Tag: Jorie Graham

jan 28/BIKE

25 minutes
basement
outside: wind gusts, 32 mph

I woke up with a sore right glute/lower back. Not terribly painful, but sore and a bit worrisome. Wanted to run in the warmer weather but wondered if it was a bad idea. Then I heard the howling wind and decided to believe that it was a sign: don’t run! So I went to the basement and biked instead. It helped! I should work on biking longer in the basement. It’s boring. My bike is on a basic stand — no shifting, no zwifting, just pedaling and watching something on my iPad. Today I watched some races; next time, a show or a movie.

Before my bike: I’m in the process of re-reading all of the poems I gathered this year and choosing lines to turn into my own poem. This process inspired three directions of thought:

1 — open

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.”
(Vermeer/ Tranströmer)

When the door of my vocal cords closes, another opens. And through that open door I escape into a region I do not know what to call but which is vaster than the space of my body. You could say: my name is the door to my being, and in that interval when I’m stuttering, the door is left wide open and my being rushes out. What rushes in?
(from Liturgy of the Name/ JJJJJerome Ellis)

Open doors say, “Come in.”
(Doors/ Carl Sandburg)

This discussion of open doors reminded me of something I remembered thinking/writing about in a log entry, but not when I wrote it. It took a few minutes, but I found it!

Running north, somewhere above the white sands beach, I started thinking about something I was working on earlier today about how my changing vision is closing some doors, opening others. I’m particularly interested in thinking about how it opens doors without ignoring/denying the shut ones too. Anyway, I suddenly had a thought: it’s not just that it opens doors, but it makes it so those doors can’t shut. I waited until I reached the bottom of the hill and then spoke my idea into my phone. Here’s a transcript:

It’s not just that doors open, they won’t shut. I can’t close them to the understandings that I’m both forced to confront but also have the opportunity to explore. But the key thing is that the doors can’t be shut. my notes recorded during a run on 3 may 2023

I came to this idea after thinking about how vision is strange and tenuous and a lot of guesswork for everyone. A big difference between me and a lot of other people is that I can’t ignore or deny that fact. It’s much easier for people with “normal” vision to imagine, with their sharp vision and their ability to focus fast, that they are seeing exactly what is there. They’re not. Even if I wanted to, I can’t pretend that that is true. I’m reminded all of the time of how tenuous converting electrical impulses into images is and what the brain does for us to make those images intelligible.

log entry from 3 may 2023

2 — walls

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
(Vermeer/ Tramströmer)

I wandered all along the street that hugs the walls,
a needle floating
on its cloth. Once
I shut my eyes and felt my way
along the stone. Outside
is the cash crop, sunflowers, as far as one can see. Listen,
the wind rattles in them,
a loose worship
seeking an object
an interruption. Sara,
the walls are beautiful. They block the view.
And it feels rich to be
inside their grasp.
(To a Friend Going Blind/ Jorie Graham)

Here I’m thinking about inner and outer and the interior walls of a house and the limestone and sandstone and concrete walls of the falls and lock and dams and the gorge.

3 — blind

What Would You Give Up?/ Dorianne Laux    

Not the nose on my face, but the spite, the grindstone.
Not an arm or a leg, but the money.
Not the length of the arm, but the lie, the shot, the list, the twist.
Not the ear, but the lending, the boxing, the out on.
Not the eye, but the naked, the catching, in the blink of, 
the keeping it peeled, the turning a blind.
Not the elbow but the grease, the room.
Not the leg, but the pulling.
Not the back, but the shirt on, the breaking of, the scratch, the
     stab, 
the turning, the water off a duck’s.
Not the neck, but the sticking it out, the in-shit-up-to. 
Not the throat, but the jump down, the frog in.
Not the feet, but the ground, the dragging, the cold.
Not the heel, but the down at, the under.
Not the fingers, but the light, the butter.
Not the thumb, but the green, the sore, the twiddle. 
Not the tongue, but the slip.
Not the tooth, but the nail, the long in, the sweet.
Not the brain, but the drain, the picking of, the all brawn and no.
Not the breast, but the beating. 
Not the body, but the temple.
The bird in the hand, the foot in the grave.

This poem is one of five published in the Cortland Review in the spring of 2009. As an aside, the spring of 2009 was when I started my first blog, TROUBLE, which transformed my life, and also when my mom was in the final stage of pancreatic cancer; she died in the fall of 2009.

Not the eye, but the naked, the catching, in the blink of, 
the keeping it peeled, the turning a blind.

Yes, let’s give up these expressions. I am reminded of Naomi Cohn and her listing of expressions using blind:

Entries from the Braille Encyclopedia (excerpt) / Naomi Cohn

Blind

Blind alley a dead end.
Blind pig an illegal saloon.
Blind drunk what you get there.
Blind staggers a disease of horses.
Blind story floor of a building without windows.
Blind spot where the car lurks in the next lane.

Looking for this writing, I discovered that Cohn’s book, Braille, is finally out! How did I miss that it was published this past October? Oh, I know — I was worried about the election and dealing with the mental health crises of my two kids! I immediately ordered Cohn’s book at my local awesome book store, Moon Palace! Pick up later today. Hooray!

Didn’t Georgina Kleege do a riff on “blind” in her book, Sight Unseen? Just checked, yes!

The word blind has always meant more than merely the inability to see. The Anglo-Saxon translators of the Gospels make the metaphoric leap from literal sightlessness to spiritual or cognitive incapacity. Of course they were only following an ancient lead. Throughout the history of the language and in common usage today, the word connotes a lack of understanding or discernment, a willful disregard or obliviousness, a thing meant to conceal or deceive. In fact, when you stop to listen, the word is far more commonly used in its figurative than its literal sense. And it comes up so often: blind faith, blind devotion, blind luck, blind lust, blind trust, blind chance, blind rage, blind alley, blind curve, blind-nail flooring, blind date (more dangerous than you think), duck blind, window blind, micro-mini blind (when open, they’re hard to see), blind taste test, double-blind study, flying blind, following blind, blind leading the blind, blind landing, color blind, blind submission, blind side, blind spot, blindfold, blindman’s bluff, three blind mice (have you ever seen such a sight in your life?).

Sight Unseen/ Georgian Kleege

memories

Writing about walls and the inner and outer, I started thinking about Severance and innies and outies and the relationship between them. Scott and I are listening to the Scott/Stiller podcast recapping the first season and watching all of the episodes, before screening season 2. Anyway, I remembered Helly R’s consent speech:

My name is Helly R. I’m making this video roughly two hours before it will be shown to me. I have, of my own free accord, elected to undergo the procedure colloquially known as severance. I give consent for my perceptual chronologies to be surgically split, separating my memories between my work life and my personal life. I acknowledge that, henceforth, my access to my memories will be spatially dictated. I will be unable to access outside recollections whilst on Lumon’s severed basement floor, nor retain work memories upon my ascent. I am aware that this alteration is comprehensive and irreversible. I make these statements freely.

What does the severing process do to the brain? Is it all about dividing inner and outer memories? What is the role of memory and remembering in the forming/understanding/experience of selfhood? Irving gives a little speech about how our sense of self is shaped by our memories/stories/history to Helly in episode 3:

It’s an unnatural state for a person to have. No history. History makes us someone. It gives us a context, a shape.

may 19/RUN

3 miles
river road, south/north
60 degrees

Ran a little earlier, so it was cooler, quieter, calmer. Everything green. Everywhere orange cones from yesterday’s race. Encountered a strange squirrel that panicked as I approached — it spun around a few times, then hesitated before darting past me. Saw 4 roller skiers. Kept thinking the bag protecing the base of a new tree was a turkey. Noticed the faint shadows cast by the welcoming oaks. Faint because of the thick air, I think.

Listened to the birds as I ran south, my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist on the way back north.

Just after I finished my run, as I walked back, I could hear a man across the street talking on this phone, his voice loud and a little agitated. Was he mad, or was this just how he talked to people on the phone? At one point he paused then said, Hello? Are you still there? Silence. But someone must have still been there because he started talking again.

Almost home, I was thinking about shadows some more as I recited Jorie Graham’s “Still Life with Window and Fish.” In particular, I was thinking about the last line, We are too restless to inherit this earth. Then I thought about the beautiful interruptions — the shadows and the motion washed in kitchen light — and imagined myself as a restless shadow flickering fanning gliding upstream. Then this thought took me to a line from one of Victoria Chang’s Obit poems:

She switched
places with her shadow because
suffering changes shape and happens
secretly.

Not the suffering in secret part, just the switching places with my shadow.

Typing all of this now, I’m thinking about another J Graham line, The whole world outside wants to come into here, and twilight walks around the neighborhood before people close their curtains, when you can see inside their living rooms, watch the shows on their ridiculously big TVs with them.

added many hours later: In the late morning/early afternoon, I read a favorite childhood book, The Shades/ Betty Brock. I read the whole thing — all 128 pages of it — in about 5 hours. For normally sighted people that might not be a big deal, but for me it is. I read it with my eyes, not my ears! Yes, there was a rough stretch where I kept falling asleep every minute or so and stayed on the same page for about 10 minutes (or, maybe a lot more? It felt like a long time), but I still did it. Tomorrow, I hope to write about a few things in the book, and to also think about those things on my run. One thing that came up a lot in the book was the idea that the shadows in the garden ruled by a dolphin fountain and his magic were both beholden to the humans who entered the garden and independent of them once those humans left. A question I had a few weeks ago: what is the relationship between an object and its shadow?

may 16/RUN

4.2 miles
ford loop (short)
56 degrees / humidity: 84%

Sticky with a cool wind. Glad to have my orange sweatshirt on when we started, but happy to take it off after 2 miles. Very moist. I told Scott I felt like one of those sponges you use for moistening stamps — damp all over. This led us to a discussion of how most stamps are stickers now and how hard it is to find non-sticker stamps. I suggested that my comparison — between sweaty me (would that be the tenor of a metaphor?) and the sponge (the vehicle?) — might be a dead metaphor. Then I took it a step further and suggested that stamps and letters were becoming metaphors that no longer worked because people don’t use stamps and send letters as much as they used to. Now it’s all online. This lead us to a discussion of library archives and old papers and what’s being lost when all of our evidence is online (and easily manipulable). I think that conversation was wrapping up as we headed east on the franklin bridge.

I remember admiring the dark, flat river and hearing a far off woodpecker. No sun or shadows today.

note: this paragraph was added later in the today. Earlier I couldn’t remember what we talked about on the east side of the river, finally it came to me. Between Franklin and the trestle on the east side, we talked about Still Life paintings and I mentioned how many dead animals are in the ones I’ve seen — the only way to study them closely — and with pools of blood or strung up, their bodies contorted in grotesque ways — or were those just the still life paintings Diane Seuss picked for her poetry collection? Anyway, I mentioned wanting to play around with different meanings of still: not just keeping still, but enduring. Scott mentioned a whiskey still and I thought that, since we both like bourbon, I should write a poem titled Still Life that was about drinking bourbon.

Sometimes it felt gloomy and sometimes, like walking back over the lake street bridge after we finished, it felt intense, vibrant as a certain slant of light made the green leaves glow. Woah! What a bright green!

After delighting in the green, we talked about the difference between shadows and reflections and I mentioned how I always see the edge of the water, darkened by trees, as shadows and not reflections. Scott couldn’t understand how I would get reflections and shadows mixed up. I couldn’t either until I realized much later that my confusion stems from my vision loss, at least partly. The dark forms at the edge of the shore don’t look like reflections, they look like dark shadows — no details, no evidence that it’s anything but a mass of darkness. When it’s brighter, I can easily see and understand that the smiling bridge in the water is a reflection and not a shadow. Another example: I can picture and imagine easily the difference between the shadow of a cloud crossing over me and the reflection of a cloud on the water.

At the beginning of the run, I recited the Jorie Graham poem I memorized this morning. Then I talked about the other Graham poem I encountered (see below). After I finished reciting the poem — which I did successfully while running! — Scott and I discussed the difficulty of listening to modern poetry and trying to grasp the meaning of strange language, or language used strangely with ears instead of eyes. As part of this, we discussed the oral tradition and its different methods for telling stories that people could make sense of as they listened. Again (because I have mentioned it on this blog before), it makes me want to study more oral forms of poetry, especially as I learn to rely more on hearing rather than seeing words.

a poet speaks to me from across the page

This morning, before running with Scott, after I finished memorizing Jorie Graham’s “Still Life with Window and Fish,” something strange and wonderful happened. Looking through the collection that “Still Life” is from, Erosion, I found another poem I wanted to read: To a Friend Going Blind. I began to read it and, seven lines from the end, there it was, me. Not Sarah but Sara. Out of nowhere, like the narrator or Graham was speaking just to me. Wow. Maybe I’m missing something and her Sara is referencing something earlier in the poem, but reading it for the first time, I gasped. I am Sara, and I am (most likely) going blind, and I know the beauty of the walls.

To a Friend Going Blind/ Jorie Graham

Today, because I couldn’t find the shortcut through,
I had to walk this town’s entire inner
perimeter to find
where the medieval walls break open
in an eighteenth century
arch. The yellow valley flickered on and off
through cracks and the gaps
for guns. Bruna is teaching me
to cut a pattern.
Saturdays we buy the cloth.
She takes it in her hands
like a good idea, feeling
for texture, grain, the built-in
limits. It’s only as an afterthought she asks
and do you think it’s beautiful?
Her measuring tapes hang down, corn-blond and endless,
from her neck.
When I look at her
I think Rapunzel,
how one could climb that measuring,
that love. But I was saying,
I wandered all along the street that hugs the walls,
a needle floating
on its cloth. Once
I shut my eyes and felt my way
along the stone. Outside
is the cash crop, sunflowers, as far as one can see. Listen,
the wind rattles in them,
a loose worship
seeking an object
an interruption. Sara,
the walls are beautiful. They block the view.
And it feels rich to be
inside their grasp.
When Bruna finishes her dress
it is the shape of what has come
to rescue her. She puts it on.

Her use of inside and rich and interruption here surely must be connection to the poem I just memorized: the beautiful interruptions, the things of this world and even the windowpanes are rich and I love it here where it blurs and nothing starts or ends but all is waving and colorless and voiceless.