3.3 miles
2 trails
66 degrees
Went out earlier today. Already warm. High in the mid 80s today. At the beginning of the run, my body felt awkward. Stiff neck, plodding feet — no, not plodding, but feet that were landing wrong, not pushing off of the ground easily. Gradually my body warmed up and I felt smooth by the third mile. Started my run a little after 7 and enjoyed a different vibe than at 9 or 10. Softer, fuzzier, cool green glow instead of harsh blue light.
My favorite view today was when I turned down from the 44th street parking lot to enter the winchell trail. A path winding down a small hill to a stone wall then hazy, glowing air framed by trees and water. The river was below that sky but I don’t remember noticing it, just knowing it was there.
surfaces: dirt, dead leaves, grass, rubbled asphalt, rutted and slanting asphalt, concrete, smooth asphalt
number of stones stacked on the ancient boulder: 6
bird, heard not seen: woodpecker — a deep, hollow knocking
bird, seen not heard: a little sparrow darting into a bush as I ran by
No rowers, no roller skiers, no turkeys. No thoughts or lines of poetry popping into my head. No shadow, no memories of my mom. Nothing interrupting me.
Chanted triple berries in my head to keep a steady beat: strawberry / blueberry / raspberry.
Listened to the gentle buzz of cars, dripping water, voices as I ran south. Put in my “Doin’ Time” playlist on the way back north. Two versions of “What Time is It?” came on, one from The Spin Doctors, the other from High School Musical 2.
restraint and the work of being still
Yesterday, I found a wonderful podcast episode on Lorine Niedecker and a close reading of her poem, “A Poet’s Work.” So much of the episode was wonderful. Today I’m thinking about the discussion of stillness and restraint in LN’s work, which includes another LN poem:
For best work
you ought to put forth
some effort
to stand
in north woods
among birch
I thought about movement and moving through a place instead of standing still in it, which reminded me of a passage from Cole Swensen:
Then sitting still, we occupy a place; when moving through it, we displace place, putting it into motion and creating a symbiotic kinetic event in which place moves through us as well.
Walk/ Cole Swensen
And now I’m thinking of something I posted, and then condensed, from Wendell Berry:
The slops along the hollow steepen still more and I go in under the trees. I pass beneath the surface. I am enclosed, and my sense, my interior sense, of the country becomes intricate. There is no longer the possibility of seeing very far. The distances are closed off by the trees and the steepening walls of the hollow. One cannot grow familiar here by sitting and looking as one can up in the open on the ridge. Here the eyes become dependent on the feet. To see the woods from the inside one must look and move and look again.
A Native Hill/ Wendell Berry
finding a stillness in movement?
Thinking more about moving and how it does/doesn’t fit with stillness — as in, an inner stillness — I turned to Brian Teare and his discussion of writing while moving in En Plein Air Poetics:
I’m heading up the AT to the North Trail, the kind of hike during which my mind goes from translucent to luminous, its usual wash of thought polished to a transparency that lets in the world with a force I adore. After a mile on foot, details come into focus with an oxygenated crispness. Thought can be a block to feeling the intertwining of self and world, the mesh of phenomena and the qualia of self, and hiking unblocks that feeling by muting my mind and allowing it to flood with a kind of proprioceptive ecstasy. My sense of self disappears into smell, color, sound, touch.
En Plein Air Poetics/ Brian Teare
Have I ever heard of qualia? Not sure. Here’s a helpful explanation:
Feelings and experiences vary widely. For example, I run my fingers over sandpaper, smell a skunk, feel a sharp pain in my finger, seem to see bright purple, become extremely angry. In each of these cases, I am the subject of a mental state with a very distinctive subjective character. There is something it is like for me to undergo each state, some phenomenology that it has. Philosophers often use the term ‘qualia’ (singular ‘quale’) to refer to the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our mental lives.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
proprioceptive: “of, relating to, or being stimuli arising within the organism”
Here’s something else helpful from Teare about shifting away from vision as the primary sense:
Paying attention to a fully intercorporeal relation to a specific site in the field dethrones eyesight as the most valued sense through which we acquire knowledge of nonhuman bodies—the eye is no longer the portal of empiricism through which the rational mind accesses the world.
For instance, hearing and touch are senses rarely accused of the kind of imperialism associated with vision; they are powers that alert other parts of the brain to our embodied relationships with the world.
A listening, touching human mammal is an embodiment that is not all eye and mind, a sensate creature whose language—its rhythms and structures—is derived in part from encountering the sonic landscape, felt textures, and the human and nonhuman bodies that populate and constitute the field.
After all, each ecosystem produces a unique biophony that envelopes us, and writing itself is haptic, a specialized kind of touch.