jan 31, 2020 / 1.5 miles / basement
The start of my project on my UN \\ DISCIPLINED site, How to be!
For the past month, I’ve been thinking about all I’ve learned through keeping this log and wondering how (or if) to put it into more direct conversation with my past academic work on being undisciplined, breaking bad habits, virtue ethics, troublemaking, and moral selfhood. I guess I’m afraid that if I try, I’ll get sucked back into talking/writing/acting like my former academic over-thinking self. I’m also afraid I will spend all of my time and energy trying to contextualize /justify/ theorize what I’m doing here and won’t have any time or space or energy left to continue actually doing the work I want to be doing.
Since 2020, I’ve been putting ideas from my academic/intellectual training in ethics, philosophy, religion, feminist theory, queer theory next to poems and thoughts from poetry people. Thankfully, I am not getting sucked back into being my former over-contextualizing/analyzing academic self. I’ve amassed quite a lot of stuff that I’ve loosely compiled into various pages. Someday I’ll shape it into something more…maybe. I imagine it as a big collection — a book? — of my influences.
jan 31, 2020 / 1.5 miles / basement
In my on this day post for jan 30th, I mentioned Livingstone too.
I’m enjoying Livingstone’s lecture. I’m not necessarily learning anything new, but it’s reinforcing thoughts I already had or ideas that I had encountered elsewhere. Maybe it’s the academic in me, but I like to have my ideas confirmed by others, especially by those who have devoted themselves to studying vision and the brain. After discussing how “your visual system has higher acuity in the center of gaze” (acuity = sharper, finer detail), she says:
But your peripheral vision isn’t bad, it’s just different. Your peripheral vision is designed to see big blurry things; your central vision is designed to see small detailed things and actually cannot see big blurry things as well as your peripheral vision. So there’s a trade-off.
It’s the forest from the trees again!
It feels like a sign — to work on some peripheral poems — maybe little flashes? Brief moments loosely captured in my running rhythm form?