Warm this morning. Humid, too. Lots of sweat and a flushed face. Ran alongside the 10 milers for the “Women Run the City” race — just briefly; they passed me quite quickly. Everything was wet from the all-night rain. Was there sun? I can’t remember. Rowers? Not sure. Lots of people on the edge of trail, cheering on the runners.
Running north, I listened to the spectators. Running south, Beyoncé’s “Carter Cowboy.”
Right after I got back, Scott and I took Delia out for a walk. No more runners, but the road was still closed. So quiet! Scott remarked, and I agreed, that you don’t realize how much car noise there is on the river road until the cars are gone. I wish they could close the road to cars more — like they did during the pandemic.
shadows: cave paintings
The other day, I came across a poem by Muriel Rukeyser that reminded me of a great topic for shadows, especially in terms of painting:
In the cave with a long-ago flare a woman stands, her arms up. Red twig, black twig, brown twig. A wall of leaping darkness over her. The men are out hunting in the early light But here in this flicker, one or two men, painting and a woman among them. Great living animals grow on the stone walls, their pelts, their eyes, their sex, their hearts, and the cave-painters touch them with life, red, brown, black, a woman among them, painting.
Feels like summer is here. Everything green, my view of the river gone. I did see the river for a few minutes, as I ran down to the flats, but I don’t remember what I saw. Wait — yes, I recall seeing the reflections of trees.
Felt good for the first half, not so good the second. Tired legs, some gastro stuff.
added a few hours later, when I remembered: Along the river road, the workers were out patching asphalt and replacing wires in the street lights that were recently disemboweled again. How many times has this happened? Running north, I saw a guy in an orange vest with a big spool of coated wire, rolling out a lot of it on the bike path. Later, returning south, I saw another worker sitting at the base of a street lamp, fiddling with the wire. It looked like a time-consuming job. I read somewhere that all this stolen wire has cost St. Paul millions of dollars this year. I also read — maybe in the same article? — that the coated wire was stamped with “City of St. Paul” on it and that that stamped wire had been recovered at at least one scrap metal company that frequently bought stolen wire. Is Minneapolis wire stamped too?
I think I partly remembered witnessing the street lamps and the wire because of reading today’s episode of the Slowdown. Major Jackson picked a poem by Liesel Mueller that I gathered a few years ago for my list of vision poems: Monet Refuses the Operation. When I first encountered it, I didn’t really get it. Then, a few months ago (18 feb 2024), I read it again and it suddenly made so much sense. Yes, I thought, she gets it. She starts the poem with an image of streetlights:
Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don’t see, to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being.
I don’t think I see halos around street lamps, but the idea of things blurring together, and edges not being visible (or not existing), is very true to my experience. This poem, along with several others I’ve collected, including Ed Bok Lee’s “Halos” offer ways to think about how I see as beautiful and magical, not tragic. Here’s how Major Jackson (love his poetry!) describes this “bad” vision as beautiful:
Poets and visual artists work to give representation to the world which shimmers and blurs. Sometimes only impressions are available. Rather than a fidelity to things as they are, we desire to represent those very distortions. Today’s dramatic monologue is a gem of a poem, one that reminds how everything around us is divined with light, even our imperfections.
I can’t remember what I listened to for the first half of my run, but after running up most of the hill, I stopped to walk and put in my “Slappin’ Shadows” playlist. My favorite came from, “Dancing in the Moonlight”: you can’t dance and stay uptight
Favorite song: “Evening” — the haunting flute! the melancholy bass clarinet! love it
Evening makes me think of a wonderful poem that I encountered while rereading old entries from on this day.
Another word I love is evening for the balance it implies, balance being something I struggle with. I suppose I would like to be more a planet, turning in & out of light It comes down again to polarities, equilibrium. Evening. The moths take the place of the butterflies, owls the place of hawks, coyotes for dogs, stillness for business, & the great sorrow of brightness makes way for its own sorrow. Everything dances with its strict negation, & I like that. I have no choice but to like that. Systems are evening out all around us— even now, as we kneel before a new & ruthless circumstance. Where would I like to be in five years, someone asks—& what can I tell them? Surrendering with grace to the evening, with as much grace as I can muster to the circumstance of darkness, which is only something else that does not stay.
I think I’d like to memorize this poem, just so I can spend some more time with it, especially out on the trail.
random line encountered again: “squirrels devote much of their life to not-dying.” Today, I’d like to write around and into this stark line.
silhouettes
On Wednesday, I picked up three books related to my shadow month: the kids’ book, The Shades, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost of, and Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love. Today, I’m skimming through Nguyen’s and Walker’s books and thinking about silhouettes again.
When I look at Kara Walker’s work, I see adamantly two-dimensional images — images pinned and flattened in a rejection of Renaissance space.
Forward/ Kathy Halbreich
Okay, I would love to be able to read all of this book, but, wow, there is very little contrast and even with my brightest lamp, I’m struggling to read the words. Bummer.
I observe in Walker’s visual liexicon a world I’ve never seen quite so explicitly: a pictorial vision in which everyone is a mere silhouette of self, a profile drained of facture (def: the manner in which — a painting — is made) or flesh, pushed flat and up against the wall.
Forward/ Kathy Halbreich
Halbreich references an interview with Kara Walker in Index, which I can read much more easily than the book:
The silhouette says a lot with very little information, but that’s also what the stereotype does. So I saw the silhouette and the stereotype as linked. Of course, while the stereotype, or the emblem, can communicate with a lot of people, and a lot of people can understand it, the other side of this is that it also reduces difference, reduces diversity to that stereotype. I was kind of working through this in the tableaus and things that I’ve been doing, where the intention was to render everybody black and go from there. Go from this backhanded philosophy that blackness is akin to everything.
In a quiet voice, she [Walker] might say that her narratives are a radical condensation of a faith in shadows, or “becoming.”
Forward/ Kathy Halbreich
Two silhouettes I recall encountering during my run:
one: Running down into the tunnel of trees, dark and thick with green, I saw a figure ahead moving strangely, something dark trailing around them, almost like flapping wings. Getting closer, I could see it was a dark jacket of sweatshirt tied around their waist. As they swung their arms widely, the sleeves of the jacket were ruffled.
two: Hi Dave! Thinking again about how I (almost) always can identify Dave the Daily Walker because of his distinctive form: one arm that swings out from his side — wide and awkward.
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.
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.
Whew, that was hard. Running to the lake wasn’t too bad but on the way back, my legs were tired and I was hot and thirsty. I managed to bargain with myself — just keep going until you get to the water fountains or the light or the top of the hill — and do more running than walking in the second half. I think I needed to start earlier and bring some water.
I’m wiped out now, writing this, but I don’t care. It was worth it to get to run to Lake Nokomis and watch the glittering water, hear the seagulls, feel the lake air. Summer and open water swimming is coming! I signed myself, and FWA and RJP up for open swim this year! Will either of them swim? Hopefully at least once or twice. One more thing to note: looking out at the water, then to the little beach, I noticed the lifeguard boat — the main marker I use to navigate when I can’t see the buoys — has been moved. Hopefully it will be moved back again or I’ll have some difficulty sighting this summer.
Listened to the birds and the traffic and a song drifting out of a car window as I ran to the lake. Put in my “Slappin’ Shadows” playlist on the way back:
Moonshadow Golden Years The Shadow of Your Smile I’m Beginning to See the Light I’m Shadowing You Shadow Dancing If You Go Away Hot Lunch Jam Watching the Wheels / John Lennon
The last one about the wheels was just added last night. In addition to watching the wheels going ’round, he’s also doing time, watching the shadows on the wall. After he’s done singing, the song ends with random street noise: clopping horses, a person’s foot steps, someone talking. The clopping horses made me think of one of the rooms in an exhibit at Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA). You sit on a bench in the room as a day cycles through, complete with the light changing throughout the day to simulate dawn, midday, dusk, evening, and with a recording of sounds outside of the room, including . . . horses clopping. I recall having some deep thought about shadows and my relationship to them as I listened to this song, but I can’t remember what it was. I recall having a general feeling of agreement: letting it go and just watching the wheels go ’round or the shadows on the wall sounds good to me!
One other random shadow thing I remember: In the middle of the night, during one of 3 or 4 sessions of being restless and getting out of bed, I looked around the room and noticed the shadows. The moon must have been bright last night because there were lots of shadows even though we have the blinds closed. At one point, a car drove by and their headlights looked cool and strange traveling across the wall.
As I ran along the creek and switched from sun to shade to sun again, I thought about how welcome shade is on a too sunny day. When I’m running in the spring and summer, I almost always cheer for the shadows and the coolness they offer.
Yesterday I picked up a book I requested from the library, Margaret Livingstone’s Vision and Art. Very cool. I got it so I could read more about how artists have used luminance and shadows and light to create images that look real.
Another thought I recall as I drifted in and out of sleep last night: I’d like to think about how the way artists manipulate light and shadow to create their illusions of realness, might be similar to how the brain does it for us. The brain as an artist — filling in, filtering, transforming signals into images that we can use and admire.
Yesterday I revisited Jorie Graham’s poem, “Still Life with Shadow and Fish” and understood it in a way I hadn’t before. Wow! I decided to listen to/read something else by her. Listening to this recording helped me to understand it a little better.
Too hot this morning! My usual refrain: get up and go out earlier! Lots of shadows, birds — several turkeys in the neighborhood just past turkey hollow! None of them menacing today. I decided to put together another shadow playlist with all my favorites. Called it “Slappin’ Shadows.” I listened to it for the whole run instead of the birds.
I remember these lyrics from “Moonshadow” especially:
Did it take long to find me? I asked the faithful light Oh, did it take long to find me? And are you gonna stay the night?
I’m bein’ followed by a moonshadow Moonshadow, moonshadow
10 Surfaces I Ran Over
sidewalk
street — smooth
street — cracked, rutted
grass
roots
soft, sandy, slippery dirt
soft dirt that was mud 2 day s ago
curb
paved trail
edge of road, slanted, over a grate
Last week, I checked out Dorianne Laux’s new collection, Life on Earth. I especially love this poem:
—for Tony Hoagland who sent me a handmade chapbook made from old postcards called OMIGOD POETRY with a whale breaching off the coast of New Jersey and seven of his favorite poems by various authors typed up, taped on, and tied together with a broken shoelace.
Reading a good one makes me love the one who wrote it, as well as the animal or element or planet or person the poet wrote the poem for. I end up like I always do, flat on my back like a drunk in the grass, loving the world. Like right now, I’m reading a poem called “Summer” by John Ashbery whose poems I never much cared for, and suddenly, in the dead of winter, “There is that sound like the wind/Forgetting in the branches that means something/Nobody can translate…” I fall in love with that line, can actually hear it (not the line but the wind) and it’s summer again and I forget I don’t like John Ashbery poems. So I light a cigarette and read another by Zbigniew Herbert, a poet I’ve always admired but haven’t read enough of, called “To Marcus Aurelius” that begins “Good night Marcus put out the light/and shut the book For overhead/is raised a gold alarm of stars…” First of all I suddenly love anyone with the name Zbigniew. Second of all I love anyone who speaks in all sincerity to the dead and by doing so brings that personage back to life, plunging a hand through the past to flip off the light. The astral physics of it just floors me. Third of all is that “gold alarm of stars…” By now I’m a goner, and even though I have to get up tomorrow at 6 am I forge ahead and read “God’s Justice” by Anne Carson, another whose poems I’m not overly fond of but don’t actively disdain. I keep reading one line over and over, hovering above it like a bird on a wire spying on the dragonfly with “turquoise dots all down its back like Lauren Bacall”. Like Lauren Bacall!! Well hell, I could do this all night. I could be in love like this for the rest of my life, with everything in the expanding universe and whatever else might be beyond it that we can’t grind a lens big enough to see. I light up another smoke, maybe the one that will kill me, and go outside to listen to the moon scalding the iced trees. What, I ask you, will become of me?
Shorts, tank top, sun! Only one rower on the river. Under the bridge the water was sparkling — was it because of the sandbar? There was some sort of informal running event — no signs, but a stream of people, adults and kids, running and people on the edge of the trail cheering.
I ran on the soft dirt trail beside the pave path a lot. Gritty and fun to slide on — not slide as in slip but as in glide.
Encountered other runners, walkers, one rollerblader who kindly said, on your left, as he passed me. I could hear the metallic clunking of his wheels before and after he passed.
Birds, of course. The run began with the haunting coo of a mourning dove. I don’t hear mourning doves that often. I didn’t know, or if I did I forgot, that they are also called turtle doves. Also heard some black-capped chickadees. At the end of the run as I walked back home through the neighborhood, I heard a little kid call out, bird!, and the adult with him say, sparrow.
Lots of shadows: tree trunks, leaves, fence railings, birds, me, beside rocks, under benches. My favorite shadow was mine — running close to the railing, overlooking the gorge and the river on the east bank, my shadow was way down in the trees, near the water. I kept moving closer to the railing, trying to get my shadow in the water. I never got close enough for her to swim.
Another memorable shadow: the sidewalk was almost all gray shade, with just a little light, where the leaves hadn’t filled in it. I imagined doing an erasure poem that mimicked this form. Most of the text shaded out with just a few words sprinkled around — dappled? I want to try it! Speaking of dappled, the other day I was describing all of the shadows in my plague notebook (vol 20!). I noticed the speckled light under the crabapple tree and wrote: crabapple dapple. Told Scott about it and he responded, ugh!
Almost 4 miles in, on the ford bridge, I stopped to put in my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist. Put it on shuffle: “The Shadow Knows,” “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” “We Will Become Silhouettes,” and then a song I haven’t heard yet while running: “Shadows and Light”/ Joni Mitchell. I’ll have to think about her lyrics some more.
Here’s a poem that mentions shadow, and is about questions! Last year, I listened to a wonderful podcast with Alabi: Kemi Alabi vs. Divinity. It’s not available right now; is it because the hosts are protesting Poetry Foundation’s refusal to make a statement against the genocide in Palestine?
Ran with Scott on a beautiful spring morning. Sun, shadows, a welcome breeze. We ran over to St. Catherine’s University, across the river. RJP has almost decided to go there (hopefully she makes up her mind tonight) and we wanted to check it out. I’m impressed and excited to visit her next year. We talked a lot more in the first half of our run; we were both tired the last 2 miles. Scott talked about some Threads exchange involving Drake, Kanye West, and a diss track. We heard a creaking tree and I said it sounded like the squeaking gate we heard yesterday afternoon while we were walking. The mention of the gate reminded me of Marie Howe’s poem, “The Gate,” which I recited for Scott (of course I did). We talked about many other things but I just remember discussing what a wonderful campus St. Cates is and how great it will be for RJP.
On the sidewalk just outside of campus, we encountered several sidewalk poems that are part of the Public Art Sidewalk Poetry project. Scott took a picture of one:
November/ Marianne McNamara and Scott’s feet
November/ Marianne McNamara (2009)
Autumn winds drag leaves from the trees, clog the streets in dreary finale. Bare branches crisscross the heavy sky. Icy rain spatters, ink-blots the pavement. I settle at the window, stare into the black flannel, search the woolly lining of the night for winter.
I was unable to read this on the sidewalk, so I’m glad I could find it online. How hard is it for someone with good vision to read? I like the idea of this project, but in practice, it doesn’t quite work. Scott suggested they should use black paint on the letters, to make them stand out.
10 Things
smell: lilac, intense
tree shadows, more filled in than last week
a loud leaf blower
a safety patrol on the corner near Dowling saying I hate you, I hate you — who was he talking to?
the soft trickle of water falling from the sewer pipe near the 44th street parking lot
mud and ruts filled with water at a construction site on the edge of campus
feeling a fine film of dust on my face near the end of the run
more than a dozen signs in the grass outside a liquor store, each one said the same thing: wine sale. Scott: I guess they’re having a wine sale
running down Randolph encountering 3 or 4 sidewalk poems, none of them marked on the map
noticing a faint white thing flying through the air, high above us: a bird? a plane? a trick of the light or corrupted data from my eye to my brain?
the allegory of the cave, part 1
I want to read the cave parable and think about its shadows, but I want to read it in the context of The Republic so I’ve been searching my shelves for my copy. Which class in college did we read this for? Probably The Individual and Morality. Maybe a philosophy class? Anyway, it is very hard for me to find one book among almost a thousand. When we moved in I organized them, but over time, books have moved. Also, it’s dim in our living room and I have a lot of trouble reading book titles with my bad eyes. Yesterday I asked RJP to help, and she found it! Maybe I’ll try reading some of it out on the deck this afternoon. Reading physical books, as opposed to e-books, can be hard; there’s never enough light unless I’m reading it under my special lamp (designed for sewers and cross-stitchers and 80 year-olds with bad eyes and me). Reading outside in natural light helps.
an hour spent outside reading and dozing off and reading again . . .
First, two links that connect Plato and his cave with poetry:
From the Republic/ Plato — tldr; In these sections, Plato discusses why he doesn’t like poets. I’ll have to return to these sections.
Reading through the allegory, I came accross these lines:
. . . the eyes may be confused in two ways and from two causes, namely when they’ve come from the light into the darkness and when they’ve come from the darkness into the light. . . whether it has come from a brighter life and is dimmed through not having yet become accustomed to the dark or whether it has come from greater ignorance into greater light and is dazzled by the increased brilliance.
518a, The Republic / Plato, trans. G.M.A. Grube
Of course, I immediately thought of two of my favorite vision poems (what I’m calling them) by Emily Dickinson. And of course I have both of them memorized — but not her punctuation.
We grow accustomed to the Dark When light is put away As when a neighbor holds the lamp To witness her goodbye.
A Moment — We uncertain step — For newness of the Night (We Grow Accustomed to the Dark/ ED)
Too bright for our infirm Delight The truth’s superb surprise
. . .
The truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind. (Tell all the truth but tell it Slant/ ED)
I remember Plato’s cave and the shadows and the inability to access Truth, but I didn’t remember him discussing how both too little light and too much light blind us. The emphasis, as I recall, was always on darkness = bad, ignorance, the problem. Was I just not paying attention in philosophy class?
Searching for “plato cave,” I came across a video about it and decided to watch it:
The School of Life
I’d like to write more about what I find to be missing (also what’s helpful) in this account, but I’ve run out of time. Here’s one more video for comparison that I just started watching. When I have time, I’ll reflect on both:
Late morning felt hot today. Bright sun, not much shade. The river road was closed off for the annual Walk MS charity event so I ran on the dirt/mud trail between it and edmund. Listened to my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist for the whole run:
(skipped Shadow Song/Screaming Trees, Shadows and Light/ Joni Mitchell) Silver Shadow/ Atlantic Starr Total Eclipse of the Heart/ Bonnie Tyler Help Me Make It Through the Night/ Kris Kristofferson Sunshine in the Shade/ The Fixx The Shadow of Your Smile/ Astrud Gilberto Evening/ The Moody Blues White Room/ Cream
I wondered what a silver shadow might look like, then I wanted to see one. The silver outline of the sun behind the clouds? My shadow on the blue-white snow? I know — it’s Eamon Grennan’s birdsong in his poem, Lark-Luster:
. . . when summer happens, you’d almost see the long silver ribbons of song the bird braids as if binding lit air to earth that is all shadows, to keep us (as we walk our grounded passages down here) alive to what is over our heads—song and silence—and the lot of us leaning up: mind-defeated again, just harking to it.
Then I got distracted by mud and people and the sun and didn’t give close attention to the lyrics for the next three songs, only briefly registering that Bonnie Tyler was singing to someone whose love is like a shadow on her, keeping her in the dark; Kris Kristofferson was comparing someone’s hair “laying soft upon his skin” to the shadows on the wall; and The Fixx were declaring that they were the sunshine in the shade of life.
Off the grass, back on the road, I thought about Astrud Gilberto’s affection for the shadow of a smile — was the shadow cast by a very bright smile? Looking at the lyrics now, I understand the shadow to be the wonderful (but haunted?) memory of a love that didn’t last.
I am really digging The Moody Blues, “Evening.” That flute! Shadows on the ground/never make a sound/fading away in the sunset/Night has now become/Day for everyone
I thought about the white curtains in Marie Howe’s dark room instead of Cream’s black curtains in a white room. where the shadows run from themselves.
This is fun! I like thinking about silver shadows as birdsong, and shadows softly caressing the wall, and what it would be like to see shadows running from themselves.
Near the end of “Shadow of Your Smile,” I saw something ahead of me, in the middle of the road. A big black dog? No — it’s that menacing turkey again! The one I wrote about on april 30th and april 11th. Just standing there in the middle of the road, his feather fanned out. This time I didn’t turn around, but walked by him, at a safe distance. I also took a picture:
RJP has named this big turkey Jon.
Zooming in, I see a brave person on the sidewalk, nearing Jon.
Recounting the story to Scott when I returned home, I decided that I wanted to imagine this turkey as a friend, not an enemy — or a frenemy? I also began to believe that he’s trying to tell me something: write about ME! And I will. Well, I already wrote one poem:
Unsettled
by noise
I stop to witness
a dark shape draw near
too big for
a squirrel
too small for a bear.
The moment suspends
unresolved until
the shape turns — pale beak
red wattle framed by
tail feathers. This Tom
wants trouble.
What if this turkey is my shadow-self? Will he be around for my next run? I guess it’s the spring of the turkey — maybe the summer, too? I will add Jon — I might name him myself if he appear again — to my list of Regulars!
Inspired by another turkey sighting, and deciding that I will embrace these visits, here’s another amazing poem from Diane Seuss’s Sill Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl:
The turkey’s strung up by one pronged foot, the cord binding it just below the stiff trinity of toes, each with its cold bent claw. My eyes
are in love with it as they are in love with all dead things that cannot escape being looked at. It is there to be seen if I want to see it, as my
father was there in his black casket and could not elude your gaze. I was a child so they asked if I wanted to see him. “Do you want to see him?”
someone asked. Was it my mother? Grandmother? Some poor woman was stuck with the job. “He doesn’t look like himself,” whoever-it-was
added. “They did something strange with his mouth.” As I write this, a large moth flutters against the window. It presses its fat thorax to the glass.
“No,” I said, “I don’t want to see him.” I don’t recall if I secretly wanted them to open the box for me but thought that “no” was the correct response,
or if I believed I should want to see him but was too afraid of what they’d done with his mouth. I think I assumed that my seeing him would
make things worse for my mother, and she was all I had. Now I can’t get enough of seeing, as if I’m paying a sort of penance for not seeing then, and so
this turkey, hanged, its small, raw-looking head, which reminds me of the first fully naked man I ever saw, when I was a candy striper
at a sort of nursing home, he was a war veteran, young, burbling crazily, his face and body red as something scalded. I didn’t want to see,
and yet I saw. But the turkey, I am in love with it, its saggy neck folds, the rippling, variegated feathers, the crook of its unbound foot,
and the glorious wings, archangelic, spread as if it could take flight, but down, down ward, into the earth.
Warm, too warm. I need to remember to start these runs much earlier and to wear a tank top. A beautiful morning. All sun. Perfect for giving attention to shadows. Noticed many, cast from: new leaves on trees, tree trunks, lamp posts, a swooping bird, a parks truck, me.
Listened to water — dripping then trickling then gushing, vigorous rustling in the brush, some frogs in the marshy meadow near the ford bridge as I ran south to the falls. Put in my “I’m Shadowing You” playlist on the way back north.
I’m Shadowing You/ Blossom Dearie Me and My Shadow/ Frank Sinatra Shadowboxer/ Fiona Apple My Shadow/ Keane Shadow Dancing/ Andy Gibb
I didn’t think too much about the first two songs, but when I got to “Shadowboxer” it hit me: shadow box. I wrote the following before the run:
May is for shadows and I was thinking that I’d like to reread/study Plato’s Cave until I read this line in Readers recommend: songs about shadows— without them everything would be a floating morass of light and colour — drop shadows bring a third dimension to the 2D world. It made me think about one of my ongoing obsessions: ekphrastic poems and visual art. Just yesterday afternoon, I was reading Diane Seuss’ Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. (The title is a reference to Rembrandt’s “Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl“)In several of the poems I read, Seuss describes the dark and light in some famous paintings — does she ever mention shadows? Here’s one of my favorites, both her poem and the painting:
Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber/ Diane Seuss
Anything can be a marionette. A quince, a cabbage, a melon, a cucumber, suspended against a black background, illuminated by a curious white light. In this little show, the quince plays a full gold moon. The cabbage is the antagonist, curled outer leaves fingering the charcoal void. Cucumber’s the peasant, nubby belly to the ground like a frog. That leaves melon, center stage, rough wedge hacked out of her butter side. Each object holds its space, drawing the eye from quince to cabbage, melon to cucumber, in a left to right, downward-sloping curve. Four bodies hang in the box of darkness like planets, each in its private orbit. It’s a quiet drama about nothing at all. No touch, no brushing up against each other, no oxygen, no rot, so that each shape, each character, is pure, clean in its loyalty to its own fierce standard. Even the wounded melon exudes serenity. Somewhere, juice runs down a hairy chin, but that is well beyond the border of the box.
What would these four objects look like without the shadows around the curves, in the cracks, below the belly? Would they look more real? Less real? This painting is strange and haunting, and both difficult and easy for me to see. Can I remember it on the first part of my run? I’ll try. I’ll also try to notice how shadows offer depth, make things seem real, substantial, not just dots or flat objects.
side note: These fruits and vegetables as subjects reminds me of a movie that Scott and I rewatched the other week: The Four Seasons, with Alan Alda, Rita Moreno, and Carol Burnett. One of the other characters, Anne, has taken up photography and has spent the last 2? years photographing vegetables, one at a time. Her husband thinks this is ridiculous and offers it up as evidence for how little she does, and as one of the reasons he’s divorcing her. Reading Seuss’ poem and staring at Sánchez Cotán’s painting, I am far less judgmental of her choice than my 7 or 8 year old self was when she watched this movie, over and over, on HBO.
I searched for a clip from the movie and found it! Unfortunately it starts right after the photographs of the vegetables are shown.
Still Life with Vegetables and an Asshole Husband
During the run, I kept thinking about the painting and the objects painted in a box. How each of them were separated from each other, isolated, with some amount of light shining on them to display them. I thought about how sometimes I feel like I’m on display, a bright light shining on me, blinded, unable to see other people clearly even as I know they can see me. Disconnected from the world by the box. The shadow box, which brings me back to the Fiona Apple song, “Shadowboxer.” I started wondering about shadowboxing as a verb that didn’t mean boxing at shadows, but the act of putting someone on display, isolating them, turning them into a keepsake in a box on a wall, like the set of small boxes my mom had hanging in our many houses when I was growing up. I also thought about how there’s no reference point for size in the painting. What if the box was a small shadow box, and what if the fruit were miniatures, made out of wood or silk or plastic? (my mom loved wooden fruit) These thoughts made me want to study the history of shadow boxes.
Okay, just looked up shadow box origins and found some interesting stuff, which I’ll get to in a minute.
But first, any connection between Apple’s song and my version of shadowboxing? These lyrics seem promising:
Oh, your gaze is dangerous And you fill your space so sweet If I let you get too close You’ll set your spell on me
Now, the history of shadow boxes. I had no idea —
Sailors were the first to create shadow boxes. They made them out of wood salvaged from their ships. They made them out of fear. Sailors believed that if their shadow reached shore before they did, their life on land would be cursed. The box, containing the sum total of a sailor’s personal effects, protected their true self.
In this post, Karen Kao also mentions Cornell Boxes, named after Joseph Cornell who collected objects then arranged them in whimsical and weird ways in little wooden boxes. Adam Gopnik wrote about for the New Yorker in 2003: Sparkings.
Kao opens her post with an intriguing way to think about shadow boxes:
Think of a literal box, perhaps protected by a glass front, inside of which resides a world of whimsy. Think of it as found poetry in three-dimensional form.
Interesting, but what does this have to do with shadows? Not much, or at least not much in the way I expected. Shadow boxes don’t involve literal shadows, but figurative ones — the shadow-self as embodied through cherished objects. Am I getting that right? This shadow-self, serving as proxy for the real self, needs to be protected, plucked out of the world and made safe, preserved, in its own little box.
The idea of the shadow-self and the shadow as the property of the self bothers me a little. Even as I imagine my shadow to be connected to me, I don’t see it as me, mine. This leads me to a question for another day: what is the relationship between an object and the shadow it casts?
I want to return to the painting and Seuss’ poem and the shadows and dark and light within them, but I also want to finish this entry so I can go outside and sit in the sun.
Okay, I sat (and napped) in the sun for about an hour. I’m looking at the painting of the quince, cabbage, melon, and cucumber and thinking about light and darkness and shadows. Then, color. I think that this painting would look the same to me if it were in black and white — I searched for a black and white version, but couldn’t find one. Okay, back to shadows. They offer texture, especially on the cabbage. They also suggest that the light source is coming from the left side — a window? Anything else? I’ll keep thinking about it.
4 miles veterans home and back 57 degrees wind: 14 mph / 28 mph gusts
Ran with Scott. What did we talk about? I remember Scott talking a lot at the beginning — it was something he was excited about — but I can’t remember what it was. I do remember him complaining about Spotify and how some of their new policies hurt independent musicians like him. I talked about shadows and wind and marveled at a tree branch creaking in the wind. Oh — and I complained (again) about my new yellow shoes. I tried them one more time and they still hurt my feet and make my calves ache. I need to remember: no more yellow shoes!
The water was gushing at the falls. We could smell something being fried at Sea Salt — it’s open for the season! I heard and saw a cardinal. I was dazzled by the bright white paint on the locks and dam no 1 sign — we both wondered if it was a reflective paint that made it so bright. A mile later, I could barely make out the bright yellow sign at 38th — the one I referred to as a bee last month. It was dull and blended in with the greenish-yellow trees behind it.
My favorite thing today: the wonderful shadows the new leaves made on the sidewalk. Tiny little jagged dots or points, making the tree shadow look like something other than a tree. What? Not sure. A strange, magical sculpture? Glitter shadow? The leaves made the shadows strange, the shadows made the path strange. First encountering them on the double bridge, I didn’t think they were shadows but some sort of blob on the asphalt.
During the run I had mentioned that I didn’t know what my May challenge would be but that it would be fun to have a theme that I could make a playlist for. By the end of the run, after witnessing the wonderful shadows, I had my topic: Shadows! As we walked back, I was already creating my playlist.
I’m Shadowing You
I’m Shadowing You / Blossom Dearie
Me and My Shadow / Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.
Shadowboxer / Fiona Apple
My Shadow / Keane
Shadow Dancing / Andy Gibb
Shadow Song / Screaming Trees
Shadows and Light / Joni Mitchell
Silve Shadow / Atlantic Starr
Total Eclipse of the Heart / Bonnie Tyler
Help Me Make It Through the Night / Kris Kristofferson
Sunshine in the Shade / The Fixx
the Shadow of Your Smile / Astrud Gilberto
Evening / The Moody Blues
White Room / Cream
Shadow Stabbing / CAKE
I’m Beginning to See the Light / Ella Fitzgerald
Twilight Time / The Platters
The Shadow Knows / Link Wray
yesterday / The Beatles
Moonshadow / Cat Stevens
Golden Years / David Bowie
Candle Mambo / Captain Beefheart
If You go Away / Neil Diamond
We Will Become Silhouettes / The Postal Service
Crepuscule With Nellie / Thelonious Monk
Discovered this poem on the Slowdown before my run. Oh, Dorianne Laux, what a gift your poem is today!
The odds are we should never have been born.
Not one of us. Not one in 400 trillion to be
exact. Only one among the 250 million
released in a flood of semen that glides
like a glassine limousine filled with tadpoles
of possible people, one of whom may
or may not be you, a being made of water
and blood, a creature with eyeballs and limbs
that end in fists, a you with all your particular
perfumes, the chords of your sinewy legs
singing as they form, your organs humming
and buzzing with new life, moonbeams
lighting up your brain’s gray coils,
the exquisite hills of your face, the human
toy your mother longs for, your father
yearns to hold, the unmistakable you
who will take your first breath, your first
step, bang a copper pot with a wooden spoon,
trace the lichen growing on a boulder you climb
to see the wild expanse of a field, the one
whose heart will yield to the yellow forsythia
named after William Forsyth—not the American
actor with piercing blue eyes, but the Scottish
botanist who discovered the buttery bells
on a highland hillside blooming
to beat the band, zigzagging down
an unknown Scottish slope. And those
are only a few of the things
you will one day know, slowly chipping away
at your ignorance and doubt, you
who were born from ashes and will return
to ash. When you think you might be
through with this body and soul, look down
at an anthill or up at the stars, remember
your gambler chances, the bounty
of good luck you were born for.
