march 19/RUN

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
38 degrees
wind: 18 mph / 37 mph gusts

Ran south and had the wind at my back for the first half, which was nice but it meant that I’d be running straight into it on the home. Not as difficult as I thought, but still draining. Wore the bright yellow shoes I bought last year and promised myself I’d never wear again because they make my feet hurt and calves cramp. They’ve been sitting in the rack all year, and looked so spring-y today that I couldn’t resist trying them again. Will I regret it? Probably. I should donate them instead of trying to make them happen.

10 Things

  1. little kid voices somewhere down in the savanna
  2. empty benches
  3. something glittering through the trees, up ahead — car headlights through the trees at the bend in the road
  4. a faster runner in a white shirt off to the side, heading down to the Winchell Trail — I followed above, watching as they slowly inched out of sight
  5. I don’t remember hearing the falls, just seeing them at a distance, from my favorite spot — white foam, moving rapidly at the corner of my central vision
  6. pale blue water, soft brown trees
  7. dead leaves on the ground — feeling orange to me
  8. the bluff on the other side was mostly brown with a few slashes of white — frozen seeps
  9. branches rubbing and creaking in the wind, sounding less like rusty door hinges and more like whimpering kids: soft, insistent, whiny
  10. running on the winchell trail, about to head up the 38th steps, I looked back and thought I saw someone approaching — nope, just the wrought iron fence

before the run: my blind spot

Yesterday, I read an interview with JJJJJerome Ellis and was inspired by their renaming of their Stutter as clearing:

Ellis’s glottal block stutter—which manifests as intervals of silence in his speech flow—is represented in this interview with the word clearing. Ellis offers this term as an alternative to words like stutter or stammer. Like a clearing in a forest, the stutter, for Ellis, can open a space of gathering between Ellis and the people he is communicating with.

Angel Bat Dawid and JJJJJerome Ellis

After a little digging, I found out more about the clearing and how it works for Ellis in their work:

Stuttering (especially in the form I present with, the glottal block) creates unpredictable, silent gaps in speech. I call these gaps ‘clearings’. Slaves sang in the fields, and whites heard them; but they also sang (and danced) in the woods at night, out of earshot. Undergirding the clearing created by my stutter is that other clearing, in the woods, where my enslaved ancestors stole away to keep healing, resisting and liberating through music – work that I continue today.

The Clearing/ JJJJJerome Ellis

Wow! What an amazing way to think about the stutter. In their follow-up book, the one that introduced me to Ellis, Aster of Ceremonies, they connect the Stutter explicitly with plants and place. I want to connect my blind spot — that growing lack of functioning cone cells in my macula — with water and stone and the gorge. As I try to explain this more, I have so many thoughts, too many words!

Just looked up blind spot and found these exciting definitions:

an area in which one fails to exercise judgment or discrimination

Merriam-Webster online

In this definition, a lack of judgment is a failure. And it is sometimes. But refusing to judge, keeping a space open for listening and beholding and bearing witness without judgment or the reduction of someone or something to a category (discrimination) is also essential.

Another helpful definition:

a portion of a field that cannot be seen or inspected with available equipment

Merriam-Webster online

during the run: my blind spot

I thought about my blind spot every so often as I ran, especially the idea of how it softens and fuzzes my vision. It’s difficult to see with precision, to scrutinize or make detailed observations that encourage me to identify and classify things. As a result, I devote less time to trying to name them, and more time to being with them. Here I’m thinking of Robin Wall Kimmerer and J. Drew Lanham.

I’m sure I had more thoughts, but I didn’t record them. If I had, would I even be able to hear them over the howling wind in any recording I would make today?

after the run: my blind spot

A space without judgment. Back when I was a scholar and teaching queer ethics, I was exploring what an ethics without judgement might look like, one that emphasized room to breathe and, as Judith Butler puts it, good air. I often invoked a quotation from Michel Foucault:

I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep.

The Masked Philosopher/ Michel Foucault

A few days ago, I read something else about not judging from Cole Swensen:

. . . an instance of witness, with witness defined as the act of being present to something, whether it’s an event, a situation, a person, a view. To be present to is to present yourself, to offer yourself, to attend without judgment, opinion, intervention, appropriation or even evaluation, and yet to be present to is not to be passive; it is an act, the act of anchoring the witnessed in history, confirming it, acting as the “second” that fixes it . . . . It is the ear that turns the falling tree to sound.

Walk/ Cole Swensen

Witnessing, being with, beholding. The gorge — a widening gap, a broad space where fires are lit, the grass grows, the wind howls, and river foam scatters. A generous place for holding all of the messy, entangled, conflicting, complicated stories of a place: of preserving and maintaining it, of stealing it, of losing it, of dead mothers who disowned it, of daughters who are attempting to reclaim it, of erosion and transformation and haunting, of a girl losing her central vision and searching for somewhere to be — to feel less alienation and more connection. There’s a lot here!

For the first half of the run, I listened to kids’ voices, for the second half, my “Doin’ Time” playlist. Speaking of time, here’s something great I read by Hanif Abdurraqib about nostalgia:

Another question I was asked about There’s Always This Year was about the use of nostalgia in my work, and the function of it, and I had this long answer I was going to give, but I look back on recent moments, and I realize that a major function of my relationship with nostalgia is actually tied to a committed and principled relationship with my present life. I am in pursuit, often, of a moment I will live and miss before it’s even gone. And the awareness of the longing to come offers me an opportunity to slow down time, to pay closer attention, to say I know something will end, but I would like a vivid catalog of its existence. My favorite Robert Hayden poem is “Double Feature,” which opens its final stanza with “Oh how we cheered to see the good we were / destroy the bad we’d never be.” I love that line. There’s a lot of bad to dismantle, and only some of it is housed within. The world houses the rest, and it is abundant. I require whatever good I can steal and then hoard. It fuels me to the fight(s,) which isn’t the same as a kind of whimsical nostalgia, but it is me saying that I remember there are things I love enough to fight for, even when it doesn’t feel like it. There are things I miss that I haven’t even experienced yet, and I want to get to them, eventually. And then get to what’s next.

instagram post

added later: I want to add these thoughts from an Alice Oswald interview about erosion here, too:

DN: I wanted to switch to another topic that infuses your work, and that is the process of erosion—erosion by water, erosion by wind, erosion by light—the topic of your first Oxford lecture but also, something that feels very present to Nobody. You said in one interview that the anonymity you were striving after for this book was inspired by eroded Cycladic sculptures, sculptures where the features had been nearly washed away. I was hoping you could talk about erosion in relationship to this and to the text.

AO: I suppose that comes back to your question about thinking. The poem conveys a kind of eroded thinking. It’s as if the thoughts have had reality washing away at them; a sentence sets out then gets blown in another direction. Erosion is important to me in that I think poetry has a particular duty and relationship towards time. Poems are miniature human clots I think, they’re full of time keeping in the way that a piece of music is full of timekeeping. In some way, they set their own time but they need to be awake to actual time moving around them. A poem has to offer itself up to the erosion that’s going on in the world. Nobody, more than any of my poems, I think gives in completely to that force of erosion where I would normally try to maintain some human presence in the face of it. I think Nobody allows itself to get weathered to a Cycladic blankness.

This idea of a poem offering itself up to erosion and to being within time, reminds me of something I heard from Jenny Odell the other day in “Another Kind of Time.” She’s talking about how being part of time, having a past, present, and future — and not just being timeless — makes something/someone a subject/actor instead of thing to be commodified/exploited. To be timeless/without time is to lack a context and a life. I’m also thinking about how preventing erosion often requires a sealing up and away from oxygen, water, wind. Erosion and decay are a necessary part of life.

DN: This talk of erosion and time makes me think of that famous Marguerite Yourcenar essay, That Mighty Sculptor, Time. I’m just going to read a couple of lines from it, “On the day when a statue is finished, its life, in a certain sense, begins. The first phase, in which it has been brought, by means of the sculptor’s efforts, out of the block of stone into human shape, is over; a second phase, stretching across the course of centuries, through alternations of adoration, admiration, love, hatred, and indifference, and successive degrees of erosion and attrition, will bit by bit return it to the state of unformed mineral mass out of which its sculptor had taken it.” I was thinking of this when I encountered your interview with Claire Armitstead where you said you think of your poems less as poems than as sound carvings which made me think that the sound these poems were making is eating away at something which then by extension suggests that both the blank page and silence are not really absences in this framing at all but presences.

AO: Yeah, I like that. I’ve always felt that in some way, a poem is really a framing of its silences, that the musical art poetry is all about leading you to those silences in a way that you hear them where normally one doesn’t necessarily hear a silence or an absence, both the sound is eating away that silence but then also, the sounds are, in their own way, erosions made so I let my voice get blown around by the information it’s taken in if you like. The feeling of not quite holding your own. . . .

DN: Let me ask you something about Homer’s syntax that you’ve said in light of sound carvings being a description of your poems. You said about Homer’s syntax, “The tendency of his grammar is therefore cumulative, like a cairn. Each clause is a separable unit. It might be placed loosely on another and held there with a quick connective, but it never loses its essential singleness; which is why you often find that one end of his sentence turns away from the other.” On the one hand, this feels like a process of accretion rather than erosion, an accumulation, but the singleness and the separateness of each component, and that each is surrounded by silence of the white page made me wonder if perhaps, this accumulation is the product of erosion like I imagine the scree that builds at the at the bottom of a cliffside of all the piles of rocks that are single but also part of this erosive process.

I love erosion: I like the way that the death of one thing is the beginning of something else (source).

march 17/RUN

4.25 miles
locks and dam no.1 hill and back
50 degrees
wind: 13 mph/ 25 mph gusts

Warmer, windier. Ran straight into it heading south towards the falls. It didn’t howl or swirl the leaves but once it almost took off my hat. And it pushed against me, making it harder to run. I didn’t mind. At the start of the run, I felt a little stiff — especially my neck — but by the halfway point I had loosened up.

I noticed the river several times: Sometimes it was silver sparkle, other times tin or pewter, and it was ridged or scaled from the wind. I decided to run down the hill at the locks and dam no. 1 to get closer to the water. Inspired by AO’s Dart (see below), I wanted to hear the trails of scales and the bells just a level under listening. Did it sound like anything? If it did, the sounds were forgotten as I turned around and climbed the hill. A few steps in I stopped to take in the wide blue view of the river from this angle. It took up almost all of my sight: blue undulations

11 Things

  1. the long shadow of a slender tree cast across the part of the path that dips below the road
  2. an orange sweatshirt on a walker emerging from the winchell trail
  3. squaring my shoulders and running into a stiff wind
  4. 2 people under the ford bridge near the locks and dam no. 1, about to climb up somewhere
  5. the bright white base of the locks and dam no. 1 sign — they must use reflective paint
  6. the benches above the edge of the world and near folwell were empty
  7. the low hum of playing kids on the school playground
  8. the flat top of a recently made stump: orange
  9. a white patch in the river near the shore — was it a chunk of ice? a sandbar?
  10. a tailwind as I returned north — not feeling the wind but its absence and that everything was easier
  11. added a few hours later: a creaking above from one tree branch rubbing another in the wind

Listened to leaves shimmering in the trees as I ran south, my “Doin’ Time” playlist as I ran back north. Most memorable song, “Once in a Lifetime”:

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was

Water dissolving and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean
Water dissolving and water removing

Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
Into the blue again, into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones, there is water underground

I never realized before how much water is used in this song. Very cool! The same as it ever was is an interesting contrast to what I was reading earlier this morning: Heraclitus and his idea of never stepping into the same river twice — see 17 march 2023

possible lines to recite/chant

Rereading my 17 march 2022 entry, I encountered these wonderful lines from Dart about how the river sounds:

will you swim down and attend to this foundry for
sounds

this jabber of pidgin-river
drilling these rhythmic cells and trails of scales,
will you translate for me blunt blink glint.

the way I talk in my many-headed turbulence
among these modulations, this nimbus of words kept in
motion
sing-calling something definitely human,

will somebody sing this riffle perfectly as the invisible
river
sings it

can you hear them at all,
muted and plucked,
muttering something that can only be expressed as
hitting a series of small bells just under the level of your
listening?

The bells!

High Above on the Ford Bridge Looking Down at the River

O, can you hear them
at all, these riffle-
perfect rhythmic cells
and trails of scales, plucked,
muted, muttering
below — a string of
small bells just under
the level of your
listening?

on moving — Alice Oswald and Cole Swensen

More words rediscovered while reading past entries in my “On This Day” practice:

I found this great quote from Oswald in her introduction to the poetry anthology, The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet:

Raking, like any outdoor work, is a more mobile, more many-sided way of knowing a place than looking. When you rake leaves for a couple of hours, you can hear right into the non-human world, it’s as if you and the trees had found a meeting point in the sound of the rake. (ix)

Mobile and many-sided, more than looking from a distance.

From Cole Swensen:

Then sitting still, we occupy a place; when moving through it, we displace place, putting it into motion and creating a symbiotic kinetic event in which place moves through us as well. 

Walk/ Cole Swensen

aug 14/RUN

8 miles
ford-franklin loop
70 degrees / dew point: 64

Oh that sun! Too bright and warm! Advice for future Sara: get up earlier and pick a route in the shade. The sun sapped my energy and made me sweat even more than usual. Dripping ponytail, wet shirt, damp face. Had a few brief thoughts about cutting the run short and crossing at lake street, but didn’t. I remember reaching that bridge and hearing a voice in my head whisper, there’s no turning back after this. I’m proud of myself for continuing with the run. Did it get easier? I’m not sure, but I didn’t think about stopping again or doubt that I could keep going, and the last mile felt good, like I could have run longer.

On the warm-up walk before starting my run, I walked over dozens of acorns on a neighbor’s sidewalk, under their huge tree. As I walked, I could hear more acorns falling. I wondered if one would land on my head (it didn’t). I’ve been noticing the acorns for the last couple of weeks, hearing them hit garage roofs and the alley asphalt while sitting on my back deck. Usually the acorns begin falling at the end of July, so mid-August is a little later for me to start noticing them.

All I remember about crossing the ford bridge was that I had just started and I was already overheated. So hot in the sun! Running (and walking) across the franklin bridge, I looked for rowers (none) and noticed the sandbars just beneath the surface and the current, moving fast. It reminded me of some lines I read from Gave by Cole Swensen:

from Gave/ Cole Swensen

You walk alongside the river. No; you walk always with. Not down, or along, or beside. And you can’t help but measure–is it moving faster? And does that mean each molecule of water? Or does a body of water form internal bodies, pockets that move in counterpoint, in back-beat, in eddies? And does the surface ever move? Or is it something underneath that does? Of course, yes, the molecules of water that form the surface must certainly go forward, but does that mean that the surface itself moves too? Then what is a standing wave? What stays? I watch a large branch being carried down by the river, and then a kayaker, moving faster, then turn to walk back upstream like I’m walking into the arms of some thing.

I haven’t thought much about the distinction between being with and beside. I like beside as next to, and imagine it as a possible form of being with the thing you are in proximity to — a new way of being in community with others?

Reading through a great article about Lorine Niedecker, Dwelling with Place: Lorine Niedecker’s Ecopoetics, I’m wondering if a focus on with, and not just beside, is partly about seeing the river as another community member, not a thing/landscape/scenery you walk beside, but someone you walk with. And now, reading the CS’s lines again, I’m thinking of the idea that the walking with the river is describing how the water is moving too, so you’re not just walking past something that’s next to you.

I’m also thinking about the Sheldrake quotes I posted at the end of yesterday’s entry, on stability and flux and how we (bodies) are processes, not just things. Some of CS’s questions seem to be getting at this, wondering what part of the river fluctuates, and what part of it is stable.

july 29/RUN

8 miles
almost to downtown and back
71 degrees
humidity: 90% / dew point: 69

8 miles! I ran first half without stopping, slow and steady. The heat and humidity didn’t bother me too much. I can tell I’m getting mentally stronger. Not too long after the turn around, at the Bohemian Flats parking lot, I stopped for water and the port-a-potty. Stopped at the next port-a-potty too. So glad they were there! I know most runners have at least one terrible poop story, but I didn’t want today to be the day I made mine! Other than gastro issues, the run wasn’t too bad. I was slow, but I kept going and stuck to the heart rate plan: when it hit 168, I walked until it dropped to 135, then I started running again until it hit 168 again.

10 Things

  1. 4 or 5 stones stacked on the boulder
  2. the blue graffiti under the lake street bridge is not letters, but shapes of some sort
  3. a park worker on a big, lawn mower/tractor, whipping around trees, cutting the grass
  4. hello friends! — greeting the Welcoming Oaks
  5. a mother yelling at her kid — Carly Jane (or something close to that), put your legs down NOW!
  6. river water moving fast — I could actually hear it flowing south
  7. another park vehicle with bright headlights, trimming trees next to the trail
  8. gushing seeps in the limestone below the U of M campus
  9. a radio blasting out of a car window — didn’t recognize the song
  10. there was a crocheted sweater — orange and lime green, I think — in the port-a-potty at the flats

Cole Swensen and rivering

opening line from Gave/ Cole Swensen

no river rivers

What is to river? I can imagine rivering as the act of being beside and with the river — walking or running — or in it — swimming, rowing — witnessing the river.

Here’s another use of river as verb from swims/ Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

The river is something that happens,
like exercise or illness, to the body
on any given day
I am rivering.

On 16 august 2022, I posted this line from Burnett’s poem, I am rivering, and wondered, could there be such a thing as lake-ing? And how does it differ from rivering?

Rivering and lake-ing and streaming and brooking and creeking made me think of a line from Anne Carson’s “1 = 1”:

Every water has its own rules and offering.

What are rules and offerings of the Mississippi River and Lake Nokomis?

Cole Swensen is particularly interested in walking, both generally and specifically beside the Gave River. Here’s an interview I’d like to read in which she talks about her walks and walking.

Other sources to remember:

Cole Swensen and bridges

Swensen has a section in Gave where she lists different bridges, and “other ways of crossing.” I’d like to archive the information about Mississippi bridges that I’ve gathered — names, interesting histories, etc.

clear water

Skimming through Gave, trying to find the section on bridges, my eyes fell on the phrase, the water is brilliantly clear, and I suddenly remembered watching surfing competition in the Olympics. It’s taking place in Tahiti and the coverage was great. They even had a cameraman in the water. At one point, we got a view underwater of the surfers’ legs sitting on boards. So clear! Such visibility! When I swim in the lake, I can barely see my hand. What would it be like to swim in water that was that clear? Amazing and frightening and a bit overwhelming at the beginning, I think.

july 27/RUN

5 miles
bottom of franklin hill and back
76 degrees
humidity: 80% / dew point: 71

Brutal out there this morning. Beautiful, too. Ran 2 miles without stopping then started relying on my heart rate to determine if I ran or walked. Above 168 = walk / Below 136 = run. Tried to stay slow and relaxed and unbothered by other people passing me. It worked!

10+ Things

  1. a large stack of stones on the boulder — 5 or more?
  2. rowers, down below — a coxswain’s voice
  3. bright blue bubble-letter graffiti under the lake street bridge
  4. smell: hot chocolate — in this heat? deep, rich, feeling like winter
  5. overheard: 1 runner to another and of course, she made all those passive-aggressive comments
  6. a big group of shirtless runners (10 of them?), a smaller group of runners with shirts (5 or 6)
  7. a runner, in all black, including black pants (in this heat!?), steadily running up the franklin hill ahead of me
  8. sparkling water through the gap in the trees
  9. a very tall runner — young, long and gangly legs
  10. roller skiers — 2 or 3 — clicking and clacking with their poles
  11. a big bird, soaring above, a huge wingspan

Thinking about the Mississippi and what it means to me and my practice. Finished a first read-through of Cole Swensen’s Gave — lots of inspiration. And just now, out on the hot deck, I was rereading Alice Oswald’s Dart. I want to remember this passage from the perspective of the naturalist looking for eels:

from Dart/ Alice Oswald

the elver movement of the running sunlight
three foot under the road-judder you hold
and breathe contracted to an eye-quiet world
while an old dandelion unpicks her shawl
and one by one the small spent oak flowers fall
then gently lift a branch brown tag and fur
on every stone and straw and drafting burr
when like a streamer from your own eye’s iris
a kingfisher spurts through the bridge whose axis
is endlessly in motion as each wave
photos its flowing to the bridge’s curve
if you can keep your foothold, snooping down
then suddenly two eels let go get thrown
tumbling away downstream looping and linking
another time we scooped a net through sinking
silt and gold and caught one strong as bike-chain
stared for a while then let it back again
I never pass that place and not make time
to see it there’s an eel come up the stream
I let time go as slow as moss, I stand
and try to get the dragonflies to land
their gypsy-coloured engines on my hand

I love her descriptions throughout this section and the gentle rhymes. Is there a way to translate this eye-quiet, slow attention while running? Is it possible — both in language and as a practice of attention? Something I’d like to think about . . . .