2 miles
2 trails
72 degrees
humidity: 94% / dew point: 70
Ugh — so thick! Oh well, there’s one good thing about this consistently hot and humid weather in the morning: it’s making me want to be done with summer and ready for fall and winter running. My calf almost cramped after 4 minutes of running again. I had to walk it off. I wonder what’s causing this?
Heard a lot of rowers on the river. And not just the coxswain this time; I also heard rowers cheering for each other. Was it a class? The U of M team? I stopped on the winchell trail to try and see them but I couldn’t. Too many leaves in the way.
Evidence of rain everywhere. Lots of mud, gushing and spurting sewers. The pipe that dumps neighborhood water down the ravine and into the river at 44th was loud. I decided to stop and record a video of it. In the background, you can hear the coxswain.
When I wasn’t on the winchell trail, I listened to my “Doin’ Time” playlist, including Beck’s “Time Bomb.” The first time I heard that song was in the Funny or Die video with Will Ferrell and ? (can’t remember the other actor) going around Los Angeles and high-fiving everyone. Tried to find a clip of it but couldn’t.
When I looked up “time bomb beck video” a promo video for charity: water came up from 16 years ago. The organization was seeking donations to help in drilling for water in Central Africa. I don’t know enough about whether or not this is a good (effective, responding to the needs of the people by asking them what they need) organization, and I couldn’t tell from the video, partly because I couldn’t see it very well, but its reminder, at the beginning, that water is life and its emphasis on access to water offers an important link between time and water and a powerful contrast between my experience, living among so many lakes, and the experience of others without easy access to water.
I am reminded of a passage in Anne Carson’s “1=1.” After describing a scene of a train car in Europe over-stuffed with people fleeing war zones, she writes:
a scene so much the antithesis of her own morning she cannot enter it. What sense it makes for these two mornings to exist side by side in the world where we live, should this be framed as a question, would not be answerable by philosophy or poetry or finance or by the shallows or the deeps of her own mind, she fears.
1=1/ Anne Carson
Impossible to answer, important to dwell within the discomfort of it.
hour entry: When John Adams wrote / Endi Bogue Hartigan
Another toll, another count of automatic weapon casualties, another occasion of America losing track of its math. I read today that when John Adams wrote “Thirteen Clocks were made to Strike together,” clocks were a tolling of public event, rung, an occasion or station in sun. I slept, and woke, I slept too long and woke. I tried to count the measured world by reading. Read “Thirteen Clocks,” read the late morning sun slant, read the current count outpaces past casualty counts, read “just three percent of adults own half of America’s guns.” Something automatic in measure, too automatic. I woke out of 9.25 hours of sleep I calculated automatically upon waking. I saw a crow out the window that was the occasion of a crow pecking frozen specks. I read the headlines leaking into headlines, saw the orchid sky calculating nothing. I have an inclination to stream and I don’t what it means today. I have an inclination to lie in my husband’s shoulders crook and let the day snowdrift let the dimness become wide, so a shoulder is a kind of stream too. The argument is made that the streaming of time is a perception trick. The argument is made that we have moved past occasion to incremental measure that we are obsessed with measure and stricken. I have an inclination to obsessively stream, to arise and move not through incremental measures of occasion but through water. The early clocks were water clocks but it was shown that water was imprecise, was subject to pressure and pore—even streams of consciousness can encounter ducts and brim. I am conscious of my husband’s warmth because of more than his warmth. Do not mistake headlines for measure. We were held in God’s soft pocket. Do not mistake automatic grieving for water.
toll / automatic / occasion / track / count measures / measure counts / outpace / streaming time / from occasion to increment / obsess / to stream is to move through water not seconds or minutes or hours / water exceeds measure is imprecise is more than our grief
the imprecision of water clocks / “The history of timekeeping is the story of the search for ever more consistent actions or processes to regulate the rate of a clock.” / “Since the rate of flow of water is very difficult to control accurately, a clock based on that flow could never achieve excellent accuracy. People were naturally led to other approaches.”
source: A Walk Through Time — Early Clocks
precision / division / headline as occasion as increment as measured line between
a line to keep/to use: I have an inclination to obsessively stream, to arise and move not through incremental measures of occasion but through water.
Maybe this could be the title of a poem? Something about softness and imprecision and the inability to be contained in easily measurable ways. And how my vision loss has made for liquid looking (Alice Oswald), and a way to see the same or better than others in the water. Moving through water offers a different logic and makes the existing logic strange — distorted, weathered, unreliable, imprecise.
And now, instead of moving through water, I’m thinking of Bruce Lee’s short poem about being water:
Empty your mind. Be
formless shapeless
like water
now you put
water into a cup
it becomes the cup you put
water into a bottle
it becomes the bottle you put
it into a tea pot
it becomes the tea pot
now water can flow or it can
craaaaasshh
be water my friend
Be water versus be like water. Metaphor versus simile. Metaphor removes the encounter with the other; you become the other (see Anne Carson and the anthropology of water).
people always believe that metaphor is more poetic. But I’ve always loved simile. One of the reasons is that simile keeps both worlds alive at the same time whereas metaphor changes one for another. So you get this beautiful kind of doubled feeling with the simile.
The whole art of everything is about forgetting yourself
Searching for something else, I just came across this excellent answer to the question, Do you carry a notebook?
AO: No, I don’t much. If I travel like now I do take a notebook. I find by the time I get back home I haven’t got the sort of liveliness. Mostly I try to take things into my head. I really believe in the sort of inarticulate ways of thinking. So the fact that you can read the whole day, all day long, and then when you’re composed it can come out again. I like that process of it not yet being in language, changing your mind round. And I’m more and more wary of the kind of willed and conscious act of writing. More and more I leave my mind to do it by itself. So I will, you know, go out and be kind of shocked by all the colours and pictures and smells and then purposefully not think of them linguistically. I think that the underneath mind will then do the work and that’s the mind I’m interested in. So the skill for me is then learning how to raid that underneath mind and then, when you do pick up a pen, you’re listening just hard enough so that you don’t use your surface mind. You get down to the mind that has taken everything in.
The whole art of everything is about forgetting yourself
Instead of the underneath mind, the underwater mind, or the just beneath the surface mind? The water-logged mind?
swim: 3 loops (? cedar loops*)
75 minutes
cedar lake open swim
85 degrees
*a strange course set-up: the first buoy was halfway out in the lake, the second was close to shore and to the right of hidden beach, so I’m not sure of the distance. Judging my time and effort, I’m guessing that I did 3 nokomis loops.
note: I didn’t have time to write this entry right after my swim, so I’m writing it the next morning.
Another wonderful night with hardly any wind. Beautiful light. Warm water, except for when I stopped swimming to tread water and extend my feet as far below as I could. Then it was cold. Crowded tonight: the last free night of the season. The water was fast, flat, opaque. My goggles were fogged for a lap or two until I licked the inside, then they were clear. I wasn’t sure if that would work, but it did.
My favorite image: on the second half of the loop, heading back to the beginning, breathing to my right and seeing a line of swimmers in the distance heading towards hidden beach. What did I actually see? the rare flash of an arm, a pink cap, churned up water.
After 3.5 loops, I stopped to take a quick break and check my time. Oops, the workout never started. I remember pressing start on my watch, but sometimes this happens. Oh well. Even without the data, I swam for 30 minutes before turning on my workout.
After finishing the swim, drying off in the grass, I encountered another swimmer who had a strange request. A fish bit my mole, could you check to make sure it’s not bleeding? The other day, a fish bit me and when I got home I had a scab.
The fish bite? What? I can’t remember if I’ve written about it this summer, but I haven’t noticed any fish. Not one sighting of a silver flash, definitely no encounters. The other swimmer continued, I’m just so slow out there and they’re attracted to my moles. Yikes!
She joked that she was going to ask her roommate to make fish for dinner so she could get some revenge. With each bite she’d say, I’m not food, YOU’RE food!