60 minutes
with Delia and FWA
Minnehaha Off-leash Dog Park
80 degrees
A new ritual: hiking at the dog park with Delia-the-dog and my son, FWA. Every Thursday or Friday, more often Friday. What a park. On the edge of Minnehaha Falls Regional Park, next to Coldwater Springs, heading towards Fort Snelling, down in the floodplain, across from Hidden Falls in St. Paul. Such a great space for Delia to run and play with other dogs, and for FWA and I to hike and talk about roots and fungal nets and Mars and abundance and scarcity and Robin Wall Kimmerer, and the sand mafia and Fall Out 76 and poetry and anxiety and . . . . In past years, parts of this park have been flooded. Hiking through, the evidence is everywhere: soft sand, the bones of giant trees, ridges and cracks and wide open spaces with tall canopies, dirt studded with rocks and pebbles and stones.
Earlier this morning, Scott sent me this link: Minneapolis witch coven takes to their paddleboards for spooky lake gathering. I wish I could have seen that!
After reading the witch article, I returned to Girl Ghost Gorge and my air section. A thought: Instead of Girl Ghost Gorge, should I call this collection, River Rock Air? I don’t think so, but I’ll keep it open as a possibility. Today’s focus started out as time and the re-reading of Chloe Garcia Robert’s “Temporal Saturation,” and I’m still thinking about that, but it shifted slightly when I reached this line:
Temporal saturation . . . is used to explain both the canyons that can appear inside moments of great rending, joyous or horrific, entombing an incarnation of the self which will never again exist; as well as the median intervals of floating passivity that resist recollection and whose ending is marked by a feeling of awakening: a drowsy startle or a gradual reconsciousness.
Temporal Saturation/ Chloe Garcia Roberts
canyons. The gorge! The gash, gap, open space where more is possible, between beats, where Nothing happens and where there is (good) Air to breathe. Does it entomb an incarnation of the self which will never again exist? Ooo–I have thought about the idea of different Saras intermingling above/beside/in the gorge. It’s not that they don’t ever exist again, but that they only exist (together) here in this space. It’s the gorge as holding everything — not trapping or entombing, but holding — beholding, witnessing.
inside moments of great rending: rending = tearing — splitting and cracking open, ripping, breaking, eroding
floating passivity — resist recollection, or thinking, those spaces on the trail that are lost, when you let go, stop thinking, soft attention?
amplifies the moment, in joy or terror, both feeling like falling, joy, a falling into, terror a falling through
When I first encountered this book last spring, it wasn’t too long after I had read JJJJJerome Ellis’s amazing book, Aster of Ceremonies, which inspired me to think about my blind spot as (almost) a gorge, similar to how Ellis imagines their stutter as clearing. So now I’m reviewing my old Plague Notebook from that time, vol. 24. Here are some notes:
We all have a blind spot, mine is just bigger than yours (sight unseen/ G. Kleege). Not a lack, not nothing, Nothing. A gap, a gorge, an opening, both solid and unstable / limestone and sandstone / a break, a rupture
And then a Plank in Reason, broke/ and I dropped down and down/and hit a World at every plunge/and finished knowing then (ED — from memory so punctuation is a bit off)
a going under — not a drowning/disorientation/underwater/submersion/immersion/more porous, less divisions
cracks/erosion/waring away
from Octagon of Water, 3/ JJJJJerome Ellis
The name of that silence is these Grasses in the wind, and the name of these Grasses in this wind is that other place on the other side of this instant. This instant is divided by curtains of water and the sound of shuddering time.
time stopping, pause
erosion = pressure + time
ED’s elemental rust: ‘Tis first a cobweb in the soul/ A cuticle of dust/ A borer in the Axis / An elemental rust
big enough to hold all — expansion/room/possibility/generosity/holds multitudes — WWhitman — contradictions, ambiguities
entangled connected not needing to be resolved
a silence — And me and Silence some strange race wrecked solitary here (ED)
unseen unstable
weather — a different language of time (See Jenny Odell, Another Kind of Time)
extraction, dehumanizing, people outside of time, with no history
“Like a clearing in a forest, the stutter, for Ellis, can open a space of gathering for Ellis and the People he is communicating with” (Angel Bat Dawid and JJJJJerome Ellis).
erosion can lead to reclaiming, re-wilding as less abundance, a clearing away
a blind spot — no critical judgment, usually read as uncritical, but what if we read it as free of judgment, a generosity? See 19 march 2025 for more on this!
AOswald on erosion: worn down to abstract form, anonymity of weathered sculptures — “I love erosion: I like the way that the death of one thing is the beginning of something else.”
erosion, a softening, a vulnerability, a tenderness
Find the ceremony in every instant. — Ellis
At this point in the notebook, I moved on to color and my chapbook, I Empty My Mind.
Reading through Plague Notebook, Vol 25, I stopped on a mention of familiar with intimate. Yes! I’ve been thinking about worn in as a form of familiarity. Habit, accustomed to, familiar, family, and now, intimate/intimacy.
Okay, it’s Friday almost evening, and I need to stop!
recap for next time: exposure to air = rust = erosion — write more about the process / I’ve written about the open space of the gorge in time (Between Beats), now I need to write about in space, with an engagement with the blind spot! / the familiar/family/intimacy among us edge-dwellers at the gorge / keep revisiting Roberts’ temporal saturation / and, more on Air