Usually, I wouldn’t post about a routine long run recovery day, but I decided to today because I want to archive a few things for future Sara. The most important thing: the Purkinje Tree. It’s an entoptic phenomenon (visual effect whose source is in the human eye itself — as opposed to optical illusions, whose source is in the visual system) in which a person perceives the shadow of their own blood vessels. Purkinje is for the Czech scientist who discovered them, tree is because the shadows look like branches of a tree (What is the Purkinje Tree?).
With my damaged/diminished cone cells can I see a Purkinje tree? Found a YouTube short with instructions and yes, I could see it, but not nearly as clearly as the image in the video. Mine was more web than tree.
I found out about this tree because I was googling, too broadly, about the inverted tree that was used to explain vision to elementary school kids when I was a kid in the early 80s. I was googling it because I’m working on a poem that includes some lines about trees leaving my macula, and my central vision turning from forest to meadow.
I found this fragment of a poem I started working on last year:
just as I started to type the fragment, I noticed movement outside my window: a rafter of turkeys! 6 wild turkeys walking through my front yard!
as the trees
within my
macula
disappear
my forest
fields and
meadows
pur KIN jee — pronunciation
I’m also interested in this tree because of a call for submissions from the journal 3 Sisters that I read yesterday:
For our second issue, 3 Sisters invites work in conversation with the ideas of branches, branching, and brachial systems. This includes but is not limited to work involving: trees, olive branches (reconciliations, peace offerings), fruit (pawpaw and others), roots, ramus, trunks, leaves, alternate timelines, futures, choice, bifurcation, trifurcation, tributaries, distributaries, contingencies, permutations, confluence, estuary, forking paths, sistering (a process in architecture, of adding additional beams to strengthen an existing structure), scaffolding, limbs/appendages, innervation, veins, bodily systems, plexus, breath, fractures, fractals, nudibranchs, seeds, germination, propagation, mutation, symbiosis, proliferation, decussation, divergence, inheritance, descendants, antecedents, and genealogy.
Call for Submissions / 3 Sisters
I love this call! I have several poems (in varying degrees of completion) that I can imagine fitting with this theme. I think I’ll try to use their language as inspiration for my poems. Submissions are due by October 15th. They’re open to lots of different types of writing. I’m thinking I might be able to create a visual art/hybrid piece in the form of my HOLE project. https://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/tarot
We accept work from all genres, including but not limited to fiction, non-fiction, poetry, art, mixed media, essay, video pieces, computational work, audio offerings, objects, and more. We are especially interested in hybrid works, work that falls in between genres, and pieces that are not easily categorized. We delight in art that is structurally unconventional, fragmentary, elliptical, or otherwise weird and surprising. As an online publication we are excited to showcase works that utilize the digital format in unique ways.
Fun!
In running-related news: it’s subluxation season. No big slides of my kneecaps, just slight shifts that make my tendons/ligaments angry. Today’s slide happened when I stepped off the top stair and turned in the upstairs hallway. My kneecap stuttered. About thirty minutes later, my right knee felt a little sore, a little stiff, a little swollen. No jerky, restless movement, no warning that my kneecap might shift. I had that I’m-walking-on-icy-sidewalk-and-might-fall-at-any-time feeling. A patellar subluxation is what ended my marathon dream in 2017. Back then, I had no idea what was happening or how to limit the damage. Now I do. I told Scott that I should write Careful! on one hand and Kneecap! on the other to remind me to be vigilant.