bike: 30 minutes run: 3 miles outside temp: feels like -13
Thought briefly about going outside for a run then remembered if I stayed inside I could bike and watch more of The Gorge, which I did. I have 30 minutes left. Lots of action and jump scares and secret military operations and old film reels that reveal science experiments gone wrong and evil private corporations forming unbeatable mutant armies and chemical leaks and spiders with human skulls and more spent ammo than seems possible and . . . . I’m not sure how I feel about it all yet. One thing: earlier, when they first entered the gorge, the poet-sniper-main character (Levi) quoted T.S. Eliot and “This is how the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” This sure sounds like a bang. Two possibilities: 1. he nods to the line and has some witty quip about it, like if we’re going to end, let’s do it with a bang, not a whimper (ugh!) or 2. a much quieter conclusion, where they are not destroyed and the gorge is not destroyed evil is only slightly contained and will continue to slowly simmer and spread. Will Levi finally read Drassa his poem about her? Will he quote some other poetry? Will the movie end in poetry instead of war?
While I ran, I listened to an amazing podcast with a poet I just happened to write about yesterday: Rebecca Lindenberg. Wow! What an amazing conversation.
about how acceptance and resistance co-existfor her as she lives with chronic illness (type 1 diabetes)
I mean, what I feel is not acceptance. I did use that word earlier, but I don’t think that that is what I feel. I think what I feel is persistence more than anything.
And I feel ongoingness and I feel hope. . . . I don’t experience hope as a passive feeling, like hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul, I’m like, maybe, but you have to feed it and change the food in its cage and take it out and let it fly. . . . I understand hope as a series of acts of meaningful devotion. And I feel that because so much of the maintenace of a diabetic body is routines that you do every single day, if I think of them as small rituals instead of routines, then it doesn’t feel like I’m obeying my disease.
Persistence, ongoingness, the practice of hope, a series of (small) acts of meaningful devotion. I feel these things in me as I navigate diminished vision and potential blindness.
the purple hour
4:05 am / dining room
Tried to sit down and think about Monica Ong’s “Lavender Insomnia” but was too restless, agitated — not from thoughts, but a buzzing left leg.
11:10 am / front room
the violet hour (twilight)
T.S. Eliot’s violet hour in Waste Land: At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Civil twilight = dim but artificial light is not needed, bright stars are visible = violet
Nautical twilight = dimmer, sailors can use stars to navigate horizon, you need artificial light to do things = plum?
Astronomical twilight = almost full darkness, dark enough to see galaxies, nebulas = eggplant
I’m still thinking about T.S. Eliot and “The Hollow Men.” Hollow is such a great word. I didn’t realize T.S. Eliot lived until 1865, and long enough for there to be a recording of him reading it. Those last lines!
bike: 30 minutes run: 3.05 miles outside temp: -1 degree / feels like -18
Public schools were canceled today because of the cold. I don’t have a kid in public school anymore (hooray!) but I do rehearse at a high school on Tuesday nights for community band. When schools are closed band is canceled. Bummer.
I have run when it felt like 20 below, but 18 below was too cold for me today. Also, I figured out something I wanted to watch while I was biking: The Gorge. There is very little talking in it; it’s almost all visual. Luckily, I had the audio description on. I think I would have missed most of the movie without it. What a relief, for my eyes and brain, to hear the descriptions. About 20 or 30 minutes in, the movie was dragging and I wondered if I could keep watching it. Then bam, a suprise! I was done with my bike so I stopped, but I’m looking forward to watching more of it now. The lead actor is a poet and writes every day. Will he ever mention one of his favorite poets, or quote a line from them? In one of the last scenes I watched before I stopped, he told the other main character that he was writing a poem about her. He would only give her the tentative title: She collapsed the night (I think it was collapsed, but it could have been collapses?). added, 20 feb 2025: Finished the movie and Levi’s poem is mentioned, but Eliot’s line is not — an unsatisfying ending.
I started the run with a podcast, but moved to my energy playlist again. Listened to a few rock songs with electric guitar and thought: electric purple. Then, purple sparking on the surface or on the underside of the surface shimmering shaking distorting and dis or mis or strangely coloring my perception of the world. Purple as energetic electric chemical reactions with ganglion cells. Then I heard another song — why can’t I remember which song? — with a great beat that I was able to get inside of: feet, the beat of the song, the speed of the treadmill, a chorus in tight unison. Could this be the purple part of the beat?
During my morning poem-a-day practice, I read this:
The title is from [Immanuel] Kant’s description of reason, and I want to pry what’s moving and plaintive about it apart from what’s world-ending. Not because I care about Kant but because, from the standpoint of reason, genocide can be justified.
This explanation brings me back to my first year of grad school — fall 1996, Claremont, CA — in a class on Horkheimer and Adorno and critical theory. I remember learning about the limits of reason and the violence of modernity and the hypocrisy of claims for freedom and democracy by those in power.
plum = part of the rose family, prunes when dried, something sweet — a plum job, a plum deal, plummy (adj)
plumb = pipes/plumbing, plumbum (Latin/lead), lead weight attached to line — used to indicate vertical direction, vertically (adj), absolutely — plumb wrong / exactly — plumb in the middle (adv), plumb the depths (v)
plump = having a full rounded form (adj), dropping placing or sinking suddenly and heavily — they plumped down (v), making or becoming plump — plumping a pillow (v)
a plum assignment plumb out of luck plump up an ego
the stain of love is upon the world! Yellow, yellow, yellow it eats into the leaves, smears with saffron the horned branches that lean heavily against a smooth purple sky! There is no light only a honey-thick stain that drips from leaf to leaf and limb to limb spoiling the colors of the whole world—
you far off there under the wine-red selvage of the west!
Yellow and purple. Reminds me, again, of Robin Wall Kimmerer and asters and goldenrods!
If a fountain could jet bouquets of chrome yellow in dazzling arches of chrysanthemum fireworks, that would be Canada Goldenrod. Each three-foot stem is a geyser of tiny gold daisies, ladylike in miniature, exuberant en masse. Where the soil is damp enough, they stand side by side with their perfect counterpart, New England Asters. Not the pale domesticates of the perennial border, the weak sauce of lavender or sky blue, but full-on royal purple that would make a violet shrink. The daisylike fringe of purple petals surrounds a disc as bright as the sun at high noon, a golden-orange pool, just a tantalizing shade darker than the surrounding goldenrod. Alone, each is a botanical superlative. Together, the visual effect is stunning.
Why do they sand beside each other when they could grow alone? Why this particular pair?
Color perception in humans relies on banks of specialized receptor cells, the rods and cones in the retina. The job of the cone cells is to absorb light of different wave lengths and pass it on to the brain’s visual cortex, where it can be interpreted. The visible light spectrum, the rainbow of colors, is broad, so the most effective means of discerning color is not one generalized jack-of-all-trades cone cell, but rather an array of specialists, each perfectly tuned to absorb certain wavelengths. The human eye has three kinds. One type excels at detecting red and associated wavelengths. One is tuned to blue. The other optimally perceives light of two colors: purple and yellow.
The human eye is superbly equipped to detect these colors and send a signal pulsing to the brain. This doesn’t explain why I perceive them as beautiful, but it does explain why that combination gets my undivided attention. I asked my artist buddies about the power of purple and gold, and they sent me right to the color wheel: these two are complementary colors, as different in nature as could be. In composing a palette, putting them together makes each more vivid: In an 1890 treatise on color perception, Goethe, who was both a scientist and a poet, wrote that “the colors diametrically opposed to each other . . . are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye.” Purple and yellow are a reciprocal pair. Our eyes are so sensitive to these wavelengths that the cones can get oversaturated and the stimulus pours over onto the other cells.
Goldenrod and asters appear very similarly to bee eyes and human eyes. We both think they’re beautiful. Their striking contrast when they grow together makes them the most attractive target in the whol emeadow, a beacon for bee.s Growing together, both receive more pollinator visits than they would if they were growing alone.
Braiding Sweetgrass / Robin Wall Kimmerer
3:06 / dining room / 18 feb
the rattle of the vent as the warm air is forced through it
my dark reflection on the stainless steel dishwasher door, caused by the dim string of lights in the front room cast on me as I stood on the rug in the dining room — silvery purple
a creaking house, settling after the heat stopped
a hiss in my head
what are the origins of magenta? why were the vikings purple and gold?
purplish blue = indigo
reddish purple = magenta, purplish red = fuchsia
the crab apple trees and their fuchsia funnels (Ada Limón)
Magenta is named after a town in Italy (Magenta) and a bloody battle for independence in 1859
10:00 am / front room
Searching for magenta on poetryfoundation.org, I found some very cool looking exercises from Rebecca Lindenberg about perception, including one using Ezra Pound’s ideogram. Lindenberg offers this example:
CHERRY FLAMINGO ROSE IRON RUST
Say the students choose, for example, yellow. It is likely they will start by suggesting, again, the usual concrete items we associate with that color—lemons, bananas, the sun, corn on the cob, sunflowers. After they’ve exhausted those, it’s important to keep asking—what else is yellow? Taxis, rubber duckies, corn tortillas, rain slickers, caution tape, butter. Then, onion skins, sticky notes, school buses, yield signs, egg yolks, urine, grapefruit rinds, fog—and now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re not talking so much about what we think of as yellow, we’re talking about what we actually see as yellow.
Once the board or screen is full of things we see as yellow, it’s worth pausing to remind students that we aren’t just making a picture of yellow. What the class chooses will suggest something about yellow—but it doesn’t have to be everything there is to say about yellow. It doesn’t have to be comprehensive, just visceral, evoking “yellow-ness” (or “teal-ness” or “tan-ness”). Then, another vote. Or rather, a few rounds, in which each student gets two votes, until you narrow it down to the final four. And ka-pow! You’ve made an ideogram.
Lindenberg suggests a homework assignment: pick a color, brainstorm at least 25 things related to the color, narrow it down to four, write a paragraph of explanation. I think I’ll try this with purple — just one, or a series of purple moods?!
note: I’m resisting the inclination to dig deep into articles/essays/posts about Pound and imagism. I might (will) get lost in theories and concepts and schools and jargon and devote all my time to understanding and knowing instead of making and feeling. That’s Dr. Sara’s style, not mine!
updated a few hours later: Watched about 20 more minutes of The Gorge. In one scene they’re walking through a yellow fog and into a purple wood. I used my phone to take a picture. Don’t think it quite captures the intense colors.
yellow into purple
In this scene, yellow and purple are used to evoke a hellscape. The half-dead skeletons with trees growing out of them are referred to as hollow men, which is a reference to T.S. Eliot’s poem. The poem keeps coming up; I think I should read it. Wow — just read it. Here’s a bit from the middle and the last lines, which Levi, one of the main characters, recites as they walk in purple (violet) air.
Shape without form, shade without colour. Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom Remember us—if at all—not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams In death’s dream kingdom These do not appear: There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging And voices are In the wind’s singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star.
—
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
bike: 25 minutes run: 3 miles outside temp: 1 degree/ feels like -7
Too cold for me today. Watched some races while I biked — I need to find a good movie or show!, listened to “Energy” while I ran. I stopped at 15 minutes for a few seconds, but when a good song came on — I can’t remember what — I decided to start running again. Then I kept going until I hit 30 minutes. Nice! My small victory for the day.
During the first half of the run I couldn’t quite lock into a rhythm. My feet seemed slightly off with the belt; I was on the edge of the beat. When I made the treadmill just a little faster, I entered the beat. I could barely hear my feet striking and I couldn’t feel the belt moving. Very cool. It felt similar to when I’ve locked in with the metronome. The other thing I remember is looking up at the dark window with the reflection of the light — the one that I’ve written about several times before, describing it as looking like an inverted moon on lake superior — and thinking it didn’t look like the moon anymore. I remembered why: Scott changed the light bulb from a round one to a rectangle one. It’s brighter too. My moon is gone. Bummer.
the purple hour
3:10 am / bedroom Full moon bright, spied through the dark slats of the blinds Slanted square of window with blinds cast in the carpet
Shadow of the blinds cast on McPherson* forearm: stripes Only seen in dim light; the light of this iPad erases it
*a typo — I decided to keep it in here. I don’t remember what I was trying to write that would have been autocorrected to McPherson. Was it just a slip of my fingers as I typed my?
(written 11 feb, 9:30 am) I remember the moon early this morning. Wow! So bright through the blinds. I wanted to walk over to the window and peek through the slats but I was afraid that it would wake Delia the dog, asleep on the couch. It was so bright that even from the floor with the blinds closed all the way, I could see it if I tilted my head just right.
I turned down the brightness of the iPad as much as I could, but it still made the room too bright. Right after I put my iPad away, the shadows were gone. I wondered if clouds were covering the moon. But once my eyes adjusted, the shadows were back.
We inherited these blinds from the old owner of this house. They let light in even when fully closed. How dark would it be in this room if we had different (better?) blinds? How much longer would it take my eyes to adjust to (grow accustomed to?) the dark?
I think these blinds, with their gaps, create a dark that has some light: purple light.
purple thoughts/stories
violet: the very shortest spectral wavelength humans can see to re-create the color purple requires excess: shellfish, lichen
Reading about mauve in The Secret Lives of Colors, I was reminded of the connection between old woman and purple. (I recall thinking about the connection as I ran the other day when the Red Hat Ladies with their purple clothes popped into my head.)
Soon enough, however, mauve went into that most Victorian of things: a decline. Overconsumption, as well as the continuing loyalty of an older generation, meant that the color soon became shorthand for a particular kind o faging lady.
The Secret Lives of Colors / Kassia St. Clair (170)
Then I thought about the final stanza of a poem (this whole poem is amazing, btw). I gathered for this blog a few years ago:
It’s a small deposit, but I’m putting my faith in reincarnation. I need to believe in the sweetness of one righteous image, in Bill Parcells trapped in the body of a teacup poodle, as any despised thing, forced to yap away his next life staked to a clothesline pole or doing hard time on a rich old matron’s lap, dyed lilac to match her outfit. I want to live there someday, across that street, and listen to him. Yap, yap, yap. (I Heart Your Dog’s Heart/ Erin Belieu)
Which led to another random thought about a recent (2019?) hair trend: lavender gray. Looking at some of the pictures I wonder if I could pull this look off — I already have the gray.
The Color Purple
Inspired by my study of purple, I decided to reread Alice Walker’s The Color Purple which I read and wrote about in my masters’ coursework. I was really into Walker and Morrison and the link between women’s spirituality and sexual pleasure. I haven’t read it since then — 25 years ago. So far — 40 pages in — I’m enjoying it. Why is it called The Color Purple? I had to look it up, because I’ve forgotten. There are plenty of answers, here’s one:
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.
Shug Avery in The Color Purple/ Alice Walker
A helpful source: Unearth the Root of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. It describes the importance of nature and flowers to Walker’s vision of spirituality. This reminds me of Walker’s wonderful essay, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens.” Of course, I can’t find my copy of it right now. I’ll have to keep searching. The article also discusses the importance of horticulture for Black Americans and their African ancestors. I’m reminded of JJJJJerome Ellis’ Aster of Ceremony and their project of researching, naming, invoking the Plants that grew in the area where their enslaved ancestors “ran away”. A big chunk of the book is a Benediction, including the names of these plants, printed in purple. I’ve been reluctant to read it because it looked overwhelming with my bad eyes, but now I want to try. I think it will be another version of “The Purple Hour.”
update, a few minutes later: I started to read this section with my eyes, but it was difficult. I looked it up and discovered that my local library has the audio book. I requested it! A 2 week wait, but hopefully sooner. I’ll start on this whenl I can read the audiobook along with the paper book.
Woke up this morning to snow! Big flakes floating down. I watched them through the kitchen door. Beautiful. Within a few minutes, more flakes, faster, smaller. I sat in the arm chair inherited from Scott’s mom and watched the snow fall as I drank my coffee. A great way to start the day. Several hours later, when the snow had almost stopped, I layered up and went outside to shovel. Soft, fluffy snow, very easy to shovel. I listened to Season 2, Episode 3 of the Severance podcast. There was some wind, but it wasn’t too cold.
an image: shoveling in the back, I watched as a small, dark form swirled and skittered. It moved like a little bird. Was it? No, a leaf. Such a strange sight, watching a leaf that looked alive and not just animated by wind.
After sitting around all day — reading, napping, tracking the runners in the Black Canyon 100k Ultra, doing a FaceTime with FWA — I decided I needed to move. Went to the basement and biked. Then moved over to the treadmill and ran. Watched a few indoor track races during the bike, listened to the rest of the Severance podcast while I ran. That third episode of Severance — woah! The final minutes really freaked me out and triggered a memory from when I passed out last Christmas. Intense.
the purple hour
Woke up with very restless legs at 2:38 am. Too restless to sit and write anything. All I have in my notes is: more restlessness — shaking my legs
Low vision yoga in the morning. Biking and running in the evening: 8 pm. This has to be one of the latest runs I’ve ever done. Will it help my sleep and restlessness? Make them worse? Do nothing? I’ll report back tomorrow.
While I biked I watched an old 70.3 triathlon race. While I ran, I listened to the Energy playlist: Pump Up the Jam, Ballroom Blitz, Hip to be Square. During the bike, my left knee occasionally hurt, which sometimes happens. After the run, my lower back was a bit sore. Should I do something about my back, like take a break or get it checked out?
Anything else I remember? The shadows my swinging arms made. How warm I felt after just a few minutes on the bike. A parched throat. Feeling relaxed and happy to be moving inside.
purple hour
Woke up at 2 am last night. Unlike the night before, when my legs were so restless that I had to shake them for a few minutes, I felt calm and chill and unbothered by being up. Instead of going downstairs to sit at the dining room table, I bounced gently on my exercise ball in the bedroom. Here’s what I wrote:
Bedroom in low light — a quiet still purple, light and dark
Quiet? Silent heavy and light soft and thick
A fan — not white noise but purple noise the agitation of stirring air
A steady hum to cover other noises and to counter the stiff stuck frozen nature of sleep when we slow to almost a stop unable to move in sleep
A world not lacking color but possessing an abundance of purple
purpled pulsing heart pumping purple blood
steady relaxed rocking on my feels (a type: heels, but I like feels, so I’ll keep it!)
cracking spine small purple sparks
I typed up my notes on my iPad. I love the typo: rocking on my feels.
Just now, reading through these notes I thought, is purple noise a thing? Looked it up and, yes it is! It’s used in sound engineering and sound/color therapy and for help with sleep. Here’s a helpful video highlighting sound colors:
I appreciate the descriptions and examples in this video, even if I can’t quite understand all of it. I wonder — what color of noise was I hearing in my bedroom? The sound was produced by a fan. Maybe I’ll ask Scott to analyze it — he loves sound production/engineering. I don’t think it’s purple noise; purple noise seems too high. Listening to a purple noise album on Apple Music, I’m a little agitated.
Speaking of color noise — I wonder what color the wind howling through the gaps in screen and front door is?
25 minute bike ride 1.5 mile run basement outside: 2 degrees / feels like -8 dew point: -6
No running outside for me today. Earlier this morning, when I would have gone out for a run, it felt like -21. Brrrr. I did a short bike and a run in the basement. I don’t remember noticing or thinking about much. One thought: I wonder where the mouse who lives down here is right now? This morning, Scott discovered evidence that it had made its way upstairs: 3 pebbles of poop on the cutting board. Gross!
Watched a T 100 triathlon race while I biked and Taylor Swift’s “Reputation” as I ran.
Here’s a poem I found about Emily Dickinson yesterday:
I will tell you why she rarely ventured from her house. It happened like this:
One day she took the train to Boston, made her way to the darkened room, put her name down in cursive script and waited her turn.
When they read her name aloud she made her way to the stage straightened the papers in her hands — pages and envelopes, the backs of grocery bills, she closed her eyes for a minute, took a breath, and began.
From her mouth perfect words exploded, intact formulas of light and darkness. She dared to rhyme with words like cochineal and described the skies like diadem. Obscurely worded incantations filled the room with an alchemy that made the very molecules quake.
The solitary words she handled in her upstairs room with keen precision came rumbling out to make the electric lights flicker.
40 members of the audience were treated for hypertension. 20 year old dark haired beauties found their heads had turned a Moses White.
Her second poem erased the memory of every cellphone in the nightclub, and by the fourth line of the sixth verse the grandmother in the upstairs apartment had been cured of her rheumatism.
The papers reported the power outages. The area hospitals taxed their emergency generators and sirens were heard to wail through the night.
Quietly she made her way to the exit, walked to the terminal and rode back to Amherst.
She never left her room again and never read such syllables aloud.
This afternoon, I decided to do my first indoor bike ride of the season. Not because it’s too cold or because it’s snowing, but because I’ve run 3 days in a row and I wanted to bike instead. Cross-training in the winter isn’t nearly as fun as it is in the summer. Maybe this year, I’ll actually try some winter-specific activities, like snow-shoeing or ice-skating. I re-watched part of the women’s triathlon from the 2016 Rio Olympics. Love that race. I’ve already written about it back in 2017.
Another reason I didn’t run this morning was because, Scott and I took RJP to the post office to renew her passport. Between the lack of music, the surly workers, the flickering light, and the clueless customers, it was a vibe. (am I using that right?) At first, I thought the woman behind the counter was just rude, but when she was nice to us because we had our shit together, I realized that it was more that she didn’t suffer fools — like the woman who didn’t make an appointment, or the woman who could have but didn’t fill out her paperwork ahead of time and didn’t have her old passport or remember the number for it.
Another random thing for future Sara to remember: Pointing at some stamps, I thought Scott said, I like these Leonard Nimoy ones, but what he actually said was, I like these Lunar New Year ones.
Today, I’ve been trying to work on the “and’ section of my Haunts poem, but I’ve been a little stuck. This section is about open space and possibility and the place between beats and breaths and foot strikes. It’s about the gorge as a container holding everything and holding Nothing (air, the void, mystery). It’s about thresholds and room to move/breathe/be and the space created from absence (of land, words, functional cone cells, mothers). Wow, just typing up this summary has given me some ideas!
Before I started writing this but after my workout, I got up from my chair and my right kneecap missed the groove and slipped out hard. So hard that I uncontrollably yelled, “God Dammit!” No pain and it went right back in, or I was able to pop it back in. But it was shocking — mentally and physically. My LCL or meniscus seem as reticent to walk as my brain does — a strange sentence to write: can you imagine ligaments feeling something independent of the brain? Now I’m nervous about when this might happen again. As is usually the case, I had absolutely no warning. I didn’t do anything abrupt or dramatic; I just stood up and turned. I’ll get over it in a few minutes and stop imagining different scenarios in my head when the kneecap suddenly slides and it hurts and I can’t get it back into place. For now, I’ll breathe and attempt to remember how happy I was to work out before my subluxation.
It’s raining today, and there’s a wind advisory. Decided to go to the basement and do a bike run combo. After pumping up the air in my tire — it is still leaking air even though I got new tires last spring — I found the SuperLeague e-tri championships. I’ve been watching SuperLeague while biking in the basement since it started — when? 2018? Then I ran for 22.5 minutes while I listened to a “If Books Could Kill” podcast and then a playlist.
I don’t remember thinking about much except for that I had to go to the bathroom. Scott and I have new euphemism for it: unfinished business. Anything else? I recall looking straight ahead at the water heater and I remember feeling like a badass when I increased my cadence to try and match the bikers I was watching.
Here’s a victory: I didn’t think at all about the text exchange I had with FWA about what “fun” or “interesting” or “non-music” classes he could take to fill up his pretty bare schedule for senior year. No double major or minors for him. Just music, which he’s very good at, but still . . . . I’m trying to let him figure out his own way, but it’s so hard to watch him make choices that seem foolish or short-sighted. Sigh. Parenting is hard; backing off is hard; trusting is hard. When I worry too much, I’ll go back and watch his recital from Sunday and remember how proud I am of him and that he can (and is) creating an exciting future for himself.
update: I didn’t need to worry; he figured out some great classes on his own: Japanese!, Environmental Geography, and Criminology.
before the bike and run
Yesterday was the poet, Tomas Tranströmer’s birthday. He would have been 92. I’ve posted a few poems from him on here before. While looking for “air” poems, I found this one. It’s an ekphrastic! Those ekphrastic poems keep appearing. Are they trying to encourage me to keep working on my ekphrastic project? I’d like to believe so. Anyway, here’s the Tranströmer poem I found:
It’s not a sheltered world. The noise begins over there, on the other side of the wall where the alehouse is with its laughter and quarrels, its rows of teeth, its tears, its chiming of clocks, and the psychotic brother-in-law, the murderer, in whose presence everyone feels fear.
The huge explosion and the emergency crew arriving late, boats showing off on the canals, money slipping down into pockets — the wrong man’s — ultimatum piled on the ultimatum, widemouthed red flowers who sweat reminds us of approaching war.
And then straight through the wall — from there — straight into the airy studio in the seconds that have got permission to live for centuries. Paintings that choose the name: “The Music Lesson” or ” A Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.” She is eight months pregnant, two hearts beating inside her. The wall behind her holds a crinkly map of Terra Incognita.
Just breathe. An unidentifiable blue fabric has been tacked to the chairs. Gold-headed tacks flew in with astronomical speed and stopped smack there as if there had always been stillness and nothing else.
The ears experience a buzz, perhaps it’s depth or perhaps height. It’s the pressure from the other side of the wall, the pressure that makes each fact float and makes the brushstroke firm.
Passing through walls hurts human beings, they get sick from it, but we have no choice. It’s all one world. Now to the walls. The walls are a part of you. One either knows that, or one doesn’t; but it’s the same for everyone except for small children. There aren’t any walls for them.
The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall. It is like a prayer to what is empty. And what is empty turns its face to us and whispers: “I am not empty, I am open.”
I love this poem and how it imagines the world outside of the painting and its relationship to the world inside of it. Starting with the first line: It’s not a sheltered world. The noise begins over there, on the other side of the wall . . . . That alehouse, that psychotic brother-in-law. The explosion, the money being dropped into the wrong man’s pocket. Then the airy studio and the seconds that have got permission to live for centuries — the differences between what we notice and try to remember and what we ignore or try to forget — what is worthy of attention, a painting, and what is not.
What is worth noticing in a poem describing a painting, and what is not? The Vermeer painting the poem is titled, “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter,” but there’s no mention of the letter or the woman’s expression, and the blue described by Tranströmer is the blue fabric on the chair, not of the woman’s jacket.
This poem is about the wall, the other side of the wall, the pressure that the other side creates, pressing in on us. The wall between our interior and the exterior world. The edge of the void, the abyss. All of this is kind of, almost, not quite making sense to me. I should spend some more time rereading Tom Sleigh’s“Too Much of the Air: Tomas Tranströmer“.
I’m struck by the last lines:
The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall. It is like a prayer to what is empty. And what is empty turns its face to us and whispers: ‘I am not empty, I am open.’
I’m thinking of the gorge here and the limestone walls that contain it and how it is both empty of land/rock and filled with air and openness. To think of the void — the unknowable, unsayable, mystery — as both frightening (emptiness, nothingness) and inviting (openness, possibility).
Yesterday I talked about believing in the unseen. Today I’m thinking about what it could mean to be believe in the unseeable. Unseen could mean, not-yet-seen or unnoticed, but unseeable suggests that seeing is never possible.
Before writing this, I was reviewing an old log entry from April 16, 2022. In it, I discuss Elisa Gabbert’s article about poetry and the Void.
They [poets] write in the line, in the company of the void. That changes how you write — and more profoundly, how you think, and even how you are, your mode of being. When you write in the line, there is always an awareness of the mystery, of what is left out. This is why, I suppose, poems can be so confounding. Empty space on the page, that absence of language, provides no clues. But it doesn’t communicate nothing — rather, it communicates nothing. It speaks void, it telegraphs mystery.
By “mystery” I don’t mean metaphor or disguise. Poetry doesn’t, or shouldn’t, achieve mystery only by hiding the known, or translating the known into other, less familiar language. The mystery is unknowing, the unknown — as in Jennifer Huang’s “Departure”: “The things I don’t know have stayed/In this home.” The mystery is the missing mountain in Shane McCrae’s “The Butterflies the Mountain and the Lake”:
the / Butterflies monarch butterflies huge swarms they Migrate and as they migrate south as they Cross Lake Superior instead of flying
South straight across they fly South over the water then fly east still over the water then fly south again / And now biologists believe they turn to avoid a mountain That disappeared millennia ago.
The missing mountain is still there.
The Shape of a Void / Elisa Gabbert
This past weekend, Scott and I watched the 2 part documentary about Steve Martin, STEVE! I really enjoyed it. I remember responding to this idea offered by one of Steve Martin’s artist friends:
How to close the void. I think that’s the nature and the drive in art, it comes from that deep awareness of that void.
STEVE! — 53:30, part 2
I agree with the second part of that statement, about the deep awareness of the void, but not the first — at least how it’s worded. It’s not to close the void, but to navigate it, develop a relationship to it, engage with it, learn how to live with it. I mentioned this to Scott and he argued that the void in this quotation is not the unknown or mystery, but something else. Maybe lack or longing? A desire to be whole? To have/feel meaning? I still don’t like the word close. Can you ever close the void? Tranströmer doesn’t think so; it’s always on the other side of that wall. Even with a wall between you and it, you feel its pressure in your ears. And it’s this pressure that drives/shapes/enables your art — that makes each fact float/and makes the brushstroke firm.
A final (for now) word on this ekphrastic poem: I like how Tranströmer is responding to the work of art in this poem, how we uses the image to reflect on the abyss/void, history, interior/exterior, and why we make art. I want to think about it some more and try to write something for my “How to See” project inspired by his approach.
bike: 4 minutes run: 3.5 miles outside: feels like 13
Snow and ice on the ground. Wind. Feels like 13. Inside today. I would have done more on the bike, but my calf started to feel a little strange — tightening, but no pain.
The run was good — a few flares, then my heel made some noise at the end, again, no pain, just tight, I think. I locked into a steady, slow pace and listened to the latest episode of Nobody Asked Us. Des told a story about her recent NY 1/2 marathon and how she should have woken up 30 minutes earlier in order for the coffee to do its job — iykyk. The story was funny — I laughed several times — and also fascinating. She talked about how she couldn’t push the pace because if she tried, it would have been a big mess. She was able to control it by managing her effort and working with her body, not against it.
Later, giving a pep talk to Kara for her upcoming race she said something like, You’ll be running along and then suddenly someone in a banana costume will pass you and you’ll say, “hell no, that ridiculous thing can’t beat me!” and you’ll speed up. Thinking about our encounter with the fast banana in our 10k race I wonder, are bananas a thing in races now? Will I see more bananas next month?
before the run
Yesterday I mentioned that it was Robert Frost’s 150th birthday, but I forgot to mention 2 things.
First, when I told FWA about it, he said, And I took the road less travelled and that has made all the difference — or something like that. A few minutes later, as we were walking to the garage to leave for the airport he called out, Mom, look — then walked off the sidewalk into the grass, looped around a bush, then returned to sidewalk and said, See, the road less travelled. Wow.
Second, in honor of Frost’s birthday Poetry Foundation posted his poem, Acquainted with the Night, which I recall first reading through Edward Hirsch’s essay, “The Pace Provokes My Thought.” Acquainted. Another word for familiar with, know of or known to, on friendly terms. I want to add this word to my list of alternatives to know/ing, along with ED’s accustomed, as in We grow accustomed to the Dark. I like the friendliness of acquainted, which is slightly different than the “getting used to” of ED’s accustomed. I also like that it’s friendly, but not too friendly; there’s still some distance from whatever it is that you are acquainted with — an acquaintance not an old friend.
Now I’m thinking about the word familiar. Two immediate thoughts. First, an idea from Alice Oswald that I revisited the other day:
citing Zizek: we can’t connect, be one with nature. It’s extraordinary, alien. It’s this terrifying otherness of nature that we need to grasp hold of and be more courageous in our ways of living with it and seeing it.
So, familiar is bad for poetry? We need to make the familiar strange, fresh.
Second — I just spent 15 or 20 minutes attempting to find the log entry and poem that made think of this second thing and couldn’t, so I am very reluctantly giving up on it. — thinking about poems and how they can also take the strange and make it familiar, or take strangers and make them friends. I recall reading a poem — I think it was something about ROBINS! — I’m keeping this strange sentence in as evidence of my mind at work. After I gave up on finding and just tried to remember what I said, suddenly I recalled what the poem I was searching for was about and how reading it connected me to a stranger: robins. So I searched back through my posts for “robins” and finally found it. Hooray!
Lately I’ve been reading a lot about how poetry makes the familiar strange, but I think poetry can also make the strange familiar. Give us a door into the unfamiliar so we can get to know someone else and their experiences. The door in for me with this poem was all the robins. This past week, I saw so many fat robins on my crab apple tree, swaying and bobbing and getting drunk off the shriveled up apples.
Here’s the line from the poem that helped me get acquainted with its author, David Eye:
Cousin–When a dozen robins blew into the yard yesterday– I’d never seen so many–I watched them hop, cock their heads, grab the thaw’s first worms. Such a pleasure, those yam- colored breast feathers. (from Letter from the Catskills/ David Eye)
And now I’m thinking about the different ways that poetry has helped make the strange familiar to me, especially in terms of my vision. Since I rediscovered poetry in 2017, I’ve been reading, studying, and writing it as a way to better navigate my strange and uncertain and difficult experiences of slowly losing my cone cells. I’m building a new world and a new way to be that’s heavily populated with poetic lines, ideas, methods.
Last year, I wrote a cento in which I gathered lines from poets invoking color. The original title of it was, “When Poetry Replaces Dead Cone Cells, a cento”
A big storm, just starting, but not quite. Now, light snow. We’re expecting 5-9 inches. I wasn’t sure how icy the sidewalks were or how ready my calf was to run, so I decided to work out in the basement.
calf update, for future Sara (and maybe her physical therapist?): during the race yesterday, my calf felt a little strange a few times — a slight tightening? no pain — but was otherwise fine. After the race: some soreness and tightness. today during the bike: a few more flares, an occasional twinge with a little pain. during the run: started feeling sore about 8 minutes, then a little strange. It’s so hard to know what the right thing to do is — stop running? ignore it as nothing, or as a calf that cramped and is now recovering? schedule a pt appointment? If I can get an appointment, I’d like to see a pt. Even if the calf is nothing, it would great to be checked out before serious marathon training begins.
Watched the women’s road race (cycling) from Tokyo while I biked. When the silver medalist, Annemiek Van Vleuten, crossed the line, she thought she had won gold; she didn’t realize that someone in the breakaway had stayed away. background: A. Van Vleuten had been about to win the gold in Rio but had a horrific crash into a cement barricade. She put off retiring for another 5 years just to try and win the gold in Tokyo. Wow. How do you recover from that disappointment? I’m always amazed at the resilience of athletes.
While I ran, I listened to a winter playlist. Other than my calf, I felt good.
Earlier today, I found an article about James Schuyler and this wonderful poem, which I may have read before, but was delighted by today:
And is it stamina that unseasonably freaks forth a bluet, a Quaker lady, by the lake? So small, a drop of sky that splashed and held, four-petaled, creamy in its throat. The woods around were brown, the air crisp as a Carr’s table water biscuit and smelt of cider. There were frost apples on the trees in the field below the house. The pond was still, then broke into a ripple. The hills, the leaves that have not yet fallen are deep and oriental rug colors. Brown leaves in the woods set off gray trunks of trees. But that bluet was the focus of it all: last spring, next spring, what does it matter? Unexpected as a tear when someone reads a poem you wrote for him: “It’s this line here.” That bluet breaks me up, tiny spring flower late, late in dour October.
The analysis in this essay is all helpful to me, but I was particularly struck by this bit:
. . . Schuyler’s description of the flower transforms it into art, and that this kind of transformation is his signature poetic activity; it happens again and again in his poems: he describes what he sees before him as if it were a painting so that observation of the natural world becomes ekphrasis. That’s why—to skip down a little—the leaves are likened to a rug, crossing outside and inside, nature and culture, and those leaves “set off” the gray the way a painter or sharp dresser uses one color to set off or complement another, why the air is like a made thing, too, if one you eat, and why the bluet is called “the focus,” the way art critics say something is “the focus of the composition.” Schuyler’s words are paintbrushes, what he describes becomes a painting (though he treats it as already painted)—paint, a medium that splashes and then holds. There are examples of this everywhere in his books. In “Evenings in Vermont,” for instance, a rug again mediates between inside and outside, art and nature: “I study / the pattern in a red rug, arabesques / and squares, and one red streak / lies in the west, over the ridge.” In “Scarlet Tanager,” the bird in the tree provides “the red touch green / cries out for.” In “A Gray Thought,” “a dark thick green” is “laid in layers on / the spruce …” And so on. Touches, layerings: color as paint, natural phenomena perceived as art.
This idea of natural phenomena as art and of Schuyler as describing flowers with painting terms and of him doing ekphrastic poems might be a way into my “How I See” ekphrasis project!
