March: Ritual / Time

Partly inspired by reading JJJJJerome Ellis’ Aster of Ceremonies, I began the month wanting to focus on circumambulation and ritual and ceremony. But one of the books I wanted to read closely (CA Conrad’s ecodeviance) was not available yet, and it was too cold and my back was too sore for me to run the loop that I wanted to base the ceremony on. So I wandered a bit, and started also studying time.

This was the initial plan:

I’m thinking about creating another National Park-like unigrid pamphlet for the Franklin-Ford loop. Like the Mt. Tamalpais poem, it would have particular spots on the loop (the poem has 10) where you stop and chant. In the poem, you chant Buddhist prayers, but in my pamphlet, I’m tentatively thinking you will chant some of my favorite poetry lines — or lines I write (inspired by JJJJJerome Ellis and their prayers to their Stutter in Aster of Ceremonies). My lines would be about my blind spot. I’m also thinking about creating somatic rituals related to these spaces — I’m using CA Conrad as inspiration for them. Yesterday I requested their book, Ecodeviance: (soma) tics for the future wilderness from my local library.

log entry on 5 march 2025

On 8 march I watched the Rocky Horror scene in Fame, heard “Time Warp,” and decided I wanted to make a time playlist.

Doin’ Time Playlist

  1. Doin’ Time/ Lana Del Ray
  2. Time After Time/ Cyndi Lauper
  3. Too Much Time on My Hands/ Styx
  4. Time of the Season/ The Zombies
  5. Season of Love/ Rent
  6. Hazy Shade of Winter/ The Bangles
  7. right where you left me/ Taylor Swift
  8. Timebomb/ Beck
  9. Sign of the Times/ Harry Styles
  10. Silver Springs/ Fleetwood Mac
  11. Time/ Pink Floyd
  12. Time to Pretend/ MGMT
  13. Time Machine/ WILLOW
  14. Hard Times/ Paramore
  15. One Last Time/ Ariana Grande
  16. No Time to Die/ Billie Eilish
  17. Rocket Man/ Elton John
  18. Out of Time/ The Weeknd
  19. About Damn Time/ Lizzo
  20. The Longest Time/ Billy Joel
  21. TIme in a Bottle/ Jim Croce
  22. Sour TImes/ Portishead
  23. Time Out of Mind/ Steely Dan
  24. Time Moves Slow/ BADBADNOTGOOD
  25. Time Warp/ Rocky Horror Picture Show
  26. Closing Time/ Semisonic
  27. Once in a Lifetime/ Talking Heads
  28. Time/ David Bowie
  29. Time Stand Still/ Rush
  30. Older/ They Might Be Giants
  31. Good Times/ Chic
  32. Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is/ Chicago
  33. A Sumer Wasting/ Belle and Sebastian
  34. Suspended in Time/ Olivia Newton-John
  35. The Circle Game/ Joni Mitchell
  36. Sunrise, Sunset/ Fidler on the Roof
  37. Twilight/ ELO
  38. Reelin’ in the Years/ Steely Dan
  39. It Was a Very Good Year/ Frank Sinatra
  40. Night and Day/ Frank Sinatra
  41. Playing for Time (Dark Mix)/ Peter Gabriel
  42. A Wonderful Day in a One-Sided World/ Peter Gabriel
  43. Time Passages/ Al Steward
  44. What Time Is It?/ Spin Doctors
  45. Back In Time/ Huey Lewis and the News
  46. Clocks/ Coldplay
  47. Time Song/ The Kinks
  48. This Is It/ One Day at a Time
  49. No Time/ The Guess Who
  50. What Time is It/ HSM 2
  51. Watching the Wheels/ John Legend
  52. 9 to 5/ Dolly Parton
  53. Wheel in the Sky/ Journey
  54. The Best of Times/ Styx
  55. Sumemrtime/ Ella Fitzgerald
  56. Fly Like an Eagle/ Steve Miller Band
  57. The Windmills of Your Mind/ Mel Tormé

Time as oppressive — too much of it. Looping, repeating, returning, wheeling, slipping, warping. Being stuck in it, frozen, suspended. Seasons. A period — an era, the present moment. A duration, a measurement. Something to move through: slow, fast, one day at a time. The end, reached now or marching towards. Good times, bad times. Move slow, fast. On the clock, off the clock. A waste of/wasting/wasted. Telling, keeping, spending, giving.

rituals

  • CA Conrad and the extreme present (5 march)
  • Fame (the movie) and trying to catch yourself in the act of doing something — the mechanics of it, the patterns, the details (6 march)
  • Forrest Gander’s circumambulation and poetry lines to chant in the ceremony (10 march)
  • orbiting and blind spot (13 march)
  • ED and elemental rust (14 march)
  • a Schuyler chant, the bells!, and a possible form: psalm, praise, litany, prayer? (15 march)
  • lines from Dart/AO, converted into my 3/2 form, AO and Cole Swensen on moving/walking — as we move through a place, it moves through us (17 march)
  • Ellis’ Stutter as a clearing, helpful definitions of blind spot (19 march)
  • running as a way to achieve CA Conrad’s extreme present (26 march)
  • a list poem to inspire me (27 march)
  • a song as list (28 march)

time

  • Here’s some time lines I’d like to remember: The turning of the globe is not so real to us/As the seasons turning and the days that rise out of early gray/—The world is all cut-outs then—and slip or step steadily down/The slopes of our lives where the emotions and needs sprout. (Hymn to Life/ James Schuyler) (9 march)
  • “Time” / The Kinks (11 march)
  • metronomes (12 march — see also 10 june 2024, 29 aug 2024)
  • erosion needing time and pressure; stuck in a moment unable to get out vs. suspended in time and not wanting to leave; Mary Ruefle’s pause, Emily Dickinson’s hesitation, JJJJJerome Ellis’ Stutter; a time slip, a shift; Mary Oliver’s ordinary and eternal time (12 march)
  • “Once in a Lifetime”/ Talking Heads — water and time (17 march)
  • podcast with Jenny Odell on time + how I tell time by the gorge (18 march)
  • getting inside of the beat experiment, 1: chanting in triples, listening to a metronome, listening to music (21 march)
  • getting inside of the beat experiment, 2 (24 march)
  • a circles/cycles, loops playlist — The Wheeling Life (25 march)

notes from my Plague Notebook

4 march: new geographies / both solid and unstable / sandstone and limestone / a break, a rupture, a plank of reason broke, a going under — not drowning but a diving / disorientation / immersion / submersion / soaked / cracks / erosion / wearing away / not silence but absence / not a darkness but a nothingness /

5 march: a sacred ritual of noticing and doing / circuit / circles / circumstance

6 march: part of a ritual — chant one of my poem-openers that also fit the form: a shadow/crosses

7 march: wordplay with OR (author ardor arbor / orchard porphyrion interiors / forgive mortal organs)

9 march: another opener — a wind passes through

10 march: in the name of the bee

11 march: wind/the old 8 day clock and listen to it tick (Things to Do in the Kitchen/ Miriam Sorkin) / see 7 april 2021 and 16 august 2021 (time as burden) / unhitched / geologic time

12 march: a circumambulation specific to my vision / stuck in a moment / twilight = before gray, before all color is gone / leaking / crumbling / slow steady abrupt / the strangeness of deterioration / spreading – closing in / widening – narrowing

14 march: the bells chiming signals the start of the ceremony / see D Lasky’s red experiment in Imaginary Syllabus — orange instead of red?

17 march: in addition to the bells, another sound that could start the ceremony: creaking trees / Sarah Manguso and ongoingness / ceasing – seizing – stopping

spots made sacred:

  • tunnel of trees
  • welcoming oaks
  • tuning fork tree
  • ancient boulder with stones stacked
  • under the lake street bridge
  • above the rowing club
  • behind the sliding bench
  • trestle
  • the road down to the east flats
  • eeker dam
  • the top of the hill — up from under marshall bridge
  • shadow falls
  • monument
  • the bells of st. thomas
  • above the slanted paved trail — the flat dirt trail
  • unmarked overlook
  • ford bridge
  • steep trail down to locks and dam no. 1
  • turkey hollow
  • double bridge
  • bench above the edge of the world
  • the ravine at 44th
  • the curved retaining wall at the WPA steps at the edge of the parking lot
  • the ravine at 42nd
  • folwell bench
  • 38th street steps
  • the boulder that looks like an arm chair
  • above the oak savanna

elements

  • water — river, falls, springs, seeps
  • stone — limestone, shale, sandstone, asphalt, concrete, riprap
  • wind
  • bridges
  • locks and dams
  • shadows
  • oaks
  • dirt
  • bells
  • benches
  • fences
  • cracks, fissures, sinkholes
  • ravines
  • hills
  • lamp posts
  • steps
  • road
  • birds
  • roller skiers, walkers, bikers, runners
  • cars
  • clouds
  • airplanes
  • voices
  • rowers
  • port-a-potties
  • parking lots
  • crosswalks
  • ghost bikes, flowers, plaques
  • overlooks

18 march: blind spot / mystery / possibility / ruins / decay / not darkness, not nothing, but anything — gray, purple / Jenny Odell and the gardening of time / not chronos but kairos time

chronos

quantity
everyday
conveyer belt
world as resources

kairos

quality
interrupts daily life
the big things that happen
what we remember
points to unpredictability

to be timeless is to be lifeless is to lack a history and humanity

What is time to a flower? water, temperature, sunlight

Through running, exposing myself to the elements outside, grounding me in place, developing a relationship with wind, snow, trails, witnessing the nearly invisible labor, the ways of responding to the world.

time = in 5 years, your central vision will be gone
erosion and rewilding, both an abundance and a stripping away

19 march: able to hold all contradictions / this moment of ruin / worn down to abstract form /

20 march: little 3/2 form fitting poems: split open/worn down // reshaped: to/be un // done is to/become // something else /// I go to/the gorge // to witness/nothing // happening /// 3 form fitting poems: 12000 / years ago / water from / melting ice / began to / wear down sand / stone to form / a gorge /// 30 years / ago cone / cells from my / macula / began to / malfunction / to form a / blind spot /// a litany — list — poem of gorge details/mechanics (verbs not nouns, things done

21 march: litany of body parts? / condensing, wearing away — Lorine Niedecker / desire a remedy for excess, restlessness

27 march: not cone cells eroding, but: dwindling, diminishing, disintegrating, dying

28 march: memorize and recite this line: praise the presence among us/ of the unfenced is // no one bright seizure (Rita Dove), not one explosion, but the flickers and flares of movement everywhere, however slight

other things to remember and return to, (re)discovered on 31 march

Time kept reminding me that I merely inhabit it, but it began reminding me more gently.

Ongoingness/ Sarah Manguso

Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.
(Let it Be Forgotten/ Sara Teasdale)

Losing track of time = revery (or ED’s reverie) = daydreaming / Haste vs. patience

Hurry/ Marie Howe

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store
and the gas station and the green market and
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,
as she runs along two or three steps behind me
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?
Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,
Honey I’m sorry I keep saying Hurry—
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

The illusion of speed is the belief that it saves time. It looks simple at first sight: finish soemthing in two hours instead of three, gain an hour. It’s an abstract calculation, though, done as if each hour of the day were like an hour on the clock, absolutely equal.

But haste and spped accelerate time, which passes more quickly, and two hours of hurry shorten a day. Every minute is torn apart by being segmented, stuffed to bursting. You can pile a mountain of things into an hour. Days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer, because yo uhave allowed every hour,e very minute, every second to breathe, to deepend, instead of filling them up by straining the joints.

Philosophy of Walking/ Frédéric Gros