4.65 miles
ford overlook and back
63 degrees
Hot! Time to start running much earlier in the day! Yes, a return to morning running could be the next step in my efforts to regain some healthy discipline.
Earlier today I found another song to add to my “Remember to Forget” playlist — Forget Me Nots / Patrice Rushen, so I decided to listen to it while I ran for 9 minutes, then walked one. Midway through the playlist, “Forget Me Nots” came on and as I listened to it, I thought about Emily Dickinson’s “If recollecting were forgetting”. Listening to Elvis Costello’s “Veronica” about a woman with dementia, I thought about how the new name Scott came up with for present Sara, Sara this second, has a much different meaning when applied to someone who has no memory beyond the now.
10 Things
- flashes of bright green in my periphery as I ran by trees with new buds
- hot sun
- music coming from the grassy boulevard: people sitting in chairs, listening to music
- squirrels squawking at each other
- a loud thumping noise at the skate park
- someone in white sitting on the ledge looking over the river
- a biker in an orange shirt, biking very slowly over the ford bridge
- the voices of kids laughing and yelling on the playground
- a biker in a winter coat with a stocking cap and gloves on
- the desire path on the grassy boulevard is a mix of packed dirt, mud, roots, and greening grass
holes and grids and threads
The saga continues. I said to Scott earlier, after pushing my eyes to the limit with measuring 9/16th of an inch and attempting to cut straight slits and placing 84 pins 1/2 inch apart to create a grid, why I am so stubbornly committed to this project when it is to fiddly and challenging for my limited vision? I am not sure, but something in me won’t quit. I want to make a series of visual poems that use grids made out of thread and string and yarn and that require skills far beyond my ability (at least my ability right now) and that are exhausting and frustrating and take a lot of time. And, I WILL make it, dammit! I could use graph paper for the grid, but I want to use thread/string and have the lines be 3-dimensional. The thread/yard is partly as a connection to my fiber artist mom and my fiber artist daughter. The 3D is for the shadows and for what the floatinggrid boxes do to how we see/don’t see the words within them. I just finished my first attempt on placing the grid over Holes 3. I measured a 10×10 square over the words and then placed 21 pins on each of the 4 sides. Then I wound the thread around the pins to create the grid.
I really like this grid overlay, even as I recognize that I need to do more to it to make it make sense to a reader/viewer. The pins are difficult to work with on the thin cork board. They twist and bend out of place. What will I use for a different/the final version of this poem? I showed it to Scott and he suggested a frosted plexiglass layer with only the words of the poem visible. At least, I think that’s how he described it; I’m not quite understanding what he means. I’m wondering if encasing the words in a small dot (both a reference to the center dot of an Amsler grid AND xy coordinates on a graph) might work. One problem: I don’t want to remove the pins and draw the dot in, then have to re-string/pin the grid. I need a better solution for that!
I do like the elevated grid and the way you have to look through and around it to find the right word. I also like the thin thread that you almost can’t see. That’s how my vision often works: it’s not a solid wall of black, but the faint trace of something, sometimes feeling like a net or a screen that makes it harder to focus on anything. One more thing: when I ‘m reading, it does feel like each word or phrase is encase in a grid, with nothing outside of the grid in focus.
note: I’m warming to Scott’s plexiglass idea, even as I’m still not totally understanding what Scott means. What does the plexiglass do to the effect of the grid-thread? The focus on this poem is the graph-grid and the x = blur, y = almost coordinates.
It’s 5:38 and the sun is streaming in my front room studio. I’m waiting for it to hit my grid poem, and hoping it leads to cool grid shadows!
It’s 6:38 pm and some shadows have finally arrived! I asked Scott to take the picture because I wasn’t sure I could capture it effectively.
At first I didn’t notice the pin shadows, I just thought the pins had become twisted out of shape. But no — the pins are fine; it’s their shadows that are all askew. Nice!
Delighted by the result, I decided to take my own picture:
