bog Wife/ Kay Chronister
I’m reading Emily Dickinson’s “The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants” and refreshing my memorizing of Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms.” Nobody sees us, stops us — SP envisions mushrooms as trespassers.
And here are a few more passages from Mushrooms at the End of the World, that I want to archive:
a network of (mostly) invisible influences
Below the forest floor, fungal bodies extend themselves in nets and skein, binding roots and mineral soils, long before producing mushrooms. All books emerge from similarly hidden collaborations.
The Mushrooms at the End of the World/ ALT
a gift and a guide
The uncontrolled lives of mushrooms are a gift — and a guide — when the uncontrolled world we thought we had fails.
promise and ruin, promise and ruin
This is a story we need to know. Industrial transformation turned out to be a bubble of promise followed by lost livelihoods and damaged landscapes. And yet: such documents are not enough. If we end the story with decay, we abandon all hope—or turn our attention to other sites of promise and ruin, promise and ruin.
bike: 20 minutes
basement
It was definitely nice enough to bike outside today, but I wanted to test out how riding a bike would feel on my back/hips/glutes for taking my bike off the stand and carrying upstairs. Plus I wanted to watch more of The Residence. Great show!
Almost 2 hours later, my back feels okay. We’ll see how it is when I want to go to sleep. If it’s okay, I might try biking outside tomorrow!