4 miles
river road, north/south
49 degrees
We were planning to go to the Y, but when we stepped outside and felt how beautiful it was, we changed our plans. Instead of swimming, I would go running. I’m glad I did; it was beautiful out there! Saw on the forecast that rain turning into snow is possible on Saturday. It’s coming: winter! Felt strong again and bouncy, able to pop off the asphalt with my powerful leg swings and foot strikes. Nice!
I’m writing this 3 hours late because we had a mini kid crisis with parking tickets and passes. Had to help figure that out. Can I remember 10 things?
10 Things
- Good morning Dave! / Good morning Sara
- running in shorts with bare legs, warmed by the sun
- a tall oak, 2 of its branches stretched, looking almost like shrugging shoulders
- a lime bike below me in the bushes
- stopping before the trestle, walking through dead leaves, standing on the edge of the bluff, looking down to the below the trestle and at the blue river
- the warning tape and cones around the big crack north of the trestle have been removed — has the crack cracked more? Possibly
- standing by an empty bench nearing franklin, walking past it to another bluff edge and another open view of the river and the other side
- sliding bench: empty
- my shadow: sturdy, strong, moving fast
- after the run, walking back through the grass, kicking up dead leaves and delighting in their crunchiness
Listened to the last part of the Invisibilia episode that I mentioned yesterday. According to the neuroscientists, there is no thing in our body that doesn’t change over the course of our lifetime, even our brain cells are transformed. I need to listen to it again; I was distracted.
3 hours later:
“Neurons don’t die and get replaced, but the atoms that make them up are constantly turning over.”
memory: “each time we think about a memory, we corrupt it”
“we have this illusion of continuity”
Looked up “cell” on poems.com and found this great poem:
Always and Only from Material/ H.L Hix
A drop of water changes shape if it falls through an electric field
(the thunderstorm, say, that gave God material form
in Job, then in Lear trued troposphere to terror).
The drop takes the shape of a spindle (the same that turns,
in the myth of Er, on the knees of Necessity)
and sends out from tl1e positively-charged spindle-point
a slender filament of electrical force.
Or take your red blood cells, which in the blood itself
retain the shape of a dimpled disc, a spongy
rubber ball squeezed lightly between finger and thumb.
A little water, though, to thin that blood, and the cell
turns spherical; a little salt, and the entire
cell shrinks and puckers, grape into raisin.
Mysteries attend even membrane formation.
No pure liquid ever froths or foams. Something
must be dissolved or suspended, to sustain
the additional surface area, the passage
from smooth and taut to bubbled and subdivided.
I feel subdivided, denatured, quasi-solid.
I often fall through electrical fields. I can speak
only as I do: in fragments, of a continuum.
This last bit: I feel subdivided, denatured, quasi-solid./ I often fall through electrical fields. I can speak/ only as I do: in fragments, of a continuum.
Hix’s mention of the spindle reminds me of A.R. Ammons and garbage. I remember that he writes about the spindle early on — in relation to presocratic philosophers, I think? I’ll have to find the reference.
I always forget what denatured means: take away or alter the natural qualities of.
Do I feel subdivided, denatured? No, I don’t feel fragmented or altered, just unstable and never quite finished.,
This poem comes from a book that I might like to find: BORED IN ARCANE CURSIVE UNDER LODGEPOLE BARK
“H. L. Hix demonstrates a Thoreauvian burrowing of the mind—a burrowing of fifty poems—into fifty “seed sentences” from fifty “soil texts” from natural history. The poems burrow, too, into common yet rarified encounters with “the carcass of an elk,” or the sun which “contains all direction,” or the “breathing of Breathing” of a “fresh-brushed red-brown ribcage-rounded coat” of a horse. We readers are invited to burrow along with Hix, not unlike “generations of a beetle species” who can “migrate /deeper into a cave than any individual / could travel to get out.” The exploration yields glimpses of the mystic part and the elusive, mythic whole as well as a profound and sobering reflection of the human experience upon planet Earth.”