4.1 miles
minnehaha falls and back
7 degrees / feels like 2
Lots of layers today. Too many. Under the jacket and pull-over and sweatshirt and shirt I was sweating. Like yesterday, the first mile was hard. I had several small victories as I pushed through moments of wanting to cut the run short.
10 Things
- happy, wild kids on the playground — I thought I heard one kid call out, thank you thank you thank you then Sara Sara Sara
- a bird singing — couldn’t quite hear the tune, just understood it was a bird
- the few times I ran on snow it crunched — crisp, compact
- the falls were dribbling over the ledge
- 2 vehicles in the parking lot, one of them was a pick-up truck
- a car honking far behind me in the parking lot — were they honking at me?
- a pink plastic bag in the small wood near the ford bridge — full of something
- a few walkers, one woman bundled up, wearing a white mask over her mouth and nose
- several fast runners, speeding by me
- the river was almost all white
Chanted some tripe berries, then triple birds, partly inspired by hearing Kacey Musgraves’ song, Cardinal, last night:
cardinal
chickadee
woodpecker
woodpecker
cardinal
attention
ATTENtion
aTTENtion
attenTION
the purple hour
I have eliminated Facebook from my morning routine and I’m not missing it at all. No new is good news (for Gary G’news — how did they spell his name on The Great Space Coaster?). Maybe I’ll check the news once a week? So, instead of Facebook, I went straight into poets.org then Poetry Foundation then poems.com. On Poetry Foundation, I found a wonderfully titled essay, The Joy of Attention by Jasmine Dreame Wagner. The whole essay is great and I’d like to return to it. When she mentioned Carolyn Forché’s Blue Hour (which I’ve requested from my local library), an idea slowly, or not so slowly, crept into my consciousness: doing a variation of Wagner’s experiment — going to the same place at the same time every day, giving attention, then listing what you notice (without metaphor) — that involves my restlessness/insomnia at night and calling it Purple Hour. At 1 A.M. last night, sitting at the dining room table, up because of restless legs, I wrote, What color is restlessness? Then I wrote: purple / grayish purple. My answer, I’m sure, was inspired by Alice Oswald, her lecture Interview with Water and her mention of purple in Nobody. In the exercise, Wagner suggests writing in a notebook. Should I do that, or type it up in a document?
To go back to that bucket of water — to wave a blue gown above it and ask, What is that color which Homer calls porfurium? It is not blue exactly; it gets translated as purple but purple is a settled color whereas Homer’s word is agitated. It derives from the sea verb porfurion which means to roll without breaking, so it is already a fluid word, a heaped up word, a word with underswell, not a pigment but an emanation from the nature of water. To get a true sense of porphyrion you need to see the sea in it and for Homer the sea is unhuman full of strange creatures missed colored unplowable and this is my favorite word it is a peritone meaning unfenced. If you want to imagine the colour of Odysseus’ gown you will have to swim out into the unfenced place, the place not of definitions but of affirmations. Yes I’m afraid you will have to find your way to the p volume of Johnson’s unwritten dictionary. There you will discover a dark light word an adjective for edgelessness — a sea word used also of death smoke cloth mist blood between bluish purple and cobalt mauve. It appears mid-ocean when the wind perhaps makes a network of backblowing glitters that the underswell moves sideways as when a big sea swells with noiseless waves. It is used of the heart meaning his heart was a heaving not quite broken wave. It indicates a surface but suggests a depth a mutation of flatness or noiseless sheen, a sea creature, a quality of caves, any inlet or iodine or shaded stone, a type of algae or rockfish, anything excessive or out of focus or subliminal — for example: a swimmer seen from underneath, a rotting smell, a list of low sounds, an evening shadow or sea god, a whole catalogue of simmering grudges storms waves and solitudes or deep water including everyone who has drowned in it. To be purpled is to lose one’s way or name, to be nothing, to grieve without surfacing, to suffer the effects of sea light. to be either sleepless or weightless and cut off by dreams — find yourself in the silence underneath an overhanging way that or thereabouts is the color of a bluish violet ultramarine gown so the great poet sang.
Interview with Water
from Paean to Place/Lorine Niedecker
How much less am I
in the dark than they?
Effort lay in us
before religons
at pond bottom
all things move toward
the light
Except those
that freely work down
to ocean’s black depths
in us an impulse tests
the unknown
from Nobody/ Alice Oswald
The sea she said and who could ever drain it dry
has so much purple in its caves the wind at dusk
incriminates the waves
and certain fish conceal it in their shells
at ear-pressure depth
where the shimmer of headache dwells
and the brain goes
dark
purple
purples to think about: heels echoing, doors creaking closed, deep pits. The gentle, queer curve of a branch towering over the trail — as I ran under it I thought, that’s very purple. Then the face of a child in the midst of bellowing frustration — I didn’t see their face, but I imagined it could be a deep purple. Purple whispers in the trees.
Mary Ruefle’s Purple Sadness
some guidelines on the experiment
[from Wagner, things to observe]
- Record what you see, hear, smell, feel, and taste during each visit.
- Aim to record at least six new observations each time.
- On days when you’re pressed for time, allow yourself to simply record: “ailanthus, roof moss, fireplace wood smoke, fence squirrel, birdbath.” Phrases can be just as powerful as full sentences.
- Note the small observations as much as the significant ones: “eclipse.”
- When you notice that something in the visual field has changed, be sure to reflect on this change.
- Observe movement in addition to stasis.
- Pay attention to the appearance of new items and the absences of others.
- Familiarize yourself with the specifics of your environment.
- Resist the urge to create metaphor or simile; instead, log what you see. Recognize the world for what it is.
After recording your observations for a few days or weeks or years, Wagner suggests reflecting on the process of this experience by writing in reverse — starting at the back of the notebook and writing until you reach the first entry. Write in the margins and any empty spaces; “write until your reflections on your process become entangled with your observations; let the notebook become a gnarled and ecstatic poem.”
While Wagner writes everything by hand in a notebook, I might try typing up and/or dictating my observations, printing them out and then writing all over the printed paper. I’m thinking my approach will be be better for my weak eyes.
Will I stick to pure observation? I’m not sure; I might experiment with different ways of understanding my restlessness, and the purple of it all.
