Tag: no headphones

may 6/RUN

2 miles
2 trails
69 degrees

It was nice and I felt good, so I decided to go for a short run this morning. Hot! I wore my summer attire: tank top and shorts. Sunny. Sharp shadows, still air, not much shade. Ran right by the Minnehaha Academy playground and heard all of the kids shouting and shoving and having fun. I peeked at the river through the trees: a flat blue. No turkeys or roller skiers or gushing water. No headphones either. Instead, I listened to the kids and the cars and the loud rumbling of a truck. Also heard: someone’s workout program on their phone, you have complete 3 miles — or something similar to that.

before the run

This morning, I’m reading another chapter of RWK’s Gathering Moss: The Advantages of Being Small: Life in the Boundary Layer. I was excited/please/inspired to encounter this passage:

Mosses inhabit surfaces: the surfaces of rocks, the bark of trees, the surface of a log, that small space where earth and atmosphere first make contact. This meeting ground between air and land is known as the boundary layer. Lying cheek to cheek with rocks and logs, mosses are intimate with the contours and textures of their substrate.

Gathering Moss/ Robin Wall Kimmerer

surfaces / where earth and atmosphere meet / boundary layer / intimate / contours / textures

I’m interested in surfaces, both ground surfaces by the gorge and water surfaces at the lake. I’ve gathered poems and thought about them before. And there is a line from my Haunts project that I’m still trying to write around/beside/through: It begins here: from the ground up, feet first, following. Today, I want to think about surfaces and boundary layers and textures and the intimacy that is created when air and land, foot and ground, meet.

things we did on grass

When you lie on the ground on a sunny summer afternoon to look up and watch the clouds go by, you place yourself in the boundary of the earth’s surface. When you are flat on the ground, the wind speed is reduced, you can scarcely feel the breeze that would ruffle your hair if you were standing up.

Things we did on grass is a line from an XTC song. I’ve been wanting to experiment with it. RWK is inspiring me!

still

the air becomes progressively slower and slower until, immediately adjacent to the surface, the air is perfectly still, captured by the friction with the surface itself. It is this layer of still air that you experience while lying on the ground.

Such a rich word and idea, still. I’ve been orbiting around it for years. And yet, the opposite of restlessness, something I can’t do: sit still, a calmness and willingness to stop and just be.

during the run

Since I’m thinking of surfaces, especially grass, I decided to run on the grassy boulevard between edmund and the river road. After the run, as I was walking home, I recorded some thoughts:

[transcript] may 6th. I’m thinking about surfaces and moss and where air and ground meet and these little spaces that are sheltered, that are a little warmer and still and allow for friction without total erosion. Then I was thinking about how I like those spaces — those small spaces, those enough spaces. Then RWK’s bit at the end of the chapter, about how moss still need to germinate and seed and they can’t in these sheltered spaces so they have to expose themselves. Also thinking about the back deck as a sheltered space. It’s interesting to put this in a context of the pandemic because of how the surfaces and how this dirt trail is surely wider because people were running and walking and using it during the pandemic. All the different ways that (the pandemic) is written on this surface, this boundary layer.

surfaces: asphalt, concrete, grass, roots, packed dirt, soft dirt, mulching leaves, rubbled asphalt, limestone

Earlier in the run, I was also thinking about friction in relation to surfaces meeting. In particular, my feet and the ground, but also RWK’s example of free flowing air being disrupted and altered by rock. My thought: we need that friction to feel bodies, to feel our bodies. A flash of Wittgenstein and his rough ground (as opposed to smooth ice) flashed through my head.

I thought about the benefits of being small and a discussion I had with FWA the other day when he was suggesting that humans are resilient in the way that small trees that can bend and lean with the wind during a heavy storm are.

after the run

Ideas to give some attention:

  • Intimacy and Forrest Gander and Anne Pringles’ conversation about intimacy as an encounter that transforms you and Scott describing two trees growing out of the same spot and intertwining as intimate
  • the texture of wind when encountering objects, makes me think of light on surfaces and how the ancient greeks took that into account in their understandings of, and names for, color
  • surfaces and feet first, following — the encounter between foot and ground is the space where a poem can be written and offered
  • the boundary layer visible to our eye as the horizontal lines I mentioned last month: the line between blue and brown
  • where earth and atmosphere meet = violet
  • grass as threshold (a boundary space): the threshold between neighborhood and park, between life and death — grass as a space where the dead and living can meet
  • the dirt trail through the grass as a record of the pandemic
  • not too deep, at the surface: humus, loam

may 5/RUNWALK

4.25 miles
minnehaha falls and back
59 degrees

Warm! Nothing hurt, it was just hard. My heart rate was higher. Who cares? No back or calf or hip pain! I’m trying to ease back in. Today I ran 4 minutes/walked 1, 8 times. I was proud of myself for sticking with it, even as my heart rate climbed. Yes, I’m ready for some mental toughness!

10 Things

  1. an abundance of sparkles on the river
  2. more green leaves crawling up the trunks of trees
  3. fee bee fee bee
  4. shadow, 1: a straight-ish line on the path from the fence
  5. shadow, 2: soft, sprawling branches
  6. shadow, 3: me — sharp, upright, satisfied
  7. the faint, slightly off tune dinging of the train bell
  8. flowing falls
  9. park workers had the one set of stairs blocked off — I heard water, were they spraying down the steps?
  10. passing another runner from behind, they were dressed warmly in long pants and a a jacket and breathing heavily

enoughness / contentment / not scarcity

Moss lifeways offer a strong contrast to the ways we’ve organized our society, which prioritizes relentless growth as the metric of well-being: always getting bigger, producing more, having more. Infinite growth is ecologically impossible and exceedingly destructive, as it demands the transformation of the lives of other beings into raw materials to feed the fiction. Mosses show us another way—the abundance that emanates from self-restraint, from enoughness. Mosses have lived too long on this planet to be seduced by the nonsense of accumulation, the delusion of permanence, the endless striving for productivity. Maybe our heartbeats slow when we sit with mosses because they remind us that contentment could be ours.

Ancient Green/ Robin Wall Kimmerer

Summer Day/ Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

When I think of green, I think of another concept Robin Wall Kimmerer promotes: abundance — as in, a gift economy and a challenge to the (mostly) myth of scarcity. In May, green is almost too abundant — a gift that is not scarce!

walk: 45 minutes
winchell trail (ravine) / tunnel of trees / edmund
76 degrees

Took Delia out for a walk in the afternoon. The green is taking over. The view from above in the tunnel of trees was only green — no dirt trail below, no sliver of river, no exposed sewer pipe. Just green. As we walked, I thought about another passage I read from RWK in “Ancient Green” this afternoon:

They [green moss] cover the inanimate with the animate. Without judgment, they cover our mistakes, with an unconditional acceptance of their responsibility for healing.

Ancient Green/ Robin Wall Kimmerer

Everywhere green — not moss, but leaves — were covering bare branches, sewer pipes, the gorge. A green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return of the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Did I feel that way about the green I was encountering today? Somewhat, but I also felt it taking over, transforming the floodplain forest in ways I didn’t like: too hidden.

overheard: music from car radios! Someone blasting “Bohemian Rhapsody,” someone else “Rhapsody in Blue.” Until typing these 2, I didn’t make the rhapsody connection.

It must be this rhapsody or none,
The rhapsody of things as they are.
(The Man with the Blue Guitar/ Wallace Stevens)

rhapsody: a portion of an epic poem adapted for recitation

may 3/RUN

3.25 miles
trestle turn around
47 degrees

A little cooler, but sunny. I wore shorts and my legs didn’t feel cold. The green continues to spread. I’m sure I still have a view of the river but I don’t remember looking at it, not even once. I saw some rowers heading down to the rowing club, but didn’t hear them on the water. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker. Was passed by several groups of young and fast runners. High school or college teams? Not sure.

Mostly I felt good. My heart rate is still high. I guess I lost some fitness on my almost 2 week break. Monday, I’ll try some more deliberate walk-run segments.

Listened to other runners, cars, water gushing out of sewer pipes heading north, my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist heading back south.

Ran on the grass for a few stretches to avoid other runners and walkers. Thought about how several sites recommended running on more gentle surfaces, like grass, when dealing with a herniated disc or sciatica.

before the run

I’m thinking more about open fields, meadows, lawns, boulevards, village greens, grasslands both wild and manufactured. Grassy spaces I recall from childhood, living in sub-divisions in North Carolina and Virginia and Iowa: soccer fields, manicured lawns, pastures just beyond my backyard.

I decided to look through the poems I’ve gathered for more meadow poems. Found Robert Duncan’s Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow. Wow.

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind, 
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart, 
an eternal pasture folded in all thought 
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light 
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

An eternal pasture with a hall made by light and shadows. After the poem, I wrote about Duncan’s idea of projective verse

poetry shaped by rhythms of poet’s breath. So cool–I want to explore this more, thinking about breathing when I run vs. walk vs. sit.

“Olson argues that the breath should be a poet’s central concern, rather than rhyme, meter, and sense. To listen closely to the breath, Olson states, “is to engage speech where it is least careless—and least logical.” The syllable and the line are the two units led by, respectively, the ear and the breath: 

“the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE 
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE”

poetry foundation introduction to “Projective Verse”

The heart, by way of the breath, to the line — This idea will be the start of a moving while writing experiment!

after the run

up to the wind-stripped branches shadow-
signing the ground before you the way, lately, all
the branches seem to, or you like to say they do,
which is at least half of the way, isn’t it, toward
belief — whatever, in the end, belief
is…
(My Meadow, My Twilight/ Carl Phillips)

My husband and I were arguing about a bench we wanted to buy and put in part of our backyard, a part which is actually a meadow of sorts, a half acre with tall grasses and weeds and the occasional wild flower because we do not mow it but leave it scrubby and unkempt. 
(The Bench/ Mary Ruefle)

And, back to the field:

Crossing a field, wading

                   through nothing
        but timothy grass,

imagine yourself passing from
and into. Passing through

doorway after
doorway after doorway.
(Threshold/ Maggie Smith)

After the rain, it’s time to walk the field

again, near where the river bends. Each year

I come to look for what this place will yield –

lost things still rising here.
(After the Rain/ Jared Carter)

may 1/RUN

4 miles
minnehaha falls and back
60 degrees

Warm! Green everywhere — tufts of grass on the bluff, leaves unfurling from the trees. Lots of bikers on the trail today. I ran to the falls without stopping, then took several walk breaks on the way back. My heart rate was high, my legs were sore. I think I should do a post-injury walk/run plan to ease back into moving.

As I write this on my deck, a black-capped chickadee is doing their feebee call. So loud! So constant. No answer yet.

10 Things

  1. Sea Salt is open at the falls — I could smell it as I ran through the park — what was the smell? fried and salty?
  2. a group of kids with adults — students/teacher? — below me on the winchell trail
  3. the falls parking lot was full of cars
  4. kids yelling/laughing on the playground
  5. a park worker driving a big mower, cutting grass on the strip between the walking and biking path — the lawn mower had a bright orange triangle on the back
  6. a biker in a bright yellow shirt with a matching bright yellow helmet
  7. someone swinging at the falls playground
  8. a biker biking in wide circles under the ford bridge
  9. flashes of white though the (already) thick green on the trail below me and beside the creek — I think it was the heads of people taking the path that leads to the river
  10. yellow and red tulips near a parking lot

before the run

Thank you past Sara for posting this beautiful Katie Farris poem — Ode to Money, or Patient Appealing Health Insurance for Denial of Coverage — and giving me inspiration for a May challenge with these lines:

America’s optimistic to dye its money
green. Leaves are green
because of chlorophyll, which is the machine
that turns sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into leaf, stem, and root. All
the little blades of grass left behind by the lawn mower like Civil
War soldiers. Same as cash.

Grass! A whole month with grass? Maybe a whole month with green, one week with grass? Yes! And (at least) a week with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gathering moss. Will this challenge idea go the way of last month’s steps? Forgotten after a few days? I hope not.

like Civil War soldiers — the line this is referencing in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was one of my first favorite lines from a poem:

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

I posted this section of Song of Myself on 18 may 2020. Here’s another part I want to remember:

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

And now I’m thinking about Mary Oliver and her line about rising up again like grass, and realizing that she was referencing Whitman with it. She loved Walt Whitman. Uh oh — I’m feeling a shift in direction. Will I forgo grass for a study of Walt Whitman?

during the run

As I mentioned in my 10 things list, while I was running, I encountered a park worker mowing the strip of grass between the bike and walking paths. I decided that that would be my image of grass for today. I could smell the freshly cut grass as I ran by. I wonder what the parks’ department’s schedule for mowing grass is — how often? and how many acres of grass do they maintain across the city?

after the run

1

Read Mary Oliver’s chapter in Upstream, “My Friend, Walt Whitman.” I’m pretty sure I’ve posted this line before, but I’ll do it again because it fits:

I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple–or a green field–a place to enter, and in which to feel.

2

I decided to look up information about minneapolis parks and mowing.

4,660 acres of grass/turf mowed

They divided grassy areas into 3 types: athletic fields, general park turf, reduced mowing areas.

general park turf: “We cut grass to a height of 3 inches on a regular basis as time and weather allows, but grass height may exceed 5 inches at times. This standard applies to most of the Park System including neighborhood parks, boulevards, parkways and active use areas within regional parks.”

reduced mowing areas: “We maintain some park lands through mowing on an infrequent basis. These areas include steep hillsides, erosion prone slopes, shorelines and park lands that are not intensively maintained.”

I love that the parks department posts this information!

Also wanted to add this video. It’s light on sources, especially the early history of grass, but I like the clips from commercials:

And here’s a useful resource to return to, and also to use to supplement the video:

The History of Early American Landscape Design: Lawn

And also this — Get Off My Lawn! — which has an interesting 30 minute podcast, images related to the lawn from the Smithsonian Museum.

april 29/WALKRUN

walk: 25 minutes
neighborhood
52 degrees

Took a walk with Delia the dog through the neighborhood. The sky was very blue, with no clouds. Had the wind blown them all away?

A beautiful contrast: a silvery birch (or aspen?) with no leaves against the bright blue sky

Earlier today, I bent over too far and tweaked my back (see below). As I walked, I felt stiff and too cautious. Everything tight and anxious, like when I’m walking on a sidewalk covered with ice.

A favorite moment: turning a corner and walking under the bright green leaves of an enormous willow tree

before the walk

No tornadoes! No 85 mph wind! No golf ball sized hall or thunder or giant trees crashing down! No damaged roofs or freaked out dogs or power outages! Not even rain. Several tornadoes touched down in southern Minnesota, south of FWA, but by the time the line of storms reached the edge of the twin cities, it split in two, with one section angling north of us, and one angling south. Whew.

Whatever has been happening with my back/piriformis/glutes/? seems to have turned a corner. Not fully healed, but feeling much stronger. A new problem: a dull, restless ache in my left hamstring. It doesn’t hurt that much, just feels uncomfortable. If it’s a muscle, I think it’s my semitendinosus or maybe the satorius?

20 minutes later: Ever since I bent over and experienced a burst of sharp pain in my lower back 2 days ago, I’ve been trying to avoid bending over with my legs straight. Reaching down to put a baking sheet away, I forgot. Ouch! oh oh oh oh oh oh — that’s what I chanted after it happened. Damn, that’s some pain. Now, reverberations. Boo. Decided to call and make an appointment with a spine specialist — May 23rd. I hope everything is better before then!

Doing some more research about running and herniated discs (I think that’s what I might have), I read that low-impact running might help — something about the movement producing spinal fluid? So, with some trepidation, I decided to go out for a short run —

run: 2.4 miles
2 trails
54 degrees

I was very nervous to take the first few steps, but after a block, I started to feel good. My back and legs didn’t hurt at all and it was wonderful to be out moving beside the gorge. No pain at all during the run! (I walked some, too)

10 Things

  1. a turkey on the edge of the path near the Horace Cleveland Overlook
  2. a roller skier and a biker
  3. several of the benches along the trail were occupied
  4. the soft, sprawling shadows of tree branches
  5. a runner moving fast, working hard with slapping feet and jagged breaths
  6. kids laughing and yelling at the playground across the road
  7. swarming gnats near the 42nd entrance to the winchell trail
  8. someone in a big white hat, below me, on a path closer to the river
  9. a bird — but not a cardinal — calling out the same note in quick succession, maybe 15 or so times
  10. soft purple flowers on the edge of the trail — not Siberian squill

The Bog Wife

Down to the wire. I had to finish this wonderful book by the end of the day before it was automatically returned. I did it! What a wonderful ending, and so fitting for my thinking about entanglement. A beautiful story about a history of compacts with the land.

compact: an agreement or covenant, to knit or draw together

the compact / The Bog Wife

april 15/RUN

2.5 miles
2 trails
44 degrees / wind: 15 mph

Windy this morning and warmer than I thought it would be. I was overdressed in a short-sleeved shirt, a hooded pull-over, and short running tights. I continue to feel sore, so I wondered if I should run. Luckily. my back and glutes didn’t hurt when I was running. In fact, they felt better, like the movement was loosening them up. There were lots of shadows on the trail — from me, trees, the fence. I’m thinking about indigo today so I briefly wondered if I’d call the darker shadows indigo. Nope, they weren’t dark enough. The sun made the river sparkle as I looked to the south. Wow!

Encounter: a woman with her dog on the narrow winchell trail. As I ran by she called out, Look out for his poop! I couldn’t see it, but I leaped and hoped for the best. Success!

Anything else? Someone was sitting on the bench at the Horace W.S. Cleveland overlook. A street cleaning truck was clearing out leaves and making a ruckus across the road. The wind has strong and in my face as I ran north, and even stronger as I ran west.

before the run

Today I’m thinking about indigo. In the entry for indigo in The Secret Lives of Color, I read about indigo dye and the plants that are used to create indigo (including woad) and the process of soaking it in alkaline and drying it and collecting the powdery residue and forming it into blocks to be sent off to market. I think some part of this line might make it into my poem:

changes color upon coming into contact with the air, turning from yellowish green to sea green before settling on a deep, stolid blue.

The Secret Lives of Color/ Kassia St. Clair (190)

stolid: calm, dependable, and showing little or not emotion

Later googling “indigo,” I encountered the indigo bunting. Of course!

looks like a scrap of sky with wings

All About Birds
  1. “Like all other blue birds, Indigo Buntings lack blue pigment. Their jewel-like color comes instead from microscopic structures in the feathers that refract and reflect blue light, much like the airborne particles that cause the sky to look blue” (All About Birds).
  2. “Indigo Buntings migrate at night, using the stars for guidance. Researchers demonstrated this process in the late 1960s by studying captive Indigo Buntings in a planetarium and then under the natural night sky. The birds possess an internal clock that enables them to continually adjust their angle of orientation to a star—even as that star moves through the night sky” (All About Birds).

Knowing names correctly is everything; it’s a key to connection and tenderness and a turn to kindness. When you get to learn about an animal or plant, get to know their names, when you learn that there are birds out there who read the stars to fly home at night (indigo buntings), and how wondrous and lovely that is — maybe it might become harder to want to use a product that clogs up the sky with smog so these birds can’t see the stars?

Short Conversation with Poets: Aimee Nezhukumatathil

after the run

Found a PBS documentary on jeans, Riveted: The History of Jeans. I watched it online through my local library. Some things to remember:

  • “In Africa, the indigo cloth is considered the next layer to the skin. It holds a person’s soul, their spirit.”
  • many African captives who were enslaved in the new world brought with them the knowledge of making indigo dye and how to fix it to fabric. “Indigo is one of the ways in which slave holding became tied to the economic fortunes of the colonial experiment.”
  • indigo was the second biggest cash crop behind rice in South Carolina (1770s)

Now I’m reading the chapter on indigo in On Color. Before Isaac Newton decided it was a color in the 1670s, it was only a dye.

But if colors, at least for humans, are the particular visual experiences triggered by the detection of electromagnetic waves between about 390 and 700 nanometers, there are no new colors to be seen, only new colors to be named. Any new color is just a thinner segment than has previously been recognized of an infinitely divisible continuum. It isn’t new; it was always there. So why not indigo?

On Color

Finally, I found a blue poem with some useful lines that I might read as indigo:

Blue variations/ Lubna Safi

Blue is the blue of distance, “the ink that I use is the blue blood of the swan” (Cocteau), of the sea, of the faraway, a discriminating blue, of your eyes, of memory, the blue of baby boys, of glaciers, of a last light, the great blue chord of a nocturnal symphony, of being cold, of shallow holes, of tender bruises, the gathered blue of my mother’s laughter, of once in a moon, of mountains, of blueprints, of the hottest fire, of silence, of nostalgia, of herons, of dreams, lakes, and skies, of reading The Holy Book, the blue-black of my grandfather’s hair and Hayden’s cold mornings, of the horizon, blue taste of summer, off-blue of concentric waves, of elsewhere, “this blue that opened the way to you” (Bennis), of feeling, of late nights, of blues notes, of edges, of memories of your eyes, of piercing, of the afterimages of Lorca’s words, of stones and storms, blue like thought, like time, the past and present blended together, blue tent of refugee camps, of veins, faded blue of childhood’s tongue, of cold lips, glacial blue of the Arctic nights, of God’s unfolding hand (C. D. Wright), of our pale dot, of the tepid pool water, of the elemental hue of the upper sky “that seems to retire from us” (Goethe), of the typical heavenly color (Kandinsky), blue turning deeper and deeper before going out.

april 10/RUN

4.5 miles
river road, north/south
51 degrees

Today I wore shorts! I did a variation on the beat workout. Mile 1 = chanting triples / Mile 2 = metronome at 175 / Mile 3 = Playlist (Color). The variation was that I took a little longer between miles and I tried to get faster with each one. I felt faster and more locked into the beat, which was fun.

Right after I started the run, the tornado sirens went off. Hmm — it’s not Wednesday and it’s not the first week of the month, so what was happened? I asked a walker I encountered and she told me it was tornado prevention month. Of course!

10 Things

  1. the river road was crowded with a steady stream of cars as I entered the path
  2. a small tree beside the path, some of its tops were spray painted orange
  3. a bike was hidden behind the feet of the lake street bridge
  4. a man and a woman standing next to 2 overturned lime scooters — the man had his phone out, was he about to rent them?
  5. a tree leaning heavily against the wooden fence above the ravine — how long until the tree falls or the fence breaks or the park workers fix it?
  6. a runner ahead of me wearing white mid-calf socks, looking smooth and relaxed
  7. the part of the road between the franklin and I-94 bridges is open again
  8. I mistook the tree trunk with a burl at the height of a head for a person again
  9. a heavy gray sky
  10. road closed April 12th — what for? a race?

color

Today’s ROYGBIV:

Red — Taylor Swift’s song, “Red”
Orange — my sweatshirt
Yellow — another runner’s bright yellow shirt
Green — the grass, a pale green
Blue — a recycling trashcan along the route
Indigo — ?, maybe the color of a car?
Violet — the sky, the palest, slightest hint of violet

I’m reading more of the book, On Color. Here are some passages/ideas I’d like to archive from the introduction:

1

Color is an unavoidable part of our experience of the world, not least as it differentiates and organizes the physical space in which we live, allowing us to navigate it.

Often, this navigation is assumed, taken for granted, unspoken. It is not that I can’t see color; it is that I see it in unreliable ways. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes green is brown, yellow pink. Red is gray. Orange makes an object invisible.

2

But for all color’s inescapability, we don’t know much about it. There is no comparably salient aspect of daily life that is so complicated and so poorly understood. We are not quite sure what it is. Or maybe it is better to say we are not quite sure where it is. It seems to be “there,” unmistakably a property of the things of the world that are colored. But no scientists believe this, even though they don’t always agree with one another about where (they think) it is.

Chemists tend to locate it in the microphysical properties of colored objects; physicists in the specific frequencies of electromagnetic energy that those objects reflect; physiologists in the photoreceptors of the eye that detect this energy; and neurobiologists in the neural processing of this information by the brain.

*

For artists, the precise scientific nature of color is more or less irrelevant. What matters is what color looks like (and also, and not to be underestimated, how much the paint costs). 

3

Color vision must be universal. The human eye and brain work the same way for nearly all people as a property of their being human—determining that we all see blue. But the color lexicon, meaning not merely the particular words but also the specific chromatic spacethey are said to mark, clearly has been shaped by the particularities of culture. Since the spectrum of visible colors is a seamless continuum, where one color is thought to stop and another begin is arbitrary. The lexical discrimination of particular segments is conventional rather than natural. Physiology determines what we see; culture determines how we name, describe, and understand it. The sensation of color is physical; the perception of color is cultural.

4

Always with color, what we see is what we think is there.

A Crown of Sonnets?

A few days ago while working on my color sonnets I suddenly remembered that sonnet crowns existed. I wasn’t quite sure what one was, I just knew of them. Could this work for my color poems? I like the thought of it, but I’m not sure I can make it work — but I’ll try, at least!

7 sonnets linked through a structure: the last line of one poem is the first line of the next, and the last line of the final sonnet is the first line of the firsts sonnet. Tricky to not make it sound contrived. (see Learning the Sonnet)

Some variations — link with lines throughout but don’t make the last line of the last sonnet the first line of the first OR do the first/last line with 1 and 7, but not throughout.

april 9/RUN

4.6 miles
ford overlook and back
45 degrees

Overcast, warm. I was overdressed in a short-sleeved shirt with a hooded pull-over. I tried a slightly new route today: south on the river road trail, up to Wabun park, over the ford bridge, along the river in st. paul, stopping at the ford overlook, then turning around. A harder run today. I felt tired and had to convince myself to keep running a few times. Recited the poem I re-memorized this morning as I ran — Still Life with Window and Fish/ Jorie Graham. Such an amazing poem!

10 Things

  1. a brown leaf whirling in the wind then startling me as it landed in front of me
  2. kids yelling on the playground, one voice sounded frantic at first, like the kid was hurt. As I listened longer, their voice sounded less pained and more playful
  3. a tall runner with long legs loping (with a long, bounding stride) — not graceful but awkward, gawky
  4. 2 (or was it 3?) big birds with wide wingspans riding the thermals near the overlook — almost floating, smooth, slow, silent
  5. reading the plaque describing the giant rusted paddle wheel on display at the overlook — from 1924, part of the hydroelectric power plant — the rust was deep red-brown and speckled with orange
  6. a skateboarder heading to the empty skate park
  7. crossing the ford bridge from west to east, noticing how steep and crumbling the slope at the edge of the bridge was — I wondered how soon this would need to be reinforced
  8. the river was a deep and dark blue with small waves and no shadows
  9. someone playing frisbee golf in wabun park — not seen, but heard: the clanging of the chain netting as it caught the frisbee
  10. running above on the paved trail, noticing a man walking a dog below, feeling tall and fast as I passed them

Here’s a poem I found the other day. I love the idea of writing a thank you poem to a poet. Maybe I’ll do one?

For Allen Ginsberg/ Dorothy Grossman

Among other things,
thanks for explaining
how the generous death
of old trees
forms
the red powdered floor
of the forest.

april 7/RUN

5.4 miles
franklin loop
30 degrees

Wore my new Brooks for the first time today. I need to adjust the laces at the top, but otherwise, they’re great. Hooray for past Sara for buying these shoes, and hooray for new shoes! Sunny and cooler today. Wind. I felt strong and relaxed, occasionally my back was tight.

10 Things

  1. a flash of silver in the sky — a plane
  2. a blue sky — cerulean — no clouds or birds
  3. the river, 1: from the trestle on the west side: blue
  4. the river, 2: from the franklin bridge: small waves, textured
  5. the river, 3: from the lake street bridge: sparks of light moving fast, making my head buzz in disorientation and delight
  6. the deep bellow of a train horn on the east side
  7. the soft knocking of a woodpecker
  8. a turkey on the trail — as I neared them, they flared their feathers then moved over
  9. another turkey in the brush on the edge of the trail
  10. the bridge railing casting a thick grid of shadows on the path

Listened to voices in the gorge below — high-pitched, a laughing kid or a startled animal? — and wind and water in the trees for most of the run. Put in my color playlist on the bridge. Went deep inside the beat as I listened to “Mr. Blue Sky.”

Tried to think about my orange poem — I’m a little stuck — but got distracted by my effort and the wind and the turkeys. Now, after the run, here’s some inspiration:

excerpt from Notes on Orange/ Jennifer Huang

In case you’re wondering, the fruit came first, the color
name second. They called it red-yellow for some time, and
for some time it was just that. Red brought nearer to
humanity by yellow, as Kandinsky described it. I am just
that: a human who wants to be closer to god. What is the
true opposite of human? Maybe orange. A piece of sun, its
properties have been known to help us recall the feeling of
cool-blue grass under toes, the chime of a baby robin, the
holy scent of ripe mud. What is it that makes us want to get
close? To the gods, to summer, to sweetness, before we
retreat again . . .

One section — right now, it’s the beginning — of my orange poem is this:

Before word fruit and before fruit color
not as concept but movement, a certain
length of light finding its way to the back
of an eye, to a brain, through a body.
More than sight, sensation, the feeling
of heat* bursting out of the blue**

*or flame?
**blue as orange’s contrast color and blue as the lake water surface an orange buoy sits upon

hmm . . . I’ll play around with this some more. I need to connect this section with my experiences with seeing and not seeing orange buoys.

april 6/RUN

4.15 miles
minnehaha falls steps and back
45 degrees

Yes, spring! Bright sun and clear paths. Warmer air. Lots of runners and walkers and one roller skier in a bright yellow shirt. My lower back/glutes did not hurt when I was running — even though they had ached slightly (or softly?) yesterday and last night.

Did a slightly different route today: river road trail, south / godfrey / hiked down the steep trail then ran across the flat, grassy part below the falls where the creek pools and begins to bend / walked up the 100+ steps / climbed over the green gate / ran through the park / north river road, trail / boulevard grass

Running south I listened to the roller skiers poles striking the ground and happy voices, returning north, my color playlist. An orange song happened at the end, Shake it Well/ Koo Koo. Like most orange words, its about the fruit.

10 Things

  1. a loud rustling in the dry leaves below the double bridge
  2. a big turkey on the winchell trail, they moved off to the side to let me pass — no hissing or gobbling
  3. white foaming water falling beside slabs of ice
  4. the creek, moving past over the rocks, glittering in the sun
  5. a woodpecker somewhere in the trees, laughing
  6. the bench above the edge of the world, empty
  7. something big and bright and shining across the river
  8. something else big and white — at first I thought it might be the sky through a gap in the trees but later I decided it was a building
  9. my shadow in front of me — sharp, looming, distracting
  10. a lumpy shadow cast on the paved trail by a gnarled tree branch leaning over a crooked fence

This month, I’m slowly incorporating steps into my training, and my thinking about color, especially but not exclusively, orange. Here’s a color poem I discovered yesterday:

Black lake, black boat, / Emily Skaja

black fog I can’t find my way
through. Black trees, black
moon. I once knew the sky
from the water. This course
I remember, its narrowing.
How I crept my way down
the ladder like clutching
the gluey rungs of a throat.
I know you know how I’ve been.
Like you, like blood sucked
from a cut. A hot metal gash,
a beat of alarm, too late.
The water is listening.
That’s my name in its mouth.