bike: 8.6 miles
lake nokomis and back
61 degrees (there) / 68 (back)
It’s great to bike! Independence! Not having to rely on someone else to get me to the lake. And, being on a bike is much more fun than being in a car.
Overcast and cool. Some wind as I biked south and west. I might have glimpsed the river through the trees, looking almost white, but I don’t remember. Heard the rush of the light rail going past on the other side of the barricade. Also heard the rush of the creek, moving past the spot where all the kids like to swim. Heard the rhythmic thwack of the pickle ball hitting the racket. The pickle ball courts by the lake nokomis rec center are always full. And, as I neared the big beach, I heard a shrill sound on repeat. Scott and I had heard it last night and thought it was a person whistling. Nope. Was it a bird? What else could it have been?
swim: 3 loops
lake nokomis open swim
64 degrees
A little tired today after last night’s swim. Otherwise, I felt good, buoyant, high up on the surface of the water. My sparkle friends were coming right at me as I swam across to the little beach. The sky was covered in clouds. The positioning of the buoys was closer today than last nigh, so a much shorter course. Two things: the green buoy closest to the little beach was farther away this morning than last night and the middle green buoys were closer together — a tighter angle. According to my watch, I swam a mile and 1000 less strokes today.
I had trouble keeping my nose plug on; it was leaking air which made a funny nose underwater. I wondered if other swimmers could hear it. Have I heard the noises of other swimmer’s underwater before? Not in lake, but I’ve heard clicking elbows in the pool.
Mostly my stroke pattern was: 1 2 3 4 5 breathe right 1 2 3 4 5 breathe left
Occasionally: 1 2 3 4 5 6
or 1 2 3 breathe right 1 2 3 4 breathe right 1 2 3 left 1 2 3 4 left
I recited Alice Oswald, mostly the one about microscopic insects that catch pigment on their shivering hair-like receptors. I wanted to recite the new lines I tried to memorize last night, but I got stuck on the first line. I couldn’t remember disintegrating certainty.
Yesterday I watched a little of the 5k open water swim world championships from Singapore. The competitors were swimming in a shipping lane with an over-sized lane line on one side. This lane line was enormous, much bigger proportionately than a pool lane line. It looked strange and unreal.
10 Colors
- orange buoy
- red lifeguard kayak
- white swan
- an occasional dot of robin’s egg blue — the green buoy getting closer
- lime green buoy
- yellow safety buoy
- pink cap
- green vine, floating
- pale greenish-brown vine from milfoil reaching up from the bottom
- a smear of green so dark it almost looked black near the ford bridge: a dark dirt trail that winds through the woods
EXAQUA
Last week, I returned to a poem I posted on this log a few years back: EXAQUA / Jan-Henry Gray. So many good lines about water. I decided to request it from the library — it’s in Gray’s collection, Documents. Yesterday RJP and I went and picked it up. Exaqua is several pages long, with multiple sections. Today I’ll start reading it more closely.
I wondered about the title. What does it mean? In a note, Gray writes that the title comes from the “Notanda” section of M.NourbeSe Philip’s Zong. I’ve heard of Zong! before. JJJJJermoe Ellis writes about it in Aster of Ceremonies. I had to do a little more digging to find out what it means in Zong! Found a masters thesis with an explanation:
When Morrison writes, “By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footsteps but the water too and what is down there,” she gestures toward the material remains of the enslaved who we know to have been drowned by those waters—the “Sixty Million and more” to whom Beloved (324). It is in an attempt to remember “the water and what is down there” that NourbeSe attempts to do the work of recovering, reclaiming, or exhuming those bodies from their liquid graves. The term NourbeSe uses to describe this process is exaqua: that is, to exhume the bodies of the Zong’s victims from the water. In lieu of the enslaved’s literal, material remains—their scoured bones— Zong! orients itself toward creating a textual space where their voices may sound out. When we have observed that a voice is singular, this observation has rested on the embodiedness of our voices. As sound, our voices are constituted by the materialities of our bodies that produces them, thereby carrying something of our bodies outside of ourselves and spacing it out into the material world. For NourbeSe, then, Zong! as a material object is like the surface from which the sound of the captives’ voices reemerge.
Listening/Reading for Dismembered Voices
This definition is fascinating. I want to keep thinking about it as I do a close reading of the different sections of the poem. An immediate thought: the idea of surface here is interesting — surface as where what is inside us travels outside.
immersion
The only way to know a song is to sing it.
The only way to know an ocean is to swim it.
(from Across the Pacific Ocean/ Jan-Henry Gray)
These lines are from an earlier poem in the collection, but I’ve been thinking about them and I think they can be put into conversation with EXQUA. I’d also like to put them into conversation with my own thoughts on being in the water as opposed to being near it or beside it or above it (like I am with the river).
I think about all that I know or understand or am familiar with because of the time I’ve been in lake nokomis over the last 12 years. The quality of the water, its currents, its colors, its buoyancy, its temperatures. The sediments, the ducks, seagulls, loons, dragonflies, the vegetation.
In the water, you feel the ripples, the swells, the rocking of the waves, the wind. Out of the water, you might see a textured surface or a whitecap, but you might only see flat, calm water.
