Tag: CAConrad

june 24/RUNSWIM

4.75
veterans home
64 degrees

The heat broke. Yes! Still overheated by the end, but much easier to run in the 60s than the 80s. Did my 9/1 again. About 2 minutes into the third segment of running, nearing a steep hill, I briefly contemplated taking another walk break. Then I remembered that I took an extra walk break around the same time yesterday. This might become a habit, I thought, so I decided to keep going. Make it to the top of the hill. Make it to the parking lot. Make it to the bench above the edge of the world. Then I was at 9 minutes. Victory!

Before I went out for my run, I revisited CAConrad’s TL;DR and their advice for listening:

listen to the most immediate sounds in the building. Let the layers reveal themselves, shifting to what you hear further away, then further.

When you feel you have heard everything, wait. Sit there a little longer, listening for the faintest of traffic in the sky or a faraway rumble.

As I ran, I listened for the the layers. Running above the falls, on the other side of the creek, I tried to listen to what was beyond the soft rushing of the water over limestone. Cars, a train horn, birds, my foot steps. I tried to listen for voices at the overlook. Did I hear any? I don’t think so.

10 Sounds

  1. a car, whooshing by me on the street
  2. a few pebbles crunching under the wheel
  3. the soft knocking of a woodpecker
  4. kids laughing on the playground
  5. the creek, tumbling over rocks
  6. the soft rush of the falls
  7. scraping — someone working on the new trail below me
  8. the clicking of a roller skier’s poles across the road
  9. the sharp clanging of a dog collar
  10. the shifting of a bike gear

what is a tree?

Yesterday, walking on the gravel road that leads to the cedar lake beach, I noticed the husk of a tree — a sad-looking trunk with no top and no branches. When I pointed it out to Scott he said, that’s not a tree. Trees have branches. Even little trees have branches. Running today, I suddenly wondered about a tree’s root system and what was underground. Can that define a tree? Looked it up, and according to several sources, there is no universal or official scientific definition of a tree. The generally accepted idea is that it has a single, thick trunk, branches, a root system.

run 5

broke
still
again
about
third
steep
world
cedar

below
heard
water
think
wheel
creek
trail
beach

skier
break
might
extra
habit
bench
sharp
thick

I have a third wheel habit.
again, water, my break below.
a beach bench thick with habit
trail-think, creek-think, beach-think: one is still, one sharp, one thick
world — break what broke again
steep bench habit
beyond the linear layer, a wheel world could be heard

floating again

I returned to Anne Carson’s Float today and found many delightful things in her pair of lectures, “Uncle Falling,” including this:

Uncle Falling / Anne Carson

I like to write lectures. My favorite part is connect-
ing the ideas. The best connections are the ones
that draw attention to their own frailty so that at
first you think: what a poor lecture this is–the
ideas go all over the place and then later you think
but still, what a terrifically perilous activity it is,
this activity of linking together all the threads of
human sin that go into making what we call sense,
what we call reasoning, an argument, a conversa-
tion. how light, how loose, how unprepared and
unpreparable is the web of connections between
any thought and any thought.

CHORUS 1:
Here’s a thought

CHORUS 2, 3:
Here’s another

CHORUS 1, 2, 3, 4:
How about getting from here to there

CHORUS 4:How about spending some time in mid-air

CHORUS 3:
Much depends upon the fact

CHORUS 2:
that one falls

CHORUS 1:
or one does not fall

swim: 3 loops
open swim lake nokomis
80 degrees

A wonderful night for a swim! Warm water, hardly any chop, no glaring sun. So many sparkle friends and bubbles and muscles being worked. And, a ferret on the loose? The lifeguards caught a ferret and kept asking if anyone was missing a ferret. I felt strong and fast and free — no worries about getting off course. Who cares? A great swim.

march 5/SHOVEL

32 minutes
about 8 inches
26 degrees

The biggest snowfall of the season. Of course it happened on the day that FWA and his college friends were taking the train to Chicago. Last year, when FWA and RJP were flying to Chicago: a big snow storm all day.

The snow is the worst kind for shoveling — heavy, wet, deep. It will probably melt by the end of the week.

The view from my desk: a man walking his dog in the street wearing snowshoes — the man, not the dog! Will I get to see any skiers too? I hope so.

Today is my mom’s birthday. She would have been 83. She’s been dead for 15.5 years. Last night at community band rehearsal I laughed at something my friend Amanda said — I can’t remember what. And my laugh was my mother’s, at least it sounded like it to me. Sometimes I hear her in my laugh, and sometimes one of my older sisters. I can’t describe the laugh — it’s been too long since I heard it — but I felt it and her last night. That’s how my memories of her work now; they are faint and fleeting and difficult to put into words.

The president’s address to congress was last night. Neither of us talked about it until it was over, but then Scott and I admitted to each other that we had been a little worried he might do something extreme, like declaring the dissolving of congress or pronouncing himself king for life. Thankfully, no. What a world.

circumambulation

In the fall of 2023, when I first started thinking about Gary Snyder and circumambulation, I printed out the Mt. Tamalpais poem, along with a related one my Forrest Gander, and put them under the glass on my desk. They have been there, beneath my fingers, ever since. Today, I reread them and was inspired. I’m thinking about creating another National Park-like unigrid pamphlet for the Franklin-Ford loop. Like the Mt. Tamalpais poem, it would have particular spots on the loop (the poem has 10) where you stop and chant. In the poem, you chant Buddhist prayers, but in my pamphlet, I’m tentatively thinking you will chant some of my favorite poetry lines — or lines I write (inspired by JJJJJerome Ellis and their prayers to their Stutter in Aster of Ceremonies). My lines would be about my blind spot.

I’m also thinking about creating somatic rituals related to these spaces — I’m using CA Conrad as inspiration for them. Yesterday I requested their book, Ecodeviance: (soma) tics for the future wilderness from my local library.

In the introduction to Ecodeviance, also posted here, Conrad describes how their (soma) tics are designed to fight the factory approach to writing poetry they had been using by creating rituals “where being anything but present was next to impossible.” For Conrad, these rituals create an

“extreme present” where the many facets of what is around me wherever I am can come together through a sharper lens.

intro to ecodeviance / CA Conrad

While Conrad identifies the factory model as the source of their key problem of not being aware of place in the present, the model that I’m trying to fight in my writing/creating is the academic one, which shares some similarities with the factory.

Am I brave enough to try any of Conrad’s rituals? For one of them, they fully immersed themselves in the color red for the day —

When I say fully immerse myself in the colors I mean ONLY eating foods of the color of the day, as well as wearing something or keeping something of that color on or around me at all times.

The red experiment is part of a 7 poem sequence, (soma) tic MIDGE. For more on it, see: You write what you eat. This essay describes the poems and has links to audio recordings of Conrad reading them. Very cool.

In their introduction, Conrad describes purple in this way:

Purple being the natural transformative pivotal color which is born only when the starting color red (fire) and the last color blue (water) bleed together.

Introduction / CAConrad

And here is their poem inspired by a day immersed in purple: smells of summer crotch smells of new car’s purple MAjestY (2:05): MP3

More mentions of purple!