4 miles
franklin loop
68 degrees
humidity: 81%
Started at 7:30 a.m. and it was already hot and humid. That sun! Ran with Scott. We talked about AI and whether or not art was a purely human expression and how, within running circles, humidity is considered a “poor man’s altitude training.” We ran over the lake street bridge and the franklin bridge and above the mississippi rowing club and wondered what the loud buzzing noise below was. Trucks. My guess: doing something with the sewer vents by the rowing club. Scott’s guess: pulling a car out of the river.
10 Things
- a single rower on the river
- graffiti under the lake street bridge: Stop Hate
- cloudless blue sky
- everywhere, a thick green veil
- all the benches we ran by were facing a wall of green — on the other side of that: an unseen river
- 2 runners ahead of us disappearing into the trees — passing the spot a minute later, we noticed a steep dirt trail
- the cracked pavement that I’ve been monitoring for years has grown into a sinkhole
- the color of the river: brown in the foreground, blue in the background
- I don’t remember seeing shadows, just experiencing the cooling effects of shade
- beep beep beep — a truck backing up somewhere nearby
We started out doing 9/1, but had to take an extra minute of walking after the second interval. Still, we got outside and moved over 4 miles in the heat. Small victories: we ran more again in the last 2 miles and we ran up the entire section of the franklin hill even though I had initially wanted to walk it.
Found this definition of poetry by Wang Ping. Several years ago, she wrote a wonderful poem about the Mississippi River Gorge.
That’s what poetry is: a wind, a leaf of grass that ties time and space together (Wang Ping).
field
Continuing to think about the visual field test and the idea of my visual field. Today: what is a field? and can I play around with the idea of a field?
The visual field is “that portion of space in which objects are visible at the same moment during steady fixation of the gaze in one direction”; in ophthalmology and neurology the emphasis is mostly on the structure inside the visual field and it is then considered “the field of functional capacity obtained and recorded by means of perimetry”.
wikipedia
A single, fixed view from one direction — the space, and what’s contained within that space that can be seen.
I think I’ll leave thoughts about visual fields alone for now. Instead, I want to turn to a wonderful chapbook I just bought — as part of an entry fee for a chapbook contest — from Driftwood Press: Questions about Circulation
ruins/ Charles Malone
III.
The kitchen ceiling falls to the floor—
soaked plaster, moldy wood.
Hundred-year-old floors warp
something more sinister than time
in the farmhouse.
Plants grow to cover the windows,
the smell chokes
a massive colony of honeybees takes up in the siding,
raccoons come and go from the basement window.
This is the process by which a home becomes not,
a process other than a real estate transaction—
spills, arguments, accidents, cruelties.
You see other farmhouses stripped of paint
ducking behind wilding shrubs and flowering weeds.
The boundary between in and out blurs,
a sign with shameful orange letters on the door.
What action and inaction, what ruins a house
for the body and the lungs and recollection?
Rain, the creep of ivy, the sedimentary accumulation of dirt
this is the opposite of the joy of work.
1
Scott and I recently discovered more seasons of the Great House Revival where people take abandoned houses in Scotland Ireland (oops) and restore them. There are lots of discussions of water damage and rotten floorboards and overgrown yards and critters wandering in and out of basements and kitchens and first-floor (which is the second floor in a U.S. house) bedrooms.
2
Ever since I discovered the concept of re-wilding, I’ve been thinking about my eyes becoming wild again. At some point, my cone cells began scrambling then leaking then scarring then dying. Sometimes, I think of my central vision less like a wilderness, and more like a wasteland. But, there is something wild/feral about the refusal to fix/tame an image. Everything moves slightly — shakes, shimmers, fuzzes, fizzes. Nothing is still.