shovel
26 degrees
Winter storm warning today. Heavy, wet snow, up to 8 inches possible. It’s supposed to snow all day, but there was enough of a break for me to get outside and clear some of it away. In the middle of shoveling, it started snowing again, but now, less than hour later, it has stopped again — or, at least slowed.
This snow is the bad kind — not powdery or soft, but heavy and wet. Heart attack snow. Branch breaking snow. Power lines going down snow.
While I shoveled, I wore one of Scott’s mom’s winter coats and RJP’s Christmas present: a crocheted neck warmer, in light green with purple trim. So well made — very warm and comfortable!
No running today. My glute/hip pain is back. It aches sometimes when I sit for too long. I need to run 1.7 miles to reach my goal of 950 miles, but I have until Wednesday, so I won’t push it!
a few hours earlier
Looking out the window above my desk and watching the snow fall, I discovered this poem:
Origins/ Laura Ann Reed
Nowhere but in the occasional dream
can I know again
with certainty
those hills, the dead-end road,
the solace of so often walking—
with such little thought
as to where time was leading me—
to the placewhere the asphalt gave way
to stone, dust,
and an amber imbroglio of manzanita.
No longer fluent in my primal dialect,
the tones rising with the sap
of the blue eucalyptus, I can only recall
that I thought like a child.
And reasoning like a child, I thought
it best to keep secret
the certainty of my lovefor the aromatic leaves,
the strips of bark day by day
peeling back to exposethe radiant layers: a gesture
toward the desperation to be known.more time with the safari reading list
1 — an interview with Fanny Howe (FH) in the Kenyon Review (KR) / bewilderment, openness, fear, and secularizing belief
KR: But a tinker, a traveler, is often a searcher, and as you’ve said, lyric is searching for something that can’t be found. In one of your essays you describe a “poetics of bewilderment” which is very intriguing to me: “An enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.” To me that sounds like a frightening state of being. Not a little mess, but a big one! Is that frightening to you?
FH: I think it is frightening. Staying completely open to what might happen and trying not to prefigure what is coming at you is frightening. The imagination is in jeopardy. Belief is bold. There’s a philosopher I like called Gianni Vattimo and he’s written a book called Belief (he is a nihilist) and in it he talks about the secularization of belief and turns it into a positive event, being the collapse of hierarchical structure; and he says that Christ was attempting to secularize belief, to return it to the ground. And one of the terms he uses is infinite plurality, that the relations and contingencies that mark your movement through time are always taking place in ways that are outside judgment and imagination. That is sort of where I would like to stand, without being terrified. It involves an openness.
Fanny Howe Interview 2004
openness is anti-control
KR: Openness to. . . ?
FH: To . . . everything . . . it’s like seeing the future coming at you instead of yourself walking into the future. It’s a reversal of the time relationship, so that you have to welcome it because it’s approaching and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. That’s the best way I can describe it. It is definitely anticontrol.
currently watching
Scott and I are currently making our way through “Little House on the Prairie.” Last night’s episode was about Laura and Mary, and their sexist/idiot friend Carl, getting stuck on a runaway caboose. It was awesome, especially when Pa ripped some dude off of his horse so he could “borrow” a fresh horse to catch up to the train. As great as that episode was, it couldn’t compare to the one the night before in which Ma is trapped in the house, alone, with tetanus. She’s losing it — passing out in the rain, passing out on the floor — but still has enough wherewithal to heat up a big knife and cut out the infection before passing out again. Damn. This show is dark, and I love it.
Also watched: Die Hard as our Christmas movie, which was also excellent, and The Thursday Murder Club, with a fabulous cast.
And, started a great Poetry in America episode about Robert Pinsky’s poem “Shirt.”
bike: 20 minutes
basement
several hours later: Still snowing. Decided to do a quick bike ride before Scott took over the basement to record. Not much of a workout, but it felt good to move my legs and get my heart rate up a little. Finally started watching the new season of Wednesday — season 2. I can’t remember when it came out — last fall?