Tag: remember/forget

july 15/RUN

2.6 miles
2 trails
80 degrees / dew point: 69
noon

Decided to take a break from swimming this morning; went for a run instead. Trying to think about the topic for next week for my class: breathing, rhythm, and pace. Did some triple berry chants, then some rhythmic breathing chants.

triples:

mystery
magical
serenade
history
remember
remember
remember
forget this
forget that
remember

rhythmic breathing: 3/2

everything’s/open
listen up/closely
everyone’s/looking
Can’t you be/quiet?

I know I did more, but I can’t remember them. I heard a black-capped chickadee doing their 2 note call. I tried to match up my feet and my words to the bird’s 2 syllables. I thought about the idea of trying to match my breathing and foot strikes to the rhythms of the gorge. Then I heard the electric buzz of cicadas, and I imagined the buzz as a shimmering shower of rapid beats. I don’t think it’s easily achievable, but the idea of listening to the gorge and then trying to breathe in time with it, is pretty cool — or trying to sync up breathing and foot strikes and heartbeats.

Here’s a great quote that I found (the quote on twitter, the original source from an interview of poets.org):

There is something very important and vital in poetic expression. The way that language is used to just connect us to parts of our experience, that can’t be captured in the linear, prosaic sense, and the instructional register, the command register. Poetry doesn’t do that. Poetry invites us to question, to discover, to delight, to be odd, to be frightened—all of these wonderful emotions that actually open doors inside us and to the world. 

One more thing: Scott sent me a very interesting article about new research on woodpeckers and how they’re able to withstand the force of their constant drumming. A couple years ago, when I was researching woodpeckers and writing poems about their drumming, I mentioned learning (I can’t seem to find the entry right now) about how woodpeckers’s heads offer good shock absorption. According to this article about a recent study, that’s not true. Their heads act like hammers and the reason they’re able to endure so much pecking is because their brains are so small. Fascinating.

june 7/RUN

3.25 miles
2 trails + extra
66 degrees

The rain that looked like it was coming never did, so I went out for a run. It’s overcast. Not cloudy, but CLOUD — one big cloud covering everything, making the sky gray and the greens more green. It seemed humid to me and I sweat a lot, so I thought the humidity would be high. Nope, only 47%. The run felt good, relaxed.

On the surface, all I remember is trying to lift my knees and my left hip and looking out for other walkers or runners or bikers. Can I remember more if I try? Yes!

10 Things I Noticed

  1. lots of bikers, mostly single bikers or groups of 2, one large, spread out group, several of them wearing bright yellow jackets
  2. no blue jays or chickadees, but lots of little chirping birds — I wondered if they were warblers
  3. the faint voices of kids playing on the Dowling Elementary playground
  4. exchanging deep head nods with a man using a walker
  5. Minneapolis parks is mowing today — saw and heard a big lawn mower speeding by on the path. More evidence of the lawn mowing: the smell of freshly cut grass
  6. encountering another runner down below on the winchell trail, near its southern start, where all the asphalt has reverted to dirt. They were wearing sweatpants and maybe (I can’t quite remember) a sweatshirt too?
  7. voices below, in the gorge — rowers?
  8. mud on the trail from yesterday’s rain, but not enough to slip in or on or through
  9. trickling water in several different spots in the ravine, just north of the oak savanna
  10. the dirt trail below the mesa that the parks dept cleared out last year is showing signs of being reclaimed: weeds popping up in the middle of the path

Today I got lost in the run, in some sort of reverie or just my mind shutting down for a while. I can’t remember what the river looked like, though I know I looked at it. I can’t remember anything about running through the tunnel of trees, not even a hint of a memory of the dark green or the sound of cars above, or whether I encountered someone as I ran past the old stone steps. Strange and wonderful. I like getting lost.

Found a beautiful poem through this tweet:

As from a Quiver of Arrows/ CARL PHILLIPS

What do we do with the body, do we
burn it, do we set it in dirt or in
stone, do we wrap it in balm, honey,
oil, and then gauze and tip it onto
and trust it to a raft and to water?

What will happen to the memory of his
body, if one of us doesn’t hurry now
and write it down fast? Will it be
salt or late light that it melts like?
Floss, rubber gloves, and a chewed cap

to a pen elsewhere —how are we to
regard his effects, do we throw them
or use them away, do we say they are
relics and so treat them like relics?
Does his soiled linen count? If so,

would we be wrong then, to wash it?
There are no instructions whether it
should go to where are those with no
linen, or whether by night we should
memorially wear it ourselves, by day

reflect upon it folded, shelved, empty.
Here, on the floor behind his bed is
a bent photo—why? Were the two of
them lovers? Does it mean, where we
found it, that he forgot it or lost it

or intended a safekeeping? Should we
attempt to make contact? What if this
other man too is dead? Or alive, but
doesn’t want to remember, is human?
Is it okay to be human, and fall away

from oblation and memory, if we forget,
and can’t sometimes help it and sometimes
it is all that we want? How long, in
dawns or new cocks, does that take?
What if it is rest and nothing else that

we want? Is it a findable thing, small?
In what hole is it hidden? Is it, maybe,
a country? Will a guide be required who
will say to us how? Do we fly? Do we
swim? What will I do now, with my hands?

For reasons I can’t totally express, this poem seems fitting to post this late morning, after spending time working on an introductory lecture for a class I’m teaching on noticing the world, then documenting that noticing in a log, and after writing in this log entry that I got lost in the run.

Also, it’s always a good time to post a Carl Phillips poem. His work is wonderful.

may 29/RUN

2.5 miles
river road trail, south/north
68 degrees
drizzle

Got up at 6 am again. Why won’t my body ever let me sleep in? Did my morning ritual of coffee, poems-of-the-day, and slowly waking up. Decided to head out for a run before the thunderstorms arrived at 7:30. It was dark-ish — dark enough for the street lamps to be on — and thick and heavy with humidity, green, and birdsong. I liked it. I encountered a few people on the trail, including a runner who “mornied” me. Heard some trickling from the sewer pipe, wind moving through the trees. It wasn’t drizzling all the time, although it was difficult to tell what was rain and what was sweat.

Running back north on the dirt trail between edmund and the river road I heard some more screeching blue jays. I thought about how I’ve been identifying them as crows for years. Why? I guess when I hear an annoying bird cry I think, crow. Sorry crows. The cry of a blue jay is way more annoying.

No river, but I managed to look down at the oak savanna: dark and mysterious. No roller skiers, a few bikers, no laughing kids or chattering walkers. Not too many cars this early on a Sunday morning. No rowers on the river.

Here’s some wisdom from @chenchenwrites that I found on twitter the other day:

as i’m always telling my students—why start from scratch? look at some paintings. look at photography. take a long walk. smell some basil. flip through an old notebook. tweak a favorite song lyric. follow what you already love into its forest. deepen that love. step into it more

and @hechizante777’s reply:

I worry that so many of my students (potentially pressured into nursing or other healthcare majors) simply haven’t had opportunities to figure out what they love… how to make space for that in an era of violence and scarcity?

Making space for figuring out what we love and then loving it in an era of violence and scarcity. So difficult. This discussion reminds me of Teju Cole and his interview with David Naimon for Between the Covers, especially this part:

This frenzied capitalism that we live in—what I’ve been calling market totalitarianism—produces loneliness, existential isolation that deprives people of the tools with which to navigate their place in the universe. This might be genuinely new in the history of the world, cultures have always provided people with those tools, and now we’re all just screaming into the void. Because we’ve been robbed of many, many of the tools that help anchor human experience in the world. I remember what Sun Ra said, he said “Everything comes from outer space.” Everything, it’s all meteors, it’s all from the sun. “The only thing Earth produces is the dead bodies of humans,” he said. I feel in a very vital way that the only thing market totalitarianism really produces is human alienation, depriving us of the tools with which enfold ourselves in the fabric of time. So when I encounter a quintet by Brahms, or traditional Papuan flute music, these are things that give me a chance to re-enfold myself in those sustaining human networks; to the mystery of being alive.

Teju Cole interview

And I’m also thinking of Haniq Abdurraqib’s “On Joy” (which I found very early this morning via twitter):

I don’t know what to do with all of the world’s burning anymore. Sometimes we start the fire directly, other times we’re unwitting accomplices to it, and then there are times when the smoke rises and dances above our own doorsteps, and we’re just too tired to keep the flames under control. I turn on the TV and people of color are still dying. I read the news and people in Trans communities remain dismissed, remain punchlines until they are dead, and people are still laughing at the bad joke. I talk to the women in my life and hear how they’re treated as a different class of person entirely. I don’t have the luxury to not dismantle the systems that allow for those things, and more. I am impacted by it, in some ways, I’m complicit in it, and it’s hard to sit idle while knowing those things. While being afforded a platform, artistic and otherwise.

When we talk about “the work”, as writers, so many of us mean the actual work of writing. The work on the page, of course. After a year of wrestling with the fragility of my own life, and the life of my closest human love, I realized that “the work” is also the work of living. It is the work of loving others when we can, taking care of ourselves when we can, and knowing not to let the former overwhelm us into forgetting the latter. Those two different types of work are two rivers flowing into the same body of water, for me. I don’t know how to write healthy and productive poems if I’m only doing one side of the work.

The only promise here is that I will wake up tomorrow and be as exhausted by the world as I was today. Sure, I may find a brief reprieve in a panda video (or, in the case of the particular tomorrow at the time of this writing, the new Terrance Hayes book!), but I will still find myself going outside to throw water on whatever flames I can, my arms weakening. I know that they will be there, every day. But even through all of it, something happened at around the end of last year. I started writing poems about being married. About my father, still healthy and living. About the friends I love and miss dearly. About my dog. I realized this urgency to archive the things that are not promised. I need the joy in my life to live outside of my body. I need to see it, to touch it. I need that outside of my body even more than I need the rage, confusion, and sadness on the outside. I know the sadness will always replenish itself. There is no certainty in almost anything else. I don’t know how long I’ll get to hear my wife sing along to pop songs in the car during road trips. I don’t know how much longer I’ll get to talk to my father with him remembering who I am. I don’t know when my dog will be too old to rush towards me with a wagging tail whenever I come back from an especially long trip. I need those things to live in other places. I need to have them outside of me so that I can run into them on the days where I will need to. Surely, each small joy has an expiration date. I have touched the edges of them. I don’t know how to fight against this reality except for to write into these moments with urgency. With fearlessness and hunger.

may 24/RUN

5.45 miles
franklin loop
60 degrees

Another beautiful morning by the gorge! Sunny, calm, not too warm, clear, low humidity. I felt mostly good, although my IT band — the left one — was sore off and on.

10 Things I Noticed

  1. a cardinal on the path, near the edge. The light and my bad color vision made the red glow in strange ways. It almost looked purple. I wondered if it might be a scarlet tanager, which is found in the gorge, but they have deep black wings, and the one I saw did not
  2. an off, so sweet it was sour smell near the ravine — the sewer
  3. a blue river with some white foam
  4. black capped chickadees singing their fee bee song
  5. no tarp under the lake street bridge on the minneapolis side, but some sort of tarp hanging off a piling on the st. paul side
  6. a empty bench on the east side, its back to the river, facing the road
  7. another empty bench on the east side facing the river with a clear view to the other side
  8. shshshshsh of my feet stepping down on the winter grit that’s settled at the edges of the path on the franklin bridge
  9. closed: Meeker Island Dam dog park (flooding); the road down to the east river flats (flooding); the walking path under the lake street bridge on the east side (erosion — the asphalt has caved in or fallen off into the river)
  10. a runner in shorts and a tank top who I first noticed as walker, walking up the lake street hill. She was talking with someone on the phone — speaker phone? or bluetooth headset? — and running slowly on the dirt trail next to the paved path

more fun with the IT band

Every so often, when my IT band starts to hurt, I like to play with the acronym IT, which stands for Iliotibial, by re-imagining what it/IT stands for. In November of 2018, I re-imagined IT Band, as a rock band, then composed a list of free band names. I’m pretty sure I played with IT again in this log, but I can’t seem to find it. Found it! In addition to re-imagining illiotibial, I also have turned it, as it is used in the common= phrase, “Let it Be,” into an acronym. I made a list of things IT stands for, then turned that into a poem.

Today, I’d like to play with another “it” that I’m encountering a lot as I think about my fall course proposal. It’s from Mary Oliver’s poem, “Invitation”:

It could mean something.
It would mean everything.
It could be what Rilke mean, when he wrote:
You must change your life.

In a poem I wrote in 2018, I speculated on what Mary Oliver might be referring to with her use of it. Today I’d like to expand that speculation beyond her poem.

I.T. could mean something.

  • iced trees
  • important turns
  • invisible tethers
  • irksome temptations
  • indigo territory
  • invalid treaties
  • inevitable treachery
  • imploding tasks
  • injured teeth
  • italic tymphanies
  • iridescent trestles
  • impending trash
  • invalid tramping
  • ignorant tests
  • immediately trampled
  • itchy traps

Not sure if anything will come out of that, but I love playing with words, and it made me forget about my IT band. I do think there’s something interesting about the invalid treaties.

Here’s a poem that I discovered today via twitter. Paul Tran’s poems are wonderful, especially when they read them (click on the poem link to check out their recording of it)!

Hypothesis / Paul Tran

Whether it’s true 
that the moth mistakes the candle’s flame  
for the moon or the bioluminescent  
pheromones of another moth, 

I can’t say. 
I was the candle.  
I was the flame 

conceived in and by reason of  
darkness, nibbling on a darkening wick.  
When moth after moth after moth  
swarmed me with their powdery wings, 

I asked why.  
I asked how.  
I asked if 

I could survive knowing 
that not everything has a reason,  
that not everything is capable 
of or interested in reason. 

Nothing answered.  
Nothing spoke 
my language of smoke.

april 19/RUN

4.75 miles
veterans’ home loop
33 degrees

Sun. Slightly warmer. Less wind. Hooray! Still wore my running tights, winter vest, and gloves, but felt like spring is almost here. Ran around the falls. They were gushing, but the creek was barely moving. Ran past the “big feet” statue. I can’t remember his name — Gunther something, I think — but I do remember that he was a poet, a hymn writer, and a politician from Sweden. Ran the Winchell Trail too. At the start of it, I slipped, but didn’t fall, in the mud. Said a lot of “excuse mes” as I encountered people from behind. Not irritated at all. A good run on a beautiful morning.

before the run

Thinking about roots and how things become rooted in the ground today. This topic is inspired by a favorite poem that I memorized in May of 2020: What Would Root/ Katie Farris. Here’s what I wrote in an entry from may 20, 2020:

I like the idea of this long, wild story, being rooted at the rock from the beginning of the poem. And I love this idea of rooting, being rooted and how the story unfolds around it. I want to spend some more time thinking about what it means to root, be rooted, take root. I’d also like to write a poem like this–with a story at the gorge–about sinking.

I used to have this poem memorized, and I think I can again, with a little practice. For now, I’m going to record myself reading it, then listen to that recording a few times while I run today.

during the run

Started by listening to the recording of myself reading the poem. It was very cool — dreamy, almost disembodied — to listen the words as I ran through the neighborhood and toward the river. Then, when the recording was done, I put my headphones away and thought about roots as I ran south above the gorge. I remember imagining my skin as more porous and open to the world and grass growing through my pores (instead of Farris’ roots).

Halfway through the run, in Wabun park, I stopped to record my thoughts. Here’s a summary:

  1. Thought about being rooted in a place, then being on the inside or the outside and how being rooted means being both in and out, or neither, at the same time. Just there, part of what’s happening.
  2. Then, I wondered, Does rooted always mean we’re tethered or stuck in one place, immobile? What would it mean to be rooted in a place while you were moving?
  3. Then: how are the roots formed? Instead of one solid, thick, sturdy root that’s difficult to cut down, what if we were a network of roots spread throughout the ground, connected and tangled with other? Roots can be networks — shallow and easy to pull out, like weeds, but multiplying and growing when you do that (rhizomes and nodes).
  4. Getting at the root, radical feminism and the root of oppression, the origin/cause of the problem I often think about the origins of my running story — there is no one root or cause or start, but a series (a network) of reasons.
  5. Chanted: root root root root/root root root root/ roo ting roo ting/root root root root/root root root root/roo ted root less I like these simple repetitions. I’d like to try chanting these for several minutes, then seeing what other words/ideas/chants might appear.

after the run

Here’s a sad, scary headline: Report lists Mississippi as one of ‘most endangered’ U.S. rivers

And here’s a hopeful story about activists making a difference and changing the future of the river: The untold story of our national park’s founding

Thinking about being inside or outside of yourself and being rooted and what of self/Self that suggests, I’m reminded of a poem I put on my reading list the other day:

Full of yourself/ Rumi

Translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori

Full of yourself—
a friend’s touch is sharp as a thorn.
A buzzing fly drives you mad.

Forget yourself
and what friend can hurt you?
You mingle with wild elephants
and enjoy the ride.

Caged in self,
you drown in anguish.
Storm clouds swallow the sun.
Your lover flees the scene.

Outside yourself,
the night is moonlit.
Lovers drink Love’s wine.
It flows through you.

Self-conscious,
you’re dry as autumn leaves.
You bite like frost.

Melt yourself,
and winter’s frozen meadows
will become spring’s fragrant fields.

(How) can we travel outside of ourselves? What does this untether/uproot us from? I posted this quotation from Jamie Quatro in a log entry from April 19, 2018 about running as prayer:

a state of prayerlike consciousness. Past the feel-good vibes, past the delusions, my attention moves outward: I’m intensely aware of the cadence of a bird’s song, cherry blossoms weighted-down after a rain. Things light up and I experience an interior stillness that somehow syncs me more profoundly with the exterior world. It’s a paradox: only when I’m fully present in my body do I begin to experience the absence of myself.

 Running as prayer

Does fully present in a body = rooted? I’m also thinking about entanglement and Ross Gay’s critique of buoyancy and floating free (see april 12, 2022). Can we be a self, rooted in a body and a place, and still be other than ourSelf? How do I fit Rumi’s idea of forgetting the self with entanglement?

april 10/RUN

3.25 miles
trestle turn around
51 degrees

Spring! Spring! Spring! Sunny and warm. Shorts with no running tights. Lots of birds singing and drumming and casting big shadows across the path. Near the end of my run, I saw the shadows and stopped briefly to catch a flash of a soaring bird. An eagle or a kestrel or a hawk? It couldn’t be an owl, could it? Do they fly that high? Didn’t hear any rowers and barely noticed the river — even when I stopped at the overlook at the end of my run and was looking straight at it. I think I noticed the dirt trails leading down to the gorge the most. Heard some dogs barking down in the gorge. Ran past a peloton on the road. Saw some graffiti on the door of the porta-potty under the lake street bridge. Overheard a conversation, or one brief bit of a conversation:

walker 1: “I’ll just have to get up tomorrow and go to work, and forget about it.”
walker 2: “uh huh”

This reminds of something I heard yesterday from one biker to an other: “They don’t have a leg to stand on to fire him.” A leg to stand on? I don’t hear that expression that often anymore. Also, why was “he” being fired, and from where?

before the run

This popped up on my twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/shaetlan_rose/status/1512848196682366979

Very cool. Read the article in The Guardian, then the study it linked to: Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity. Here’s a summary:

Mathematical analysis of the electrical signals fungi seemingly send to one another has identified patterns that bear a striking structural similarity to human speech.

and

The research, published in Royal Society Open Science, found that these spikes often clustered into trains of activity, resembling vocabularies of up to 50 words, and that the distribution of these “fungal word lengths” closely matched those of human languages.

Mushrooms communicate with each other using up to 50 ‘words’, scientists claim

I find this interesting — how they did it, by placing iridium coated spikes in their nerve centers and measuring electrical impulses, then analyzing the impulse clusters and comparing their length to human languages — but I’m particularly struck by the researches explanation of why this matters:

a modified conception of language of plants is considered to be a pathway towards ‘the de-objectification of plants and the recognition of their subjectivity and inherent worth and dignity’ [28].

Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity

So, to care for and grant dignity and worth to fungi we need to understand them to be as “smart as us” — that is, able to use language? Why? Even as I enjoyed reading this experiment and thinking about fungi communication as language, I wonder about its purpose and why we need fungi to speak in ways we can understand in order for them to have value. And, why do we assume that, 1. human language is the most valuable (or complex/sophisticated) and/or 2. to value something it needs to be like us? Perhaps I’m reading too much into their claim?

I found a comment at the end of the article that offers a useful critique from a slightly different perspective than mine:

This kind of anthropomorphic work would do well to define terms including words, language, information, and communication. These are technical terms in communicology and in linguistics but are indiscriminately used in this research. Plants do not produce meaning but merely exchange information. They do not, therefore, communicate in any human way. Language is not merely a syntactical system, as implied here. Language consists of the necessary components syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. In short, the image of the human cast over the findings is inappropriate. It is also not needed to make the research interesting.

comment on article from I Catt

I also found this poem about a type of mushroom (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis) that invades carpenter ants:

The Ants/ Matthew Rorher

Nothing is more important to the ant
whose exoskeleton has been breached
by mushroom spores that are now
controlling his nervous system
and compelling him to climb to a high leaf
only to die and release the spores
over the whole forest
than this poem about his sad plight.

Otherwise his life is meaningless.
Forage. Chew. Recognize by scent.
Abdication of the will. A huge wind
that comes and sweeps his fellows
off the grass. When he dies up there
in the treetops the mushroom grows
right out of his head and breaks open
lightly dusting the afternoon.

Everything he thought he was here
on Earth to do has been left undone.
Through the trees
the spores move on their sinister ways.
I put down the science magazine written
for elementary school kids
in which I have briefly disappeared.

during the run

Stopped at the end of my run to record some of my scattered thoughts during the run:

  1. Remembering the poem about the parasitic mushrooms and the carpenter ants that a poet found in a kids’ science magazine. Why and how do we lose the wonder we had as kids?
  2. Then I was thinking about care, and why and how we care about things. What do we need to care? Do we care about things we can understand? That we know? That have use value for us? What about things that make us wonder and delight in their strangeness? Why can’t that be a reason to care?
  3. Finally, I was thinking about Alice Oswald and something she said in an interview about otherness and how our encounters with the land and nature are ones of encountering that which is alien and other to us. So, we don’t recognize nature in how it’s like us, or we’re like it, but in how it is strange to us.

after the run

Found Oswald’s words, or my rough transcription of them, from a podcast:

I exert incredible amounts of energy trying to see things from their own points of view rather than the human point of view.

It’s a day long effort to get your mind into the right position to live and speak well.

citing Zizek: we can’t connect, be one with nature. It’s extraordinary, alien. It’s this terrifying otherness of nature that we need to grasp hold of and be more courageous in our ways of living with it and seeing it.

Landscape and Literature Podcast: Alice Oswald on the Dart River

Does it always have to be terrifying? Can we access this strangeness through wonder and curiosity, and marvel that there is so much that is different, and more, than us?

Thinking about this idea of connecting to “things” and nature through making them like us, anthropomorphizing them, I just remembered a delightful poem I posted by Lisel Mueller this last fall:

Things/ LISEL MUELLER

What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.

april 3/RUN

4.05* miles
minnehaha creek path, between lake nokomis and lake harriet
40 degrees

*Scott’s watch said 4 miles, mine 4.1, so I’m splitting the difference here. Also did the .05 because my total miles was at a .45 and needed the .05 to round it out.

Ran with Scott along the Minnehaha Creek trail between lake nokomis and lake harriet. Nice. Not too cold or windy, relaxed. An easy pace with several walk breaks. I haven’t run this route in many years. Crossed over the creek several times, noticing the water: blueish gray, gently flowing, almost whispering its splashes.

before the run

At the end of my post from 2 days ago I decided on my project and, of course, I am already abandoning it, or maybe just wandering with it a little? This wandering is one joy of my undisciplined approach to writing/engaging/being in the world. The project/challenge: do a different B Mayer “Please Add to this List” experiment each day. Yesterday, I picked my first one: “Compose a list of familiar phrases, or phrases that have stayed in your mind for a long time–from songs, from poems, from conversation.”

I began a list:

  • You’ll get no commercials
  • There’s a new girl in town
  • As long as it’s gum and that’s for me
  • Life is life, and death but death, Bliss but bliss, and breath but breath
  • I am the wind and the wind is invisible
  • Think of a sheep knitting a sweater, think of your life getting better and better
  • Like sands through the hourglass, these are the days of our lives
  • Wake up in the morning, feeling sad and lonely. Gee, I got to go to school
  • What a world, what a world!
  • Heaven, I’m in heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak
  • Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
  • What do you do when your kid is a brat?
  • Pious glory
  • The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
  • I’m a wheel watcher
  • Remember I love you, I won’t be far away. I’ll just close my eyes and think of yesterday
  • I’ll be yours in springtime when the flowers are in bloom. We’ll wander through the meadows in all their sweet perfume
  • Of course you do
  • Eastbound and down, loaded up and trucking’
  • Hey y’all
  • trouble is inevitable, and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it
  • You were not there
  • All will be revealed
  • And you never will be
  • Tell all the truth but tell it slant
  • Try to remember the days of september
  • the boobie hatch
  • the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinnacle on your snout
  • Miss Suzy had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell. Miss Suzy went to heaven, the steamboat went to…

Then I stopped. I started thinking about “the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out” and remembered my sister Marji singing that to me when we were kids, then us gleefully singing it together. Something clicked. I thought about worms and dirt and death and graves and really gross things about bodies and being delighted in singing about those gross things and Diane Seuss’s commencement address and her invoking of these lines by Walt Whitman:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

I decided what I really want to do this month is study dirt. It’s fitting for April as I begin to notice dirt again as it emerges from under the snow. It also follows nicely from Oswald and her emphasis on physical labor — working in the dirt and gardening, getting your hands dirty — and minerals all the way down. And, it returns me to my extended exploration of both ghosts and haunting and earth/rock/stone/erosion. So many different ways to wander and wonder with this word!

I’ll start today with a little more on “the worms crawl in” song. Here’s how I remember singing it when I was a kid:

Did you ever think when the hearse went by
that you would be the next to die?
They wrap you up in thick white sheets
bury you down 6 feet deep.

All goes well for about a week
then your coffin begins to leak.
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out
the worms play pinnacle on your snout.

Your stomach turns a slimy green.
Pus runs out like thick whipped cream.

It starts getting fuzzy at this point in the song. It would end with something like, “And that’s where you go when you die.” I can’t quite remember. I decided to look it up. Found some interesting things about it. Here’s a brief summary from Wikipedia:

“The Hearse Song” is a song about burial and human decomposition, of unknown origin. It was popular as a World War I song, and was popular in the 20th century as an American and British children’s song, continuing to the present. It has many variant titles, lyrics, and melodies, but generally features the line “the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out”, and thus is also known as “The Worms Crawl In“.

And here’s a cover that adds many more lyrics than I remember and sounds like the Violent Femmes:

There are LOTS of variations of this song. Check out the comments on this post for some of them. I’m fascinated by this song as part of an oral tradition of poetry — the poem/words aren’t owned by any one poet, they travel and transform. The best (most compelling, memorable) are kept as people recite/sing it, the others discarded. What holds it all together is: “the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out.” If I’m getting it right, those lines are iambic dimeter — 2 feet of unstressed/unstressed.

This focus on the worms reminds me of Cornel West and how, in lectures and the film, The Examined Life, he liked to say:

For me, philosophy is fundamentally about our finite situation. You can define that in terms of being towards death, featherless two legged linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and faeces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That’s us. Beings towards death. At the same time we have desire, why we are organisms in space and time, and so desire in the face of death. 

When I was a kid, I loved singing this song, took delight in the grossness. It didn’t scare or haunt me with it’s reminder that I would die one day. Now, as a middle-aged adult, it doesn’t either, even as I encounter more death and reminders of death. I actually find it comforting (is that the right word?) or helpful to think about the relationship between bodies and dirt and worm food.

during the run

Because Scott and I were talking about many different things (most of which I can remember now), we didn’t talk about “the worms crawl in…”. Possibly we didn’t talk about it because he never sang the song as a kid and doesn’t find it fun now. Boo. I do remember remarking on all the brown and noticing the mulched leaves on the ground. Thinking about things that decompose or have decomposed.

after the run

Not much to add here, except this poem I found when searching, “worms and poetry”:

Feeding the Worms/ Danish Lameris

Ever since I found out that earth worms have taste buds
all over the delicate pink strings of their bodies,
I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine
the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples
permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley,
avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots.

I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden,
almost vulgar—though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure
so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can,
forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.

march 31/BIKERUN

bike: 10 minute warm-up
run: 3.25 miles
outside: wind + thin sheet of ice

Wanted to run outside today, but it snowed and sleeted yesterday and it hasn’t warmed enough to melt yet. I don’t want to fall and get an injury. Speaking of injuries, just watched a YouTube video with one of my favorite triathletes, Lucy Charles-Barclay. She has a small fracture on the inside of her femoral-something-or-other (I remember the femoral part, but forgot the rest). She doesn’t know yet how long it will take to heal or if she can do any exercise. She mentioned how she’s always used exercise as a way to cope with any stress/anxiety she is feeling. Now, she can’t and she’s unsure of how how to handle it. I remember feeling this way with my first “big” injury. It sucked, but then I started memorizing poems and I felt better. That injury was when I really discovered how much I love poetry.

I haven’t figured out what to watch now that I’m done with Dickinson, so I watched a random running race while I biked. Then I listened to an old playlist while I ran. Felt pretty good. Didn’t think about anything except how much time I had left. 30 minutes on the treadmill is a long time for me. Very tedious.

I guess I thought about at least one other thing: how much I was feeling the lyrics of Closer to Fine by the Indigo Girls, which was on my playlist. I remember liking that song at the end of high school, then driving with a future roommate to see them perform at Luther College my freshman year of college. I always appreciated the lyrics, but they didn’t really mean anything to me, more like empty clichés or slogans or something someone else would do. Now I find myself living (or trying to live those) words in my work and my daily practices:

There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
Closer I am to fine

I like the idea of more (possible) answers + crooked lines + not trying to KNOW or find the answers + the idea of getting closer (but never quite getting) to fine + fine (not success or achievement or even happiness) as the goal.

Found this poem on twitter this morning. Wow!

I Wonder If I Need the Rapture or If I Could Just
Swallow A Catastrophe and Call It Good / Kelli Russell Agodon

Find me at a party socializing with someone’s cat.
Pull a decade from my dress and find what’s left
of the bliss sewn in the hem.

In a perfect world, we would slow dance
with someone we love, we would hold childhood
in our palm and call it a foal.

What we love frolics with its mother, while we ache
for our sins. Walk through a field without disturbing
a spider’s web. Turn off the news

when a javelin is thrown through the screen
into our heart. Yes, you are worried–fear
has been our blanket for years.

Yes, you are home alone so your mind
is cashing in every anxiety chip. Bet on less.
Forget the radishes at the store and be joyful

that you did. There are too many false fangs
at the necks of the ones we love. Bite lighter.
Use your lips. Know the lightening

you believed would kill you didn’t. Not every wolf
harms, many just want to find their way
back into the forests we keep cutting down.

march 29/RUN

3.5 miles
river road, south/winchell trail/river road, north/edmund
39 degrees / feels like 30
wind: 20 mph

Overcast, windy, cold. Not too many people out on the trails. Ran south on the paved path, then a little on the Winchell trail — dirt, then rubbled asphalt, then paved, back up on the river road trail, through the tunnel of trees, then over to Edmund. Everything bare and brown and looking like November. Very pleasing to my eyes. Soft and dull, not sharp or crisp. Down on the Winchell Trail, I was closer to the river, but forgot to look. Maybe it was because I was too focused on the wind and reciting the poem by Christine Rossetti that I memorized this morning. I was reminded of it when I found it on my entry for March 29, 2020.

Who Has Seen the Wind?/ CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.

It was really fun to recite (just in my head) as I ran. It’s iambic, mostly trimeter (I think?). I also recited the opening to Richard Siken’s “Lovesong of the Square Root of Negative One:

“I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble but I am invisible.”

Before I went for my run, I spent more time with Alice Oswald. Here are a few bits from an interview she did in 2016 for Falling Awake:

I frequently get told I’m a nature poet living in a rural idyll, but just like the city, the country is full of anxious, savage people. The hedges seem so much stronger than the humans that you feel slightly imperilled and exposed, as if, if you stopped moving for a minute the nettles would just move in.

I think about this idea of the vegetation taking over when humans (by the gorge, Minneapolis Parks’ workers) stop managing and maintaining it. Creeping vines, tall grass, wandering branches, crumbling asphalt. I see these things all the time and often imagine how the green things might consume us when we stop paying attention.

I’m mostly interested in life and vitality, but you can only see that by seeing its opposite. I love erosion: I like the way that the death of one thing is the beginning of something else.

Erosion, things decomposing, returning, recycling. I’m drawn to noticing these things as I loop around the gorge.

It’s good to remember how to forget. I’m interested in the oral tradition: what keeps the poems alive is a little forgetting. In Homer you get the sense that anything could happen because the poet might not remember.

I like the idea of finding a balance, where I remember some things and forget others, or I forget some things so I can remember other things.

Poetry is not about language but about what happens when language gets impossible.

I like the idea of things being impossible to ever fully achieve, where no words can ever fully capture/describe what something it. When language is impossible, it’s possible to keep imagining/dreaming up new meanings.

I’m interested in how many layers you can excavate in personality. At the top it’s all quite named. But you go down through the animal and the vegetable and then you get to the mineral. At that level of concentration you can respond to the non-human by half turning into it.

This line about getting down to the mineral, reminded me of some of Oswald’s words in Dart and Lorine Niedecker’s words in “Lake Superior”:

from Dart / Alice Oswald

where’s Ernie? Under the ground

where’s Redver’s Webb? Likewise.

Tom, John and Solomon Warne, Dick Jorey, Lewis
Evely?

Some are photos, others dust.
Heading East to West along the tin lodes,
80 foot under Hepworthy, each with a tallow candle in
his hat.

Till rain gets into the stone,
which washes them down to the valley bottoms
and iron, lead, zinc, copper calcite
and gold, a few flakes of it
getting pounded between the pebbles in the river.

from “Lake Superior” / Lorine Niedecker

In every part of every living thing
is stuff that once was rock

And the idea of moving through layers, reminds me of Julian Spahr and their poem that moves through layers, first out, then in:

poemwrittenafterseptember 11, 2001 / Julian Spahr

as everyone with lungs breathes the space between the hands and the space around the hands and the space of the room and the space of the building that surrounds the room and the space of the neighborhoods nearby and the space of the cities and the space of the regions and the space of the nations and the space of the continents and islands and the space of the oceans and the space of the troposphere and the space of the stratosphere and the space of the mesosphere in and out.

In this everything turning and small being breathed in and out by everyone with lungs during all the moments.

Then all of it entering in and out.

The entering in and out of the space of the mesosphere in the entering in and out of the space of the stratosphere in the entering in and out of the space of the troposphere in the entering in and out of the space of the oceans in the entering in and out of the space of the continents and islands in the entering in and out of the space of the nations in the entering in and out of the space of the regions in the entering in and out of the space of the cities in the entering in and out of the space of the neighborhoods nearby in the entering in and out of the space of the building in the entering in and out of the space of the room in the entering in and out of the space around the hands in the entering in and out of the space between the hands.

How connected we are with everyone.

The space of everyone that has just been inside of everyone mixing inside of everyone with nitrogen and oxygen and water vapor and argon and carbon dioxide and suspended dust spores and bacteria mixing inside of everyone with sulfur and sulfuric acid and titanium and nickel and minute silicon particles from pulverized glass and concrete.

How lovely and how doomed this connection of everyone with lungs.

—

I’ve been wanting to do something with layers and the gorge. What form might it take?

march 21/RUN

6 miles
franklin loop
52 degrees

A very spring day today. Tomorrow, colder again. Rain and 40s. I overdressed — I didn’t need to the running tights. It was mostly overcast, but every so often I saw my shadow. Faint, but leading me. Ran the Franklin loop. My watch crashed less than 3 miles in. Either I get a new watch soon, or stop wearing a watch. I’m leaning towards not wearing a watch.

I got a “morning!” from Mr. Morning! and Dave the Daily Walker. An excellent start to my run. Encountered a few other runners, some walkers. Any bikes? I can’t remember. No roller skiers yet. The birds were LOUD! Heard some honking geese, then saw them flying low in a line. Heard at least one woodpecker, drumming.

note: re-reading the entry and the part about the LOUD birds, I’m struck by how quiet everything is now, at 1 pm. Where is all the birdsong that was here just minutes ago? Strange.

workers of the day

Nearing the marshall/lake street bridge from the northeast, I started to smell tar. Then I heard some deep voices on the hill at St. Thomas: “Go go go go!” then “woah” or “wow” or “alright” but not “stop” or “that’s enough.” I imagined someone was pouring the tar and someone else was telling them when to stop. Was that what was happening? It was too far away and hidden behind trees for me to see. What was the tar for? What exactly were they doing? Tarring a roof? Repaving a road? Were the workers wearing masks to protect them from the fumes?

Right before I started my run, I typed this here: A few lines from the poem to remember as I run:

have you forgotten the force that orders the world’s
fields
and sets all cities in their sites, this nomad
pulling the sun and moon, placeless in all places,
born with her stones, with her circular bird-voice,
carrying everywhere her quarters?

I decided to try and keep remembering (and noticing and studying) the river as I ran. Often, even as I know it’s there, I forget to notice it. Today, it was pale blue and mostly calm. I saw a reflection of the lake street bridge as I ran on the east side, but it wasn’t completely smooth — not the perfect, inverted bridge from another world I sometimes see. The banks were mostly brown, although there were a few white spots. Just past Meeker Island Dam, I heard a small waterfall. No boats or rowers. No ducks. Running above the river, I never got close enough to hear it. All I could hear were the cars driving by — on the river road, a bridge, the distant freeway. To me, it seemed as if they were trying to sound like a rushing river. I thought about how important the river is to Minneapolis and St. Paul, how roads, buildings, neighborhoods, industry are arranged around it and because of it (ordering the world, setting cities in its sites). I love how Oswald offered this wonderful description of the organizing/ordering force of the river, wedged between these two passages from the dairy worker.

Before:

I’m in a rationalised set-up, a Superplant. Everything’s stainless
and risk can be spun off by centrifugal motion: blood, excre-
ment, faecal matter from the farms

and after:

I’m in milk, 600,000,000 gallons a week.

On March 17th, I wrote a little about Oswald and work/working. I posted two passages by her that discuss the value of labor as a way to know the land: raking and gardening. She writes: “Instead of looking at landscape in a baffled, longing way, it was a release when I worked outside to feel that I was using it, part of it. I became critical of any account that was not a working account.”

This idea of not looking at the landscape in a baffled, longing way fits with some more of her words, in an interview: Landscape and Literature Podcast: Alice Oswald on the Dart River. In this podcast she discusses her resistance to the romanticizing of landscapes:

I’m just continually smashing down the nostalgia in my head. And trying to inquire of the landscape itself what it feels about itself. Rather than bringing my advertising skills — getting rid of words like picturesque…there’s a whole range of words that people like to use about landscape, like pastoral, idyll. I quite like taking the names away from things and seeing what they are behind their names. I exert incredible amounts of energy trying to see things from their own points of view rather than the human point of view.

…more interested in the democratic stories…the hardship of laboring, looking for food…the struggle of a tree trying to grow out of stone…always looking for that struggle. I’m allergic to peace. I like this restless landscape. I like that it won’t let you sit back and say, “what a beautiful place I’ve arrived to.” You’ve never arrived. It’s moving past you all the time.

It’s a day long effort to get your mind into the right position to live and speak well.

Landscape and Literature Podcast: Alice Oswald on the Dart River

I’m thinking about this effort as a form of labor, done in tandem with other forms of labor, like using the land, walking through the land, working on the land. Oswald doesn’t foreground this type of work — the smashing of nostalgia and trying to find better, less romantic, words — in Dart. Is that because that’s her work, as a poet, and she’s trying to keep herself out of the poem? In contrast to Oswald, Mary Oliver frequently discusses her labor of noticing and telling about it. I appreciate Oliver’s emphasis on that difficult labor, but as I read Oswald, I also like the idea of trying to move outside of, or beside, ourselves to imagine things from the point of view of the flower and its struggles, instead of from our point of view as we admire/praise that flower. She gives the example of the flower in this interview, ending with, “It’s a fascinating, hard world for a weed.”

I wonder, is there room in Oswald’s democratic stories for her own efforts at smashing nostalgia and noticing from different perspectives? How would that alter the poem to include the voice of the observer-participant or participant-observer? How might it look if the author’s voice wasn’t absent, but made only one among many, all having value?

my whole style’s a stone wall

In a section on the stonewaller, Oswald offers this great line:

…which is how everything goes
with me, because you see I’m a gatherer, an amateur, a
scavenger, a comber, my whole style’s a stone wall, just
wedging together what happens to be lying about at the time.

page 33

There are so many great lines in this poem!