Tag: time

may 21/RUN

5.5 miles
ford loop
44 degrees
drizzle

Wasn’t planning to run the ford loop, but I started it and then just kept going. It felt good, relaxed, not hard to keep my heart rate a little lower. My pace was slow, but it didn’t feel slow, or fast, or any speed really.

10 Things

  1. mist
  2. dripping
  3. spray
  4. mirrors
  5. puddles
  6. graffiti
  7. traffic
  8. bridge
  9. debris
  10. slick

It rained all day yesterday, and some early in the morning. Started again during my run. Everything dripping wet, including me, although I didn’t really feel it, or couldn’t distinguish it from my sweat. Before I started running, as I walked through the neighborhood, I looked into the puddles on the sidewalk and admired how they had become mirrors, reflecting the sky and the trees. Running over the river, I looked down at the east bank and saw colorful graffiti all over the rocks at the base of the lake street bridge. In spots, the trail was slick with mud or covered in debris — fallen leaves, broken branches, grit. Crossing the ford bridge, I looked north and was delighted by the mist, making everything seem fuzzy and unformed. The traffic on the bridge was thick — I couldn’t see or feel any spray coming off of their wheels, but I could hear it.

overheard: one runner to another — you can bank the time.
Another use of time as a commodity.

Listened to the water, in its various forms, for the first half of my run. Put in my “moment” playlist for the second half. The most memorable song today: One Moment in Time/ Whitney Houston

A line that stood out to me:

And in that one moment of time
I will feel
I will feel eternity

I thought about Mary Oliver’s definition of eternity and how Whitney Houston’s doesn’t fit with it. MO understands eternity as creative time that’s outside of the ordinary and beyond the self. Houston’s eternity seems more like eternal glory.

As I listened to all of the lyrics, I thought about Whitney Houston’s tragic life and terrible death — an overdose. I also thought about the idea of one moment and what happens after that moment is over. And this made me think about post-Olympic blues, or post-marathon blues, or post-publishing a poem blues.

To keep myself distracted and steady, I chanted in triple berries —– strawberry blueberry raspberry. Then I chanted my poem — I go to the gorge/to find the soft space/between beats.

more on the moment as between

Read a very brief interview with Marie Howe the other day. She mentioned a poem that inspired her and that she wished everyone would read: The Season of Phantasmal Peace/ Derek Walcott. Beautiful! Here’s a line to remember that describes the moment:

and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace

Before my run, I began listening to a talk by Jennifer Chang, “Other Pastorals: Writing Race and Place“. She mentions one between in the presentation of her thesis statement: how poets of color use pastoral to grapple with the complex composition of place as a tension between lived and learned experience. She recites another between from Rick Barot’s “On Gardens”: somewhere between/what the eye sees and what the mind thinks/is the world, landscapes mangled/into sentences, one color read into rage.

Chang also mentions context: If you look at the word “garden” deep enough you see it blossoming in an enclosure meant to keep out history and disorder.

Chang’s lecture is part of the Bread Loaf conference in 2019. This page has many great links for future Sara to explore.

And here is helpful essay with some ideas for thinking about the pastoral, and links to poems, like Rita Dove’s Reverie in Open Air, which I’ve already posted on this log. The second half of Dove’s poems fits with early May’s theme of grass:

But this lawn has been leveled for looking,   
So I kick off my sandals and walk its cool green.   
Who claims we’re mere muscle and fluids?   
My feet are the primitives here.   
As for the rest—ah, the air now   
Is a tonic of absence, bearing nothing   
But news of a breeze.

And a few more grass lines from Jennifer Chang:

Stalk of wither. Grass-
noise fighting weed-noise. Dirt
and chant. Something in the
field.
(Pastoral/ Jennifer Chang)

What sound does grass make? Wind through the grass, crunching over dry, brittle grass, feet on grass — bunny’s feet:

 I think my favorite sound was the soft footsteps of the bunny hurrying across the lawn. A silvery whisper only possible to hear on a calm summer morning like today. I love the sound of animal feet moving — running or hopping through the grass

log entry on 16 july 2024

may 15/WALK

50 minutes
winchell trail / ravine / grassy boulevard
75 degrees
wind: 18 mph / gusts: 34 mph

Windy and warm and green. Nearing the crosswalk that leads to the 36th street parking lot and the winchell trail, an intense smell: cannabis. After crossing, 2 guys near the bench, with scooters, talking: dogs are the coolest. I love dogs! and wanna keep going? I’ve got plenty of charge! So chill and enthusiastic and generous to the world.

Delia and I descended the split and worn wooden steps into a strange, green world. Something seemed different down here today. What was it? Some trees leaning over the trail, three trees right up against a chainlink fence that I’ve admired before seeming taller. A tree trunk mixed in with the riprap.

Delia managed to poop right near a trashcan. Nice work! And then again, close to home. A new trend for her: double poops on walks. Better on a walk than hidden in grass in our yard! While leaning over to pick up her poop, something flew into my eye. I thought of Katie Farris’ “What Would Root.” I was hit simultaneously in both eyes with some sort of flying detritus (pollen or seed). Love that poem. Ever since I connected her poem with the image of a tree as a person upside and nuzzled into the earth, I can’t unsee it. All around the neighborhood, people planted in the ground, their legs sticking out. I thought about what it would be like to have your head/mind in the dirt, among the roots and nets of trees and fungi, and your body in the air. The opposite of Alice Oswald’s idea of the mind/body split in swimming with your body immersed in the water and your head in the air.

I was planning to take the old stone steps down to the river, but Delia wasn’t interested in that today. We kept walking on the trail above and I admired the blue of the water below. No sparkles or rowers or speed boats or paddle boats or canoes.

suspension / pause / hesitation / a moment

Before my walk, I read Siddhartha Menon’s thoughts on his poem, “Captivity,” which I posted a few days ago. It is sparking many different thoughts and is returning me to one of my obsessions: the moment.

Though “Captivity” ends in something like paralysis (as does “Liberation”) I now slightly regret its final line: “You are paralyzed.” It suggests the fatal indecision of a rabbit caught in a hunter’s flashlight, and snaps the poem shut. This is a plausible way for the poem to conclude but I was actually more interested in the kind of creative suspension in which an either/or gives way to a neither. You are with the bird in the moment, seeking to neither see it more clearly nor shutter it into your camera, seeking indeed nothing at all that would interfere with the moment. This is less paralysis than a kind of shimmering equilibrium.

Siddhartha Menon on Epigraphs

either/or gives way to neither, no choice is necessary
seeking nothing, or Nothing — the space/time beyond judgment or decision or the need to act

Thinking about this idea, I recalled a line from Georgina Kleege in Sight Unseen and wrote about it in my Plague Notebook, vol. 25:

Everyone has a blind spot, mine is just bigger than yours.

I added, the moment between seeing and sight, between receiving light and comprehension, between signal and image. Everyone has a moment between seeing and sight, mine is just longer than yours.

Now I’m thinking about Radiolab and their episode about how long it takes for sight to happen. I found where I last mentioned it, on 16 july 2024

may 8/BIKE

8.5 miles
lake nokomis and back
60 degrees

The first outdoor bike ride of the year. I’m always nervous, not knowing how it will go. Can I still see enough to bike? Will it be too scary? Yes, I can see! No, I wasn’t scared! I was a bit disoriented with all of the dappled light and I had to take some deep breaths a few times, but it went well. It’s a combination of: a memorized path — all of the cracks and bumps and tricky spots from years of biking; a familiarity and acceptance of not knowing or seeing everything; a few still-working cone cells and the ability to compensate with peripheral vision and other senses; and a belief that I can bike. Oh — and biking a little slower.

The lake was beautiful. I can’t wait to swim across it in a month. I signed up for open swim yesterday — signed FWA and RJP up too. Summer is almost here.

7 Grassy Things

  1. there’s a certain stretch of grass on the bike trail that separates it from the road and helps me to see where to go — I need because the gray of the trail can blend in with the gray of the road
  2. had to bike through the grass when I turned off the trail too early — I remembered biking through this grass with FWA 2 summers ago
  3. an open field between the duck and echo bridges — a beautiful green studded with bright yellow dandelions
  4. someone spread out a blanket and is sitting in that grass — how buggy is it?
  5. what a bright blue sky! a great contrast with the green trees and grass
  6. shadows of new leaves waving in the wind on the grass near lake nokomis
  7. a bright yellow trailer and half a dozen cars parked on the grassy hill between lake hiawatha and lake nokomis — they’re redoing the path and (I had to look it up) adding a pedestrian bridge: “A new pedestrian bridge over Minnehaha Creek next to Lake Hiawatha is scheduled to be installed May. The bridge will be delivered in pieces, assembled onsite and then set in place with a crane.”

Other things: someone listening to a song on their phone as they walked — a new one from Lorde?; the bog near my favorite part of the path was completely dry; a sign, loose gravel — thankfully there wasn’t any; bird shadows on the path; lots of people walking around the lake

a grounding, a frame, a context

I mentioned in my entry for 7 may that I would post a quotation from Jenny Odell about context here:

I think a really interesting mental exercise to do with anything or anyone is to think about whether they have been afforded experience, the ability to experience, which means like having a past and a future. So one of the most fascinating things that I came across in researching the book, that I talk about somewhere in the middle of the book, is a study about the lesser minds bias. It’s not something you would immediately think has to do with time, but it’s a bias that other people, especially people in out-groups—so people you don’t identify with—don’t have as rich of an emotional inner life as you do. And so in this study that I referenced, the people running the study ask the participants to think about houseless people and show that the part of their mind that has to do with theory of mind, and imagining that someone has an inner life, is not lighting up when they’re thinking about these people. And then they ask them the question, what kind of vegetable do you think they would like, this person? Just imagine that and then suddenly it is lighting up, right? And my interpretation of that in the book was, well, someone who wants something and has desire must have a past and must have hopes for the future. For something to have desire, it has to exist in time. And so it’s almost like—that participant who’s thinking about them—it’s almost like this person has entered a time with them. Like this person is now also an actor. This person has wants and needs and regrets. And I think that kind of flipping is a really helpful and interesting way to think about why we do or don’t afford that to, you know, the nonhuman world, and also many groups within the human world—like out-groups, as they were talking about in the study. And it is that relegating of part of life to the realm of the timeless—like it might be cyclical, but it’s considered timeless—that is so much at the root of the logic of extracting it. It’s lifeless. But it’s the same mechanism that’s behind dehumanizing someone, because you’re seeing a person as almost like an instance. To go back to people without housing, it’s interesting that people don’t think about how someone might go in and out of housing within their life. You know, what led to that? What might be in their future? They’re just sort of seen as they’re just there. And so I think that’s an example of what happens when you take something out of time, or it doesn’t seem to inhabit time in the same way you do.

Another Kind of Time/ Jenny Odell

As I write this, I’m listening (by pure accident) to the Rolling Stones, “Time is on my side” and now I’m thinking about returning to time. Reviewing past entries for 2025, it seems like I’m all over the place. Maybe, but I’m also orbiting around a cluster of ideas related to the gorge and my larger poem, or series of poems, about haunting the gorge. At some point, something will stick and I’ll stop to write, but for now I’ll keep moving and circling ideas.

is a really helpful and interesting way to think about why we do or don’t afford that to, you know, the nonhuman world

What is desire to the grass? And, what is the grass as a subject? One blade/leaf? A lawn? A clump in a sea of dirt? I suddenly thought about the smell of freshly cut grass, a frequent scent in May. As a kid, it was one of my favorite smells, then I read or heard somewhere that it was the grass crying or bleeding, and I stopped liking it. I decided to look it up and found a PBS segment, That Fresh Cut Grass Scent is Really a Signal of Distress. But, according to PBS, the grass isn’t crying, it’s communicating, sending out a message to other plants, or other parts of themselves, to be prepared for trouble.

The idea that the grass is crying, or screaming, still abounds. Here’s the opening line from an article for Lawnstarter, a lawn care company:

Inhale deeply. That heavenly fresh-cut grass smell you savor while mowing your back 40 is actually your lawn screaming in pain from the hell of a hurtful haircut.

Fresh cut grass is your lawn’s shriek of despair, science says

Science (not scientists, or a scientific study), says? Wow. Anyway, I’m struck by how the idea that grass is communicating (the PBS clip) offers more agency to the grass than depicting them as shrieking or screaming in despair (the article). The article offers some of the science, then moves onto a discussion of why we might like the smell of freshly mown grass and then gives examples of how that love is depicted in song.

I wrote in my Plague Notebook, vol. 25, what is the root system for grass. Looked it up and found this helpful resource: How does Grass Grow?

Grass typically has a fibrous root system, characterized by a dense network of fine, thread-like roots that spread outward and downward.

Fibrous? I posted something a poet said about being fibrous a year or so ago. Can I find it again? No. It had something to do with someone thinking of themselves as made up of fibers, of their idea of the self as fibrous? I wish I could remember!

One last thing: Over the past weeks, I’ve encountered references to Dads and their obsessions with the lawn, how lawn maintenance is gendered male. I found this interesting site when I searched “gender lawn” from Lady Science: Liberate Your Lawn from the Legacy of Masculine Science.

In Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, Kenneth T. Jackson shows that the American Neighbor’s attachment to his lawn, since its takeover of the suburban consciousness after the Second World War, is the result of the affluence and financial security that the lawn represents. The lawn is a simple status symbol that signals to the little-n neighbors that The Neighbor has achieved a level of economic comfort that affords him both the money to pay his exorbitant water bill and the free time to mow thrice weekly in the summer. I think, however, if we want to break the American Neighbor of the lawn — and we should, because it’s not good for the environment that 2 percent of the land in the U.S is taken up by monocultural swathes of ornamental grass — we might consider that the lure of the lawn is deeper.

Hmm. . . this crabgrass book looks interesting.

april 10/RUN

4.5 miles
river road, north/south
51 degrees

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

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

10 Things

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

color

Today’s ROYGBIV:

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

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

1

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

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

2

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

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

*

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

3

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

4

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

A Crown of Sonnets?

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

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

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

march 31/RUN

4.3 miles
minnehaha falls and back
36 degrees

Yesterday afternoon we got 2 or 3 inches of snow. By the time I went out for my run in the late morning, much of it had melted, even on the grass. Excellent. It’s the warmer ground and the bright sun that did it. I was over-dressed in my purple jacket with a stocking cap. Halfway through the run, I took off the cap and held it in my hands.

As I ran south to the falls I chanted in triples. Lots of berries and sweet things (hot fudge sauce, fresh whipped cream), histories and mysteries and possibles, both muddy trail and mud on trail, and metronomes. On the way back, I put in my “doin’ time” playlist for the last day of my time month. I was planning to not stop to walk for the second half, but when a runner who was running the same speed or just a little slower than me joined the path in front of me, I decided to stop a few times to get some distance from them. One of the places I stopped was the bench above the edge of the world. I don’t remember what the river looked liked, all I remember was that looking at it made me feel calm and content and vast.

overheard while running by the falls: one person to a group of others, he should do it, his arms are the longest. Were they taking a group selfie?

10 Things

  1. water falling, 1: a steady gush out of a gutter
  2. water falling, 2: trickling from the sewer pipe at the ravine
  3. water falling, 3: gushing at the falls — mostly white foam
  4. shadow, 1: the small shadow of a bird crossing my path
  5. shadow, 2: the sprawled, gnarled, twisted, softened shadows of oak trees on the road
  6. shadow, 3: the sharp circle of the lamp part of the lamp post
  7. missing: the top railing of a wood fence on the edge of the trail
  8. several people in the falls parking lot, waiting to pay for parking
  9. empty benches
  10. a thin layer of snow on a leaning branch in the ravine

Found this poem the other day:

Color Keeps Time / Patrycja Humienik

or it rides us
like a torrent. Blurs
and fastens, flesh

to seconds. Just look
at your veins.
In vespertine woods,
I tried to read moss
by hand. There’s
something laconic
about green that I need.

Lover, let the morning slow
time through the branches.

vespertine: relating to, occurring, or active in the evening
laconic: using few words, concise to the point of seeming rude or mysterious

What kind of time are different colors? What sort of time is orange, for example? If purple is twilight, orange is late afternoon or early summer evenings.

I tried to read moss/by hand. This line reminds me of Robin Wall Kimmerer and her suggestion that “Mosses, I think, are like time made visible. They create a kind of botanical forgetting. Shoot by tiny shoot, the past is obscured in green. That’s why we have stories, so we can remember” (Ancient Green/RWK).

“Color Keeps Time” is from the collection, We Contain Landscapes.

march 26/RUNWALK

5.25 miles
bottom of franklin and back
46 degrees

More excellent running weather. Sunny and calm and warm(er). Birds singing and swooping and perching on tree branches right in front of me. I felt relaxed and strong and my back only hurt once, when I stood up after re-tying my shoe. I ran without stopping to walk to the bottom of the hill and right next to the river. It was swirling foam on the edges. Ran back up to under the franklin bridge then stopped to walk the rest of the hill. I noticed a sign — Trail closed starting March 31st — uh oh. Just looked it up; it’s only for 2 weeks:

Bike and walk trails along West River Parkway will close between the I-94 Bridge and Franklin Avenue for up to two weeks beginning Monday, March 31, 2025.

The closure is necessary for contractors hired by the Minnesota Department of Transportation to install a safe span system that will protect trail users during repairs to the bridge this year.

Trail users will be detoured to the upper West River Parkway roadway between the I-94 Bridge and Franklin Avenue. This same closure will be repeated in August so that workers can remove the safe span system after repairs are complete.

Listened to a mood playlist: energy for the rest of the run. The best (or worst?) song on the playlist was “Hocus Pocus” by Focus. I love the song, but it was too fast to try and run to!I had to increase my cadence to 200 bpm to match it! The song also does not have a steady rhythm; it just keeps getting faster and faster, probably because they were on cocaine while they recorded it.

10 Things

  1. the water was a brownish greenish blue
  2. in the flats I leaned over the ledge and watched the swirling foam slowly travel down stream
  3. workers on the road above the tunnel of trees, doing something to sewer which released a sour smell
  4. the workers were wearing bright yellow vests
  5. passed a walker who refused to move over — they were walking right next to the line. I suddenly wondered, are they neuro-divergent? then, maybe I should chill out about people needing to follow the accepted rules about where and how to walk on the trail
  6. stopped at the sliding bench, 1: heard a cardinal — it was somewhere nearby — looked up and saw that it was on a branch close to me. Was it red? I couldn’t tell, but I did noticed how its tail quivered slightly all the time — I’m assuming it was keeping its balance. Do birds have to constantly adjust while perched?
  7. stopped by the sliding bench, 2: looking down at the white sands beach, hoping for movement. Yes, there, deep in — a walker moving through the trees
  8. the small shadow of a bird crossing my path, flying fast!
  9. my sharp shadow in front of me, crossing over the softer shadows of tree branches
  10. the shadow of a tree with dead leaves on it — looking almost like a messed-up pom pom

At the end of the run, as I was walking home, I had a thought about CA Conrad’s and their idea of the “extreme present,” which I wrote about on here earlier this month on march 5th:

“extreme present” where the many facets of what is around me wherever I am can come together through a sharper lens.

intro to ecodeviance / CA Conrad

Conrad creates their soma(tic) rituals to make being anything but present is nearly impossible. Running by the gorge can put/force me into the extreme present. This sense of the extreme present doesn’t happen for the entire run, but I can achieve it in moments. In their lengthy, day-long rituals — wear a red wig, eat only red food — is Conrad able to achieve this extreme present for longer?

birdsong!

This morning Scott heard the cardinals outside his window and because he wanted to use some birdsong in his latest music project, he placed his phone on a chair on the deck and recorded some. I liked how he described it: I left the phone out on the deck then returned inside and went quietly about my business. When he told me about how similar each wave of sound looked, I asked if he could screen shot it and send me the sound file so I could post it here:

cardinal song, an image of sound waves
cardinal song / 26 march 2025

Wow! So uniform.

Happy 151st Birthday Robert Frost!

When the poem of the day on poetry foundation was a Robert Frost one, I figured it must be his birthday. Yep — 26 march 1874.

For Once, Then Something/ Robert Frost

Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

A beautiful sonnet — 14 lines, 11 beats per line, almost iambic pentameter. Is that right? I always struggle to hear meter properly.

Love the description of a reflection: Me myself in the summer heaven godlike/Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs

And that something white, uncertain, seen briefly then lost to a ripple. Yesterday I posted some lyrics from “The Windmills of Your Mind” about the ripples from a pebble. Ripple is a great word.

Seeing this sonnet is making me think I should try that form for my color poems. I could study a few different ways of doing the sonnet — Diane Seuss, Terence Hayes, William Shakespeare. Any others?

oh orchid o’clock

A good morning on the poetry sites. Not only did I find Robert Frost’s poem, but I found a cool collection that fits in with my study of time: Oh Orchid O’Clock by Endi Bogue Hartigan. (note: I just emailed Moon Palace Books about ordering it! update: I ordered it!)

/it is the president’s turned up o’clock it is America’s deadliness and dailiness

o’clock / it is glued to the headline o’clock

it is lunchhour-beeline o’clock / it is it’s only Tuesday o’clock another

curbside memorial o’clock another caterpillar miracle o’clock another

people emptying from their lives o’clock or into

their lives o’clock the Nile floods the Nile floods every hotspell in this week

I discovered this book through poems.com, which had one of its poems posted today:

hour entry: I fall asleep with a rain sound/ Endi Bogue Hartigan

I fall asleep with the rain sound app of my cellphone, the app includes distant thunderclap sounds and there are people who recorded or simulated these sounds, and it is time to disagree and thank the dawn. I disagree with this rain, I feel absurd for thesimulation of it and yet my brain waves have come to depend on it, depend onsimulated porous points between the raindrops. Always the porous dream, always theneural authority, the reaction meme, always the authority of always, the puncture ofalways, time spent saying always, the spider legs of always, the sleep command, thewake spindles, the spider leg threatening to break from the spider.

So cool! Encountering Hartigan’s work, I was inspired to think about time in relation to my blind spot and the practice of running beside the gorge that has happened beside (and because of?) my vision loss. I wrote the following in my Plague Notebook:

my blind spot
breaks open seconds
pries apart the hard edges of
a beat invites me
to dwell inside

I am suspended between
beats as time slows
but never stops
with moves so slight it takes
a practiced eye to see
their soft shimmering
embrace what is not seen but felt —
wind
the rotation of the earth
a bench sliding into the gorge
rock crumbling
cone cells collapsing
a blind spot expanding

walk: 40 minutes
neighborhood / winchell trail / oak savanna
54 degrees

What a great afternoon walk with Delia the dog! No coat. No mud. Walked to the Winchell Trail then down beside the chain link fence. Drip Drip Drip — the sewer pipe in the ravine. Everything washed out — light brown, tan, yellowed. Up on the mesa in the savanna, a great view of the river. Was able to walk on the dirt path between the savanna and the 38th street stairs. They’ve put down some mulch, so it’s not as muddy. As I neared the entrance to the Winchell Trail, I passed the spot where I fell in the mud, straight on my tailbone. No mud now, only memories and a still-sore back.

On the way to the river, I noticed something interesting hidden on the tree trunk while Delia sniffed around. I took a picture of it:

= > ÷

When I was looking at it in person, I thought someone had carved the message in the tree, but studying it now, it looks like it’s a rock wedged in a crack. I probably should have taken another picture that wasn’t quite as close-up for scale. That is one tiny rock.

I had to look up how to type the division sign on a mac. Hold down option and /

march 25/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
39 degrees

It felt much warmer than 39. Another great late morning for a run. My back seems to be getting better. Still sore, but not when I’m running. Felt compelled to walk a few more times than usual, but otherwise a good run.

10 Things

  1. a small bird’s shadow crossing the path
  2. a glimpse of silver, then the outline of a metal cart, a fold-up canvas chai with someone sitting in it, facing the river, the radio
  3. below the edge of the world: a steep trail tight against the bluff, going somewhere under the trail and over to the jagged ledges of a ravine
  4. drip drip drip the sewer pipe near the curved retaining wall dripping water
  5. empty benches
  6. hollowed out trunks on the Winchell Trail — empty circles
  7. a person climbing up the steep slope below the winchell trail on the other side of wrought iron fence
  8. the falls: white foam
  9. the edges of the river, slabs of ice/snow then sparkle
  10. the crooked shadows on the paved path, near the edge, cast by sections of a leaning wooden fence

Created another time playlist, this one all about loops and seasons and time as a circle called “The Wheeling Life.” Favorite song to listen to today: “Windmills of Your Mind”/ Mel Torm´e, which is inspired by hearing it in the season finale of Severance.

Like a tunnel that you follow
To a tunnel of it’s own
Down a hollow to a cavern
Where the sun has never shone
Like a door that keeps revolving
In a half-forgotten dream
Or the ripples from a pebble
Someone tosses in a stream

march 24/RUN

4 miles
river road, north/south
32 degrees

A beautiful morning for a run! Wind in my face as I ran north, at my back heading south. Bright sun, sharp shadows, deep blue almost purple river. Raced a wind whirled leaf and won. Greeted Dave, the Daily Walker. Heard voices down in the gorge. Noticed ice on the edges of white sands beach. Thanked a man for stopping to let me run past and he kindly replied, you’re welcome miss. He was listening to music without headphones and carrying a bag of something — groceries? More than one of the benches was occupied. Encountered runners and walkers, a biker and a roller skier. In the last mile, I zoomed past someone running down the hill and under the lake street bridge.

I did my beats experiment again today.

mile 1: triples — open door / open door/ go inside / go inside / go outside / go outside / hello friend / hello friend / old oak tree / strawberry / opening / up the hill / on my toes / forest floor

mile 2: started with the metronome set to 180 bpm, but that was too fast. Locked in with 175. By the end of the mile I barely felt my feet strike the ground, only heard the beat — I had made it inside of the beat!

mile 3-4: doin’ time playlist. The first song was “Time Stand Still“/ Rush. The first line: “I turn my back to the wind” I heard this as I was running with the wind at my back.

Freeze this moment
A little bit longer
Make each sensation
A little bit stronger

I thought about freezing the moment and the difference between stopping time and suspending (or being suspend in) it.

a few hours later: I’m reading the book, American Spy, and I just came across this bit about looking people in the eyes:

At Quantico they’d taught us the so-called classic signals that some one was lying: if they glanced up to the right before they speak, or if they won’t look you in the eye.

American Spy/ Lauren Wilkinson

My immediate reaction: that’s how I look at a person’s face. I try to find the approximate location of their eyes by looking off to the side, near their shoulder — this is me looking at them through my good, peripheral vision. Then I stare into the spot, which is usually fuzzy nothingness to me. Does that mean I’m always lying? Of course not.

I was pleased that this discussion continued:

None of what I’d learned worked as well as listening to my instincts. I’ve always been good at ferreting out decption. I’m not entirely sure what my ability to detect a liar is based on–subtle cues maybe, suconscious awarenss, an intuitive talent for reading microexpressions. I don’t know and I’ve found that the more I try to understand it the less effective I am.

Right. As Georgina Kleege suggests in Sight Unseen, looking someone in the eye doesn’t have this magic power that many (most?) people seem to think it does.

march 21/RUN

3.35 miles
trestle turn around
43 degrees

Wow, what a morning! Birds! Sun! Calm air! Everything quiet, relaxed. I felt fast and free. less tightness in my neck and hip. Greeted the Welcoming Oaks and Dave, the Daily Walker.

10 Things

  1. a runner with BRIGHT orange shoes
  2. a shining white form in the distance, through the trees: the river
  3. the strong smell of weed somewhere below me
  4. stopping at the sliding bench — movement below, in the trees just before white sands beach: a runner on the winchell trail — should I try that?
  5. the soft knocking of a woodpecker in a nearby tree
  6. stepping off onto the dirt trail for a brief stretch: soft and springy
  7. someone sitting on a bench near the trestle
  8. the river: open and blue
  9. a big branch sticking out of the trashcan — a discarded walking stick?
  10. 3? stones stacked on the ancient boulder

I decided to try an experiment with beats.

First mile: chanting in triples
Second mile: metronome at 170 bpm
Third mile: “Doin’ Time” playlist

mile 1: strawberry/blueberry/raspberry — (to the welcoming oaks) Hello friend! Hello friend! Hello friend!/ old oak tree / stacking stones / stack the stones / intellect / mystery / (noticing a crack in the asphalt) breaking up / cracking up / bright yellow / woodpecker

I found that bright yellow was especially good for locking into a rhythm — BRIGHT yellow

mile 2: 170 was hard. I think it was too slow. I probably should have tried 175 or 180. I think I’ve done 175 before. I only locked into this beat a few times. Was my inability to lock in also because I started with triples?

mile 3: I put in my playlist. The first song was “About Damn Time” by Lizzo. It was great for getting into a groove. Next up, “9 to 5.” As I started to listen to it, I realized the metronome was still on and the beats of the song and it didn’t match up. I decided to leave it going and see what happens when I’m dealing with competing rhythms. I can’t quite remember, but I feel like I didn’t lock into either rhythm; I just created my own, and it didn’t bother/unsettle me.

Later I thought about how the “9 to 5” rhythm represents the relentless drudgery of working within capitalism. Resisting that rhythm, and what it does to you, is important. The final song I heard was “Too Much Time on My Hands” by Styx. I listened to the lyrics and was reminded that it was about a guy who wants a job, a way to feel useful, something to do, but he can’t get one. While he doesn’t mention in the lyrics why he can’t get a job, I thought of the larger context and the conditions (economic, political, social/cultural) that make it difficult for people/communities to find work.

Reading the lyrics — without hearing the music or singing — I was struck by this line:

And I don’t know what to do with myself

So dark. Heard with the music it just seems like a light lyric from a pop song.

This was a fun experiment that yielded some surprising results. I liked the accident of the competing rhythms and the juxtaposition of 9 to 5 with Too Much Time on My Hands. For future attempts, I’ll increase the metronome speed and mix up the order. Maybe I should try to write something, too, at the end of each segment? Speak a poem into my phone?

march 18/WALK

45 minutes
longfellow flats
50 degrees / feels like 39
wind: 20 mph gusts

Sore hips this morning! Is it a running injury or just a terrible mattress? We flipped the mattress yesterday, and sleeping last night was worse than ever, so I’m thinking it’s the mattress. Ascending from the river, I powered up all 112 stone steps and my legs felt great. Would I be able to do that with an injured hip? I don’t think so. I’m definitely incorporating some step work this spring!

10 Things

  1. a woodpecker knocking a few blocks away
  2. the wind was coming from the north and the east
  3. two iron (or wire?) cranes in a backyard — I spied them through a fence — I want a giant iron bird in my backyard!
  4. low notes from a wind chime in the backyard of the house where a family from New Zealand lives — not only do they fly a New Zealand flag, but I heard one of them speaking with a New Zealand accent
  5. on the pedestrian part of the double bridge north of the stone steps — open and blue and brown below
  6. also on the double bridge: a temporary section of fence — looking over the edge of the (it’s high up here), I could see part of another temporary fence halfway down the steep slope — what happened?
  7. the floodplain forest between the steps and the river was littered with felled trees and tangled branches and dirt and dead leaves
  8. creeeaak — branches rubbing against each other in the wind
  9. from below, looking up at the bluff — a brown slope, a wooden fence, voices
  10. a roller skier slowly approaching the ancient boulder

Jenny Odell and Another Kind of Time

Yesterday I started listening to a podcast with Jenny Odell about her most recent book on time and I decided that when the book was ready (I requested it from the library), I would finally dedicate some time to clocks and time and other forms of time that don’t involve clocks.

15 jan 2024

It has taken me until today to return to this podcast. Why? I’m studying time and I got a notification that it was the featured podcast on Emergence. When I got the book, in February, I had already moved onto other projects — an ekphrastic project, then wind. So now, 15 months later, I’m taking up the task I assigned myself. Ha! That’s Sara/gorge time. I briefly returned to it this January, but dropped it again, which is another example of Sara/gorge time — scattered returns and departures, loops, taking it up again and again.

Today, I look several pages of notes in my Plague Notebook. Here are some highlights:

reframing language outside of the rigid belief that time is money and time as stuff that can be measured, counted, and should be hoarded

when did time become a commodity?

And then something happened, and it seems to have to do both with technology and sort of cultural needs: like on the one hand the escapement, which is like a part of a clock that can sort of keep the mechanism going as opposed to like a guy ringing a bell at a certain time, right?

Another Kind of Time

This reminds me of my poem and the idea of person inside that bell tower tugging on the rope to make the bell ring!

That happened. And then also towns that were becoming very commercial started needing to be able to count up and measure labor hours that they were buying from people. And so some confluence of those things led to this notion of an hour: like an hour that can just exist, you know, in the imagination. And that an hour is an hour, and a labor hour is a labor hour, and it sort of doesn’t matter what season it’s happening in, what time of day. And for me, that is a really crucial separating point. That is when this idea of time as stuff started to peel away from all the things that it had been embedded in previously.

As planet-bound animals, we live inside shortening and lengthening days; inside the weather, where certain flowers and scents come back, at least for now, to visit a year-older self. Sometimes time is not money but these things instead.

Telling time through weather and seasons, and the leaving and returning of leaves, and the certain slant of light, and the sound of the water, and the feel of the path, and the amount of view, and the ease or difficulty in breathing.

chronos (ordinary, standardized time) and kairos (the interruption of things/ordinary time, extraordinary time)

horizontal (work + leisure used to restore energy for work = work + weekend)
vertical (awe, wonder, interruption, not work, “true” leisure)

migratory time, animal time

what is time to a flower? water, temperature, sun

the 72 micro-seasons in Japanese almanac

how do I tell time when I’m by the gorge?

weather – exposing myself to the elements, running in them, noticing and feeling the effects of wind, air quality, rain, snow, ice, the cold or heat — a relationship to/conversation with the world

witnessing the nearly invisible labor — tree trimming, repaving, managing and maintaining trails, erosion, nest-building

alienation and learning to listen to the world

. . . there’s a part of Braiding Sweetgrass, where Robin Wall Kimmerer is describing—I think she’s talking about like what it would feel like to not know the names of the things that are living around you. And then she says, I imagine it must feel like showing up in a city and you can’t read any of the signs, right? Like, that’s a deeply frightening and lonely experience to have. 

When I heard this bit, I raised my hand and said, “that’s me.” I can’t read signs on or inside building that often — even in Minneapolis, where I’ve lived for over 20 years. It is frightening and lonely and frustrating.