Tag: body in pain

april 21/WALK

45 minutes
minnehaha academy loop*
50 degrees

*43rd ave, north / 32nd street, east, past Minnehaha Academy / edmund, south / 34th street, west, past 7 oaks / home

Before taking a walk with Delia and Scott, I “watched” the Boston Marathon, where watching = tracking runners on the app, listening to the Citius Mag watching party, and watching the last 5 minutes of the women’s race on an unofficial YouTube feed. Wow, they were fast!

It looked warm and sunny, but it felt colder than 50. It was the wind, I think. For the first half we talked about kids and wanting to be empty-nesters and how to have hard conversations about the future and the series finale of The Americans — we finished it last night. In the second half, Scott pointed out a strange mash-up of a garage and I pointed out the Siberian Squill. I wondered if we were seeing it more now because we’ve named it, but we agreed that it has become more abundant in the past few years. There was a particularly impressive patch of it in the yard of the house on the south corner of edmund and 34th. Taking in the entire patch, it looked blue. Focusing on a flower, it looked purple.

10 Things

  1. siberian squill, everywhere, including at the edge of our yard
  2. a loud dog in a fenced-in backyard
  3. an empty parking lot at minnehaha, no school for Easter
  4. a metal sign at Cooper School, bent and leaning to the side
  5. a security guard car parked in front of the gate to the field at minnehaha academy
  6. the boulevard on the edge of the academy that used to have a small line of aspensmwith aspen eyes, now only has one aspen
  7. a woman stapling a poster to a pole
  8. mud on a boulevard — Delia, stay out of the mud! — a deep brown
  9. the wind chimes chiming at the house with an Easter Island head on the front stoop
  10. looking over at the river road and seeing/feeling the open space between the west and east banks

Back/hip/leg update: today it is a little uncomfortable to sit in the chair at my desk. Is that because I went down and up the old stone steps to the river?

april 19/WALK

35 minutes
neighborhood
50 degrees

Walked with Scott and Delia the dog. My hips feel a little sore, but otherwise I’m okay. Not in pain, not stressed about taking a break from running. I know I need this break. Scott and I noticed more Siberian Squill, taking over. I admired the big turtle in someone’s front yard, Scott critiqued some out of place columns holding up a trellis-like porch at the front of a house. He asked, how have I never noticed these columns before? My response: Really? These columns are the defining characteristic of this block for me. Scott wondered if a robin, standing still in a yard, was dead. Nope, we saw it move its head. I pointed out a house that was very big. The wind was coming at us from almost every direction — not quite stiff, but irritating. Even with the chilled air, it felt like spring was here to stay. Hooray!

La Guerre (II)/ e.e. cumming

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting

               fingers of

prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy

       beauty     how

often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods
(but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

             thou answerest

them only with

                             spring)

april 16/WALK

40 minutes
neighborhood
50 degrees

Woke up this morning unable to bend down to put on socks. I’ve been having a mild version of this problem for a few weeks, but today it was worse. Time to shut it down for a while. I scheduled an appointment with the doctor. First available: June 12th. Oh well, I’m on the wait list, and I feel like there’s a good chance this problem will get better on its own — iff (if and only if), I take a proper break. No running for at least a week. No biking either. The problem has been in my upper glutes/lower back, today I felt pain all down my leg to my calf. It’s worse in the morning, after not moving for most of the night. I can stand and walk but bending down in a certain way hurts too much. I am not bothered by this injury. Of course, I’d like to be running and biking, but it’s okay. The uncertainty is gone — am I injured or not? I know I am and that I need to take a break.

Thankfully, I can still walk! Went with Delia and Scott. Beautiful — blue sky, birds, and the feeling that spring is here. Oh — and little purple flowers. Scott looked them up: siberian squill. According to the Minnesota Wildflower site, they’re not purple, but blue, and invasive. Originally from Russia, these colorful flowers are hearty and take over gardens. Not even critters want to touch them. Unfortunately, some gardeners continue to plant them. At the bottom of the entry, in bold, is:

Please, all you gardeners out there: stop planting this.

The site recommends planting native species, like phlox or bluebells. Before Scott identified them with his app, I had guessed that they might be phlox.

Wow, I just read the comments and discovered a fight — on a wildflower site? I’m not sure I agree with Sandy, but I enjoyed her spirited comment.

Petyr:  It is as bad if not worse than garlic mustard – you can’t even pull this crap.

Which gardeners are now willing to stand up and take responsibility, or is this just another “so sorry”? Gardeners, this is stupid… mindless… enough!

Sandy: Finally, after 40 years of living in the same house, I have identified the little blue flowers that blossom with the snow on the ground. Early Siberian Squill. They grow wild along the front of my house. I find them to be quite beautiful. I find nothing offensive about them. A whole lot prettier than dandilions, which I wish were gone, gone, gone. So all you gardeners out there, bite me. My Squill will be left in peace, while I continue to fight a war on the big ‘D’.

There is a poem here, I think, featuring Sandy.

april 12/WALKBIKE

35 minutes
7 oaks
58 degrees

Last night and this morning my glutes ached, so no running today. I did some more research and I think the exercises in this video might help. Future Sara will let us know!

a pain in the butt

Walked with Delia and Scott. Warmer today, windy too. My favorite sound: the wind rushing through a big pine tree. I noticed some dry leaves skittering in front of us as we walked east. Heard the St. Thomas bells and their extra long chimes at noon. Saw lots of runners and walkers and bikers. Scott talked about how farmers are getting screwed by the new tariffs, and I talked about Indigo. A few times my back ached — was it a spasm? Not sure.

indigo

For the past few days, I’ve been working on a crown of color sonnets, using the words of other writers (cento). The plan is to write 7 sonnets, with each one setting up the next with its color mentioned in the last line. I started with green, then went to orange, then yellow-red, then purple. I wasn’t sure what would come next — I thought it would probably be blue — but in the last line of the purple sonnet indigo appeared. I haven’t studied indigo that much, so before writing a sonnet about it, I’d like to spend some time with it.

Indigo began working its way into my sonnets a few days ago, when I attempted to list colors I’d seen on my run in using the ROYGBIV system. I couldn’t recall seeing anything indigo. Then yesterday, while looking for a passage by Oliver Sacks on yellow I encountered this description (which I read a few years ago, but had forgotten):

I had long wanted to see “true” indigo, and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964, I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine (for general arousal), LSD (for hallucinogenic intensity), and a touch of cannabis (for a little added delirium). About twenty minutes after taking this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, “I want to see indigo now—now!” And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture: It was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, which Giotto had spent a lifetime trying to get but never achieved—never achieved, perhaps, because the color of heaven is not to be seen on earth. But it had existed once, I thought—it was the color of the Paleozoic sea, the color the ocean used to be. I leaned toward it in a sort of ecstasy. And then it suddenly disappeared, leaving me with an overwhelming sense of loss and sadness that it had been snatched away. But I consoled myself: Yes, indigo exists, and it can be conjured up in the brain. For months afterward, I searched for indigo. I turned over little stones and rocks near my house, looking for it. I examined specimens of azurite in the natural history museum—but even they were infinitely far from the color I had seen. And then, in 1965, when I had moved to New York, I went to a concert in the Egyptology gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, a Monteverdi piece was performed, and I was utterly transported. I had taken no drugs, but I felt a glorious river of music, four hundred years long, flowing from Monteverdi’s mind into my own. In this ecstatic mood, I wandered out during the intermission and looked at the ancient Egyptian objects on display—lapis lazuli amulets, jewelry, and so forth—and I was enchanted to see glints of indigo. I thought: Thank God, it really exists! During the second half of the concert, I got a bit bored and restless, but I consoled myself, knowing that I could go out and take a “sip” of indigo afterward. It would be there, waiting for me. But when I went out to look at the gallery after the concert was finished, I could see only blue and purple and mauve and puce—no indigo. That was nearly fifty years ago, and I have never seen indigo again.

Hallucinations/ Oliver Sacks (found here)

His description of standing in front of blank wall reminded me of my mood rings experiment: facing a blank wall, staring at it, waiting for my blind spot to occur. I wonder, could I see indigo doing this (and without the drugs)?

I recall reading something about indigo and debates over whether or not it existed. I’ll have to look for that source.

At the time, because I was working on a yellow poem, I didn’t dwell on the indigo. But later that day, it returned in a Mary Oliver poem — I was looking for another orange poem:

Poppies/ Mary Oliver

The poppies send up their
orange flares; swaying
in the wind, their congregations
are a levitation

of bright dust, of thin
and lacy leaves.
There isn’t a place
in this world that doesn’t

sooner or later drown
in the indigos of darkness,
but now, for a while,
the roughage

shines like a miracle
as it floats above everything
with its yellow hair.
Of course nothing stops the cold,

black, curved blade
from hooking forward—
of course
loss is the great lesson.

But also I say this: that light
is an invitation
to happiness,
and that happiness

when it’s done right,
is a kind of holiness,
palpable and redemptive,
Inside the bright fields,

touched by their rough and spongy gold,
I am washed and washed
in the river
of earthly delight—

and what are you going to do—
what can you do
about it—
deep, blue night?

A thought occurs to me in reading this — actually, a reminder: here in the city, on a street with street lights and security lights and light pollution of other kinds, a deep, blue night is impossible to see. And, ever since the family farm in the UP was sold in 2005, I rarely am in a place remote enough to lack light.

bike: 30 minutes
basement

Finally had a chance to finish up the first episode of The Residence and start the second one. Wow, it’s good. One moment that I couldn’t quite figure out, even with the audio description: Cordelia Cup encounters the male chef sitting on the floor, against the wall and under a row of knives. He looks motionless and dead to me, but no one reacts and the audio description says his eyes followed Cordelia as she left the room. I watched again and still couldn’t tell. His eyes looked dead to me, but that happens a lot — that is, when I actually see someone’s eyes.

feb 24/WALK

25 minutes with Delia
to the Winchell Trail
53! degrees

No running today; I’m being careful with my sore/stiff lower back. Thought I’d be taking a longer walk in the warm weather with Delia, but I made the bad decision to go to the Winchell Trail. Even though I tried to be very careful on the thawing hill, I slipped and SPLAT! fell flat on my butt into gooey mud. The butt of my jeans, the back of my coat, and my hands were caked in mud. I’m lucky I didn’t hurt myself. Whew! The worst part of it was the 10 minute walk of shame through the neighborhood back to my house with my muddy butt.

the purple hour

3 am / bedroom

A quick look at my iPad. When I turned it off and put it down, an afterimage: a bright rectangle, then all darkness. It took more than a minute for the lavender light to return. As I waited, I recited “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.” The light gray blanket on the couch glowed a pale violet which I mistook for a square of light until I touched it and felt the blanket. If dark cast on the light is a shadow, what is the word for light cast on the dark?

Reminded of a poem I gathered and its description of light cast on the dark:

Good-Night/ Seamus Heaney

A latch lifting, an edged den of light
Opens across the yard. Out of the low door
They stoop in the honeyed corridor,
Then walk straight through the wall of the dark.

A puddle, cobble-stones, jambs and doorstep
Are set steady in a block of brightness.
Till she strides in again beyond her shadows
And cancels everything behind her.

Now I’m thinking of ED’s a long, long yellow on the lawn
The light in my bedroom had a pale and cold ghostly glow, not a warm one — no color. 


a pool of light? a stream of light? what are some other words to describe light in a dark room?

4:34 pm / front room

violet — On Color/David Scott Kastan

Yesterday, reading an essay about periwinkle, I discovered On Color by David Scott Kastan. My local library doesn’t have it, but RJP’s college does. Hooray! I was able to download the entire book! Currently I’m reading the chapter on violet. Here are a few passages I’d like to remember:

An exasperated French novelist, Joris-­ Karl Huysmans, complained that “earth, sky, water, flesh” were inevitably now the color of “lilacs and eggplants” (141).

Lilacs and eggplants. That’s what light and dark look like to me in the bedroom in the middle of the night. That also seems like a great name for a poem.

Landscape became the characteristic genre of the impressionists, but their interest was not, as with earlier landscape painters, in recreating the particularities of its geological, agricultural, or architectural features. They wanted, it was said, to recreate the immediate visual impression of that landscape, produced by the light in the very instant before the brain fully organized the scene (144-145).

Can my brain every fully organize the scene? Sometimes it/I get stuck and a landscape doesn’t make sense.

It isn’t that they painted objects as we see them. They painted the luminous air and light that exists in between the eye and those objects (145).

I’m fascinated by this in-between space and all that happens in it. Here I’m thinking about Alice Oswald and her invoking of Dante and the spiriti visivi — light as insects traveling to object to collect the color like pollen and then deliver them to us.

I’m roughly halfway done with the chapter, but I’ll stop here for now.

back pain

Looking up lower back pain I’m happy to report that it’s most likely only a weak core/overuse issue. Time to do some “gentle moving” — walking, stretching — for a few days. I’m cool with that. This article recommends dead bugs, planks, side planks, glute bridges, and child poses. Also: a heating pad.

sept 5/WALK

35 minutes
neighborhood, with Delia the dog
68 degrees

Today, I convinced an anxiety-ridden dog to go for a walk. What a beautiful, late summer/early fall morning! Wow. Our pace was slow, with Delia stopping to “read the news” at every tree, but I didn’t mind. I tried to stand straight and felt the calm in my core — a stillness so sweet it almost buzzed or hummed. Speaking of buzz, Delia stopped to smell some pink zinias and right next to her nose a bumble bee hovered. Only for a moment, then it flew off to the next blossom.

10 Things

  1. a city pick-up truck with a yellow arrow flashing on the bumper as it drove by
  2. a thick and long root sticking out of some boulevard dirt where the grass had been removed
  3. an shaded balcony on the second floor of a house across from 7 Oaks
  4. a chattering squirrel
  5. the steady, relaxed rhythm of a shirtless runner with a baseball cap on backwards
  6. big, bright pinkish-red blooms, emerging from a bush
  7. soft shadows cast across a big boulder
  8. a shaggy, scruffy tree, needing a shave, leaves covering the trunk and whole branches
  9. a steel planter on a boulevard filled with carrot greens, looking to my untrained eye like they were ready to be picked
  10. a neighbor across the alley dumping some cans in his recycling bin — hello! / hi!

Found this poem the other day, Painblank/ Daniel Borzutsky. So good! Instead of posting the entire poem, here’s the author’s helpful description:

About this Poem

I have said Emily Dickinson’s line ‘Pain has an element of blank’ in my head thousands of times…. I don’t know how many times I have tried to make sense of something only to conclude that the best poetic solution available is to say that it’s blank—the blank in the blank of my blank, the blankest of times, the blankness into which we all digress. Perhaps the thing about Dickinson’s poem is the way in which pain is enveloped so completely by, well, pain itself. But also, the problem of pain’s untranslatability, its blankness, resides in the sounds and symmetry of the words. What I’m suggesting in this translation of Dickinson’s Pain-Blank relationship is a reading and writing practice that believes in two things: that repetition is never repetition and that poetry, like pain and blankness, resides in the body. Perhaps poetry has the ability—definitely for the writer and perhaps for the reader—to assimilate into the body, to become inseparable from it, to become a language that is ingested through sonic relationships that have an effect beyond time, logic, and comprehension.

Daniel Borzutzky

And here’s the Emily Dickinson poem that inspired Borzutsky:

Pain–has an Element of Blank–/Emily Dickinson

Pain—has an Element of Blank— 
It cannot recollect 
When it begun—or if there were 
A time when it was not— 

It has no Future—but itself— 
Its Infinite Contain 
Its Past—enlightened to perceive 
New Periods—of Pain.

may 30/RUN

4.5 miles
bottom franklin hill and back
65 degrees

Windy but sunny. Ran faster than I should have and it wiped me out. Made it to the bottom of the hill — I had to bargain with my shadow to keep going — then paused to notice the river. It was moving a little, some white foam, the water a mix of brown and purple and blue. No rowers or birds or paddle boats.

Listened to the wind shaking the leaves and some cheering somewhere running north. Put in “Billie Eilish Essentials” on the way back south. Picked up the pace for the third mile, especially when “Bad Guy” came on.

Greeted Dave the Daily Walker —

Good morning Dave!
Hi Sara, how are you?
I’m great! How are you?
I’m good, thanks for asking!

I don’t know how many times we have had this almost exact exchange over the years, but it’s a lot. As I’ve written before, these words aren’t empty but part of the ritual of being outside, moving, noticing, and connecting.

I was distracted today — worrying about why I feel so strange — not dizzy but light-headed?, with a tight left leg. I talk to the doctor tomorrow. I think it’s the latest intense version of anxiety triggered by hormones and unusual (for me) aches and pains. Thanks, perimenopause! In this distracted, uncomfortable state, can I remember 10 things I noticed?

10 Things

  1. a tall stack of stones on the ancient boulder
  2. greenish white fuzz on the edge of the trail
  3. clicking and clacking of a roller skier’s poles
  4. an e-bike zooming up the franklin hill
  5. a group of school kids speaking spanish in the tunnel of trees
  6. a minneapolis road crew tarring more craters on the path — the tar smelled sharp
  7. the solid, wide forms of the bridge columns at the bottom of the franklin hill
  8. graffiti: the outline of a shape I can’t recall in black
  9. a runner in orange shorts doing hill repeats on the franklin hill
  10. another runner powering up the hill. I watched their steady rhythm and beautiful broad shoulders run out of sight

I did it!

silhouette and concrete poetry

Nearing the end of my shadow month, I’m still thinking about silhouettes. Today, the silhouette of a poem and how poets make their words into a recognizable shape. The most obvious version of this shaping words into form is the concrete poem.

one

I suppose you could call my mood rings concrete poetry. Some of the words are the shape of my blind spot, some the shape of my total central vision, and some the shape of what’s missing:

two

Reading more of Ted Kooser’s The Poetry Home Repair Manual, I came across a mention of concrete poetry. He doesn’t like it:

Each of us must make a thousand choices in every poem. Nobody is going to take away your poetic license for playing with typography or punctuation or spelling. It can be lots of fun to write a poem about a flying seagull in the shape of a flying seagull, but you need to understand that that bird shape will interfere to some degree with the ability of the reader to pass through the surface of the poem behind that clever silhouette.

A shaped poem with a serious message will never be taken as seriously as the same poem without the trick of shape. A lovely elegy to your dead mother is not likely to be quite as moving as it might have been if you’d not shape the typography to look like a coffin.

The Poetry Repair Manual/ Ted Kooser

A page earlier, referring to other distracting techniques, like of haphazard line breaks and ampersands, Kooser writes:

In business, executives make cost-benefit analyses. I used this term earlier. They never want the cost to exceed the benefit. Every choice you make in a poem, thinking to make it better, can also have a corresponding cost. If you want to make a line look shorter by using an ampersand or an abbreviation of a word, you face the cost of drawing the reader’s attention back to the surface while he or she wonders why you decided to use Sgn for surgeon.

The Poetry Repair Manual/ Ted Kooser

I’d prefer to steer clear of the economic metaphors, but I agree with the idea of giving care and attention to the choices you make and their consequences.

three

On this day in 2017, I wrote about Linda Pastan’s poem Vertical, which I love and have since memorized. Near the end of the entry, I mention how the shape of the poem fits with the title and topic:

Pastan’s poem is vertical in form. [the words are] Long and lean, stretching upwards.

log entry from 30 may 2017

four

This month, partly inspired by an ongoing discussion of silhouettes, I’ve been revisiting Diana Khoi Nguyen’s brilliant book Ghost of. The visual poetry in it is strange and stunning and not a gimmick. Her poem, “Triptych,” was an inspiration for my mood rings. Here’s a video of her reading it — WOW!

Triptych

Ghost of is not all visual poems, there are other forms too, but the ones in which she writes within and around the space of her brother’s silhouette are amazing. In the following poem, instead of a triptych, she uses gyotaku:

Gyotaku / Diana Khoi Nguyen

And here’s what Nguyen says about these gyotaku poems:

Several poems in Ghost Of are titled “Gyotaku.” You’re referencing this traditional method of printing from fish because you’re “printing” from the absent body of your brother?

Essentially, there’s the absent body which I fill in with text, so the absence is rendered into a visual text. Gyotaku is a practice using dead fish to create an impression of what had been captured, an old practice before photography existed. It still goes on today. I liked the idea that gyotaku creates just the impression. You can’t capture the whole of the fish, just wherever the ink or the paint was able to touch the body, the scales, and you get an idea of the thing. Thinking about the act of writing and printing—bookmaking is also inked fabric—it makes sense to also begin to claim, to manipulate, to capture this image-text in a visual way.  
source: Diana Kyoi Nguyen, To Cut Out

Open water swimming is having a moment

Okay, open water swimming. First the awesome, Nyad, and now this:

open water swimming rules

april 19/RUN

4.9 miles
veterans’ bridge and back
36 degrees / snow flurries
wind: 16 mph / gusts: 31 mph

Windy, some snow flurries. They started when I started. At first, they looked like glitter falling from the sky, later they felt like sharp pins pricking my face. Difficult conditions, but I didn’t mind — well, not that much.

Saw a BIG turkey heading for the edge of the park. Also saw a bird — a robin, I think — running fast across the grass. It’s fun to watch birds run. Had a sudden thought: Where on the Beaufort Scale would you fit the description, birds opt for running instead of flying or flying is inconvenient for birds? In my head, I began composing lines for a poem that features this bird. Another description to add to the scale: a fallen leaf will outrun you — that’s not quite right, but something about how I noticed a leaf in front of me being pushed by the wind so fast that I couldn’t catch up to it.

Was too busy battling the wind to notice the river. I wonder, were there any foam or white horses on it?

Running south, I listened to the howling wind. Heading back north, I put in Taylor Swift’s new album: The Tortured Poet’s Department

Another 5 on the Beaufort Scale. As I ran I wondered about factors other than wind speed, like wind direction — head winds, tail winds, crosswinds. I never really thought about crosswinds before I started watching cycling races. Now, like many others, I look forward to windy days of a tour when there’s a chance that some bikers will get “caught out by the crosswinds” and the peloton will splinter.

Eula Biss, Pain Scale

Before moving onto level 2 on Biss’ pain scale, I’m trying to think more about 1 and what lines of poetry might fit it. Can’t find anything yet, but I’m imagining level 1 to be the type of pain so minor, so barely there, that we doubt its existence. If 0 is faith, then 1 is doubt.

2

The sensations of my own body may be the only subject on which I am qualified to claim expertise. Sad and terrible, then, how little I know. “How do you feel?” the doctor asks, and I cannot answer. Not accurately. “Does this hurt?” he asks. Again, I’m not sure. “Do you have more or less pain than the last time I saw you?” Hard to say. I begin to lie to protect my reputation. I try to act certain. Okay, so 2 is also doubt. That gray area when we’re not certain. I don’t mind not knowing, when knowing is not possible — embracing the mystery — but not being certain, not knowing when you feel like you should know, are supposed to know, is very difficult.

And here Biss introduces the Beaufort Scale!

Wind, like pain, is difficult to capture. The poor windsock is always striving, and always falling short. There’s the difficulty of describing, and there’s the difficulty of feeling, knowing, experiencing accurately . . .

It took sailors more than two hundred years to develop a standardized numerical scale for the measure of wind. The result, the Beaufort scale, provides twelve categories for everything from “Calm” to “Hurricane.” The scale offers not just a number, but a term for the wind, a range of speed, and a brief description. Creating a standard — a common language from which to communicate and connect with others, a scale that is practical

A force 2 wind on the Beaufort scale, for example, is a “Light Breeze” moving between four and seven miles per hour. On land, it is specified as “wind felt on face; leaves rustle; ordinary vanes moved by wind.”

3

Left alone in the exam room I stare at the pain scale, a simple number line complicated by only two phrases. Under zero: “no pain.” Under ten: “the worst pain imaginable.” Too much is contained between these numbers. . . . This idea of “the worst pain imaginable” produces anxiety. I don’t want to even imagine what the worst pain imaginable might be.

“Three is nothing,” my father tells me now. “Three is go home and take two aspirin.”

“You are not meant to be rating world suffering,” my friend in Honduras advises. “This scale applies only to you and your experience.” At first, this thought is tremendously relieving. It unburdens me of factoring the continent of Africa into my calculations. But the reality that my nerves alone feel my pain is terrifying. I hate the knowledge that I am isolated in this skin—alone with my pain and my own fallibility.

The more I read of Biss’ essay, the more I’m thinking about the purpose of these scales and what other purposes descriptions/words/language can offer. The wind scale is for utility: to help sailors estimate the wind speed using visual observations. The pain scale’s purpose: to better understand and care for patients.

4

conflating physical and emotion pain — is there actually a distinction? hurting vs. feeling?

pain as seen in a face — Biss wonders, no face, no pain? Then she describes how there are no visible markers of her pain — there was nothing to illustrate my pain except a number, which I was told to choose from between zero and ten. My proof. I’m thinking about how invisible my vision problem often is to others and also, how the doctors could tell immediately that something wasn’t right: I got a diagnosis. What relief! I’m also thinking of a New Yorker article I read recently about gaslighting that mentions how the gaslit crave a diagnosis because it offers irrefutable evidence of something being wrong.

Okay, more of the pain scale in the next entry. I’m thinking about a key distinction between the Beaufort and Pain scales: the Beaufort offers brief descriptions to accompany the numbers, not just the numbers.

And, returning to point of these scales: they’re practical, which would seem to make them, at least to some, not poetry. Poetry is impractical and about making strange what we thought was familiar. It removes the utility of language, making it delightfully useless. Of course many poets disagree with this simplistic assessment, myself included. One reason I’ve turned to poetry is because it is useful; it gives me language and a method for describing my strange ways of seeing to others.

I found the following poem in an entry from aug 1, 2019. I think the descriptions might offer a more compelling and practical way than numbers on a scale to understand what pain feels like.

Let us for a moment call this pain by other words/Dominik Parisien

Ask, How many roses does the hammer weigh

when it bears down on your skull? 

Does the sword seem toothed like a toddler’s smile

or sharp as your first ice skates?

On a scale of anglerfish to northern lights

how bright are the flashes in your head? 

When I touch this, here, which constellations

light the sky behind your eyes?

Would you say that pulsing is the flicker of a satellite 

or the stubborn heartbeat of a newborn chick?

Ask, Can we for a moment make of beauty

the measure of our pain? and I will answer.

march 5/RUN

2.6 miles
2 trails
39 degrees

Sun! Blue skies! Hardly any wind! Wore compression socks while I ran for the first time. I felt fine while I was running and after I stopped, so they must be working (or, at least not not working).

Heard birds. No particular bird, just birds. Earlier, while walking with Scott to our polling station to vote in the primary, I heard a downy woodpecker and blue jays and cardinals. But, just now, running, only Bird.

I know I saw the river, but I can’t remember what it looked like. The leaves on the winchell trail were slippery, the mud up above was not. I thought about my mom a few times — mostly about her prolonged death and how I recently started understanding it as an expression of resistance and rage against cancer and dying too young and “redemption” and the expectation that she should/would be a good girl who died a nice and neat death.

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I’ve written before about how I dislike the idea of this Dylan Thomas poem. I’ve changed my mind.

earlier today

A morning of wandering (and some worrying too — not quite panic, but unease, discomfort for no real reason — peri-menopause anxiety?). Began with some thoughts about my mom, who would be 82 today if she were still alive, and a beautiful poem-of-the-day about a daughter’s grief and guilt. Then a skim of an article about W. H. Auden, which led me to his poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts” — an ekphrasis! — and the memory of an amazing, interactive essay about the poem by Elisa Gabbert, which I found and then read. I recall encountering this essay when it first came out, thinking it was great, but not having any interest in studying it. Now, on my dead mom’s birthday and with a new interest in ekphrastic poetry, I was ready for it.

encounters:

Musée des Beaux Arts/ W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

In her wonderful essay about this poem, Gabbert writes:

No matter how familiar a poem is, rereading it always gives me a sense of first encounter, as though I’ve gone back to sleep and re-entered the dream through a different door.

Each time I return to this one, I’ve read a lot of other poems in the interim, which change and expand my reading. But I’ve also done more living, so I understand more about suffering myself. Pain is a kind of wisdom, maybe. As I age, I’m making the poem better.

A Poem (and a Painting) About the Suffering That Hides in Plain Sight/ Elisa Gabbert

Today, reading the first lines — the first stanza-long sentence — almost took my breath away. There it was, what I felt when my mom was dying and dying then dead, that suffering happens in the midst of others’ living their daily, mundane lives. This can lead to indifference, as Gabbert describes Auden as suggesting (he wrote this on the brink of WWII), but it can also lead to relief or acceptance or an expanded understanding of how we are all living and grieving and suffering and eating and walking at any given time. Life is defined by all of those things together, not just one of them. I suddenly thought of some lines from Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”: Tell me about despair, yours, and I will you mine/Meanwhile, the world goes on.

I could spend the rest of the afternoon trying to find better, more precise and coherent, words to describe what I mean here, but I don’t want to. Maybe future Sara can take it up?

even more fun with medical terms!

I mentioned that I bought compression socks, or compression sleeves: they stop at the ankles, so nothing for the foot. Anyway, I decided to take out my scrabble tiles and try to do something with the letters for compression then compression sleeve.

compression

  • Ms. Ion Corpse
  • Price on moss?
  • O Prim Scones!
  • Poem is scorn
  • Poems r icons

compression sleeve

  • Impress Console Eve
  • Crisp moon sleeves (leftover e)
  • O seem clovers spines
  • Poems never close [is]
  • moon splice verses (leftover e)

march 3/RUN

5 miles
lake nokomis, then falls coffee
60 degrees

Ran through the neighborhood, past the falls, over the mustache bridge, on the creek path, up the hill from lake hiawatha to lake nokomis, then turned around and took the sidewalk on the parkway until we reached Falls Coffee. A good run — warm and very windy. Lots of shadows on the path — people too. Crowded. Tried to stay loose and relaxed as I ran; I called it being “Shaggy loose.” It worked and my right calf didn’t hurt when I was running. It felt strange again when I stopped — a few flashes of discomfort, then anxiousness. But we ran 5 miles and walked 2 and I was fine.

We talked about Scott’s music project: an arrangement of “Helter Skelter” without using any past versions for reference. I asked about the difference between parallel and series circuits. Mostly, we were quiet today, partly because we were enjoying just running outside in the warmth, and partly because Scott was arranging music in his head and I was monitoring my calf mid-run.

My calf occasionally reminded me it was there during the run, but it was fine and I was loose. When we stopped, my ankle was a little tender, but nothing hurt. Still, I was anxious and concerned about what might happen. Spent the walk home talking through it with Scott. I felt a little sore and stiff during the walk home, but no shooting pain or pops or anything too alarming. I said to Scott that I feel like my body was trying to tell me something with all this anxiety and he answered, Maybe it’s not. And I thought, yes, maybe it’s not. Maybe I’m just dealing with the random aches, the occasional nighttime muscle cramp, that older runners get? Why does the story have to be any more complicated than that?

As we approached the playground at Hiawatha School — the one our kids played on for almost a decade — I said, I think my calf pain is minor, like the sinus pain I used to get in my face. Once I started using breathe-right strips, it stopped happening — no more pressure or sinus head-aches. Scott replied: You need to find the breath right strip for your calf. Now, hours later, it suddenly came to me: compression socks. Could that be the magic antidote to my calf pain (and my fears about calf pain)? Have I cracked the code? I’ll try it and see.

update, 5 jan 2025: 10 months later, the compression socks seem to be working! Admittedly, I’m also on lexapro for anxiety now (since June), so that could also be helping.

note for past Sara (or future RJP/FWA) and for anyone else interested: Writing some of this stuff about my anxieties over calf pain feels a little ridiculous, but it seems important to document the in-the-midst-of-it process of figuring out how to navigate the uncertainty of new (albeit minor) pain. There are lots of reason why, here’s one that I return to again and again: remembering how you felt and handled moments of vulnerability and uncertainty, when you’re overwhelmed and anxious, can give you more empathy for others in their own, often different, experiences of uncertainty.

notes from a pages document titled: “To Do: 2022/2023/2024”

brain mind self soul spirit Sara body
I You us we
pain fear uncertainty loss death grief
breath muscle machine
break rupture relent embrace reject reframe resist rewire

Back to the magic of the body and our efforts to understand and describe what’s happening / the power of language, of stories, to affect how and if we survive and endure — what stories do we tell?

Where does my body end, yours begin?

What if the soul was populated by selves? what if Sara was a city, not one Self? or a lake — Lake Sara? or a gorge? or a river — the river Sara?

What is the relationship between anxiety, the body, and the mind? Is anxiety the body asserting itself?

Running as a new relationship with my body, poetry as a rewiring of my brain/mind — not as rational scientist (even though I still do this), but as poet. Not fully rejecting the rational/scientific approach, but de-centering it.

wiring circuits: series and parallel
body circuits: pulmonary and systemic
ED: success in circuits lie

Yesterday I mentioned Natasha Badmann and her experiences running through the Energy Lab during the Kona Ironman. I found the spot in the race commentary, where she is interviewed:

The Energy Lab wasn’t taking energy, but giving energy. . . . I left my soul out there on part of the course . . . Exchange yourself with the island, see the beauty. . . . Running into the Energy Lab, I saw the strength of the ocean, the waves splashing up, and I said, This ocean, it’s endless. My energy is endless.

start at 8 hours and 52 minutes in / Women’s Ironman 2023

added this in a few minutes later: After the run, I got a pistachio scone at Falls Coffee. When I told RJP about it, she said, Feed 2 birds with one scone, which is PETA’s non-violent version of the classic expression. I like it! How else can I play with it?

Text 2 teens on one phone.
Diss 2 jerks with one own.
Scare 2 kids with one crone.
Film 2 scenes with one drone.
Seat 2 kings on one throne.
Put 2 scoops in one cone.
Whet 2 blades with one hone.
Buy 2 cars with one loan.
Seduce 2 Ferris’ with one Sloane. (too many syllables, but I couldn’t resist)

one more note, the next day: When I mentioned the scones/birds phrase to FWA on our weekly Facetime, he mentioned another one: Feed a fed horse. Oh, that’s good.