The trails looked sloppy and slippery, so I biked and ran inside today. I was planning to watch Poker Face while I biked, but I couldn’t find it. Tried “Pluribus” again but it was too much for me . . . again. Finally settled on the new Knives Out movie, which I really enjoyed. While I ran, I listened to a podcast with one of my favorite triathletes, Taylor Knibb. She talked about her season and her experience DNFing at Kona: she had heat stroke in the last few ks and even though she was winning, had to drop out. When they checked her temperature, it was around 105. Yikes.
I don’t remember much about my short run. One thing: at some point I lifted out of my hips, focused on my arm swing, and felt like a smooth, efficient machine. Fun!
Get Out Ice
This morning, read the news that 700 ICE agents will be leaving Minneapolis today. That’s good, but not nearly good enough. All of ICE should be leaving should not exist. On the way to Costco, driving near the road that leads to the Whipple Building where ICE brings the people they’ve arrested or kidnapped, Scott pointed out a truck hauling several Black Jeep Wagoneers entering the freeway. Black Jeep Wagoneers are the type of vehicle ICE often drives.
For much of the day, I was working on another love poem. I wanted to do another erasure poem, but so far, I’ve been struggling with it. Here’s some of the text that I’ve come up with:
Love #`13
My heart breaks open, will stay open for all who are feeling this occupation
Do I like it? I’m not sure. It all centers around a heart breaking open, instead of just breaking.
bike: 35 minutes run: 1.35 miles outside: 13 degrees
Read a few pages of the Alice Oswald interview in the Paris Review then watched the Las Culturistas podcast with Amy Poehler while I biked. I love Alice Oswald and I love Amy Poehler. So good! I don’t have time right now, but when I do, I want to post some quotes from the podcast episode.
Listened to the first 3 songs on TS’s “Reputation” while I ran. It felt good, and I felt more relaxed than I have in many days. I think it’s the combination of almost being done with my 2-week cold, and news that some Republicans are taking back some of their more extreme statements in support of ICE. But, I know that we’re not close to being done with this nightmare.
1
I think there are places you build in the imagination that become stable. I love the metrical forms, the sonnet and the ballad, but to me the real thing is what I call patience, the idea of creating your own stability within a length of time. I responded to that when I discovered Homer. There was something in that poetry, because it was orally composed—I could feel Homer making forms of patience within the poem, lines coming back and coming back and then coming back. It makes habits. There’s something steady and reliable about its way of moving, while at the same time, it loops wherever it wants to go, and remakes itself.
I could feel straightaway that Homer was quite different from the other types of poetry I’d read. I can remember, when I was told that he was blind, having this dizzy feeling of what a poem would be if you were hearing it and speaking it rather than reading it.
This year, I want to keep pushing at this question of what a poem would/could be if you’re hearing it and speaking it instead of reading it? I want to do more poetry that does just that.
Get Out Ice
A slightly more helpful, less terrifying day than Saturday. Some Republicans are speaking out against the shooting of Alex Pretti, Walz talked to Trump and he agreed to send Greg Bovino somewhere else; Rand Paul is asking for ICE to testify at the hearing next month. Only very small successes that are possibly only offered to get Democrats to pass the budget and give ICE even more funding by the end of this week. Don’t do it Democrats!
I surrounded myself with the loving words of other Minnesotans again this morning, and created 2 more love poems. Here’s one, both are posted here.
Love #6: How to Be a Better Person
Hold space for pain, anger, confusion. Make hope happen for others. Open the door for love, close it in hate’s face. Wear boots, a lot of wool, scarves, and mittens. Bring extras to share. Believe in small acts: they matter. Demand the exit of ICE from our beautiful cities.
bike: 35 minutes run: 1.5 miles outside: 0 degrees
Still too cold and too icy (and ICE-y?) outside, so more time in the basement. Watched the men’s 2024 Kona Ironman while I biked and tried to focus on my posture and my knee lift. As always, I’m wondering why my left knee often gets stiff after biking for a while. Listened to Lawrence, Acoustic-ish while I ran. I tried to empty my mind, but bad thoughts crept in: how far will the federal government go to keep power? I’m always thinking of Heather Cox Richardson’s refrain: it’s going to get worse before it gets better and her prediction that it will go one way (the people win) or the other (democracy in the U.S. dies) by March — or did she say May? Ugh.
Get Out Ice
Still reeling from the terrible murder yesterday, but going to my block’s vigil and witnessing how Minnesotans stayed peaceful and people around the country/world expressing outrage, is helping a little.
I read a post on facebook about how hundreds of Target employees have signed a letter pushing the CEO to do more against ICE. In the post, it was mentioned how people are going to Target at the same time, buying salt, the immediately returning it, as a way to disrupt business. This action is modeled after an earlier one at Home Depot: buying ice scrapers then immediately returning them. Is this effective? Looked it up and found this Guardian article which describes many different actions against Target, including the salt:
On Martin Luther King Day, SURJ-TCsaid it had gathered 70 people at a Minnesota Target to “interrupt business as usual”. Participants repeatedly lined up to purchase salt, return it and repeat the process as a way to hold up lines, representing a desire “to melt ICE”, the organization wrote online. The organization plans to repeat this tactic at five Twin Cities Target stores until the company speaks out against ICE.
Started an interview with Alice Oswald in the Paris Review (thanks to my library, which makes it possible to check out current issues of some journals online!). So far, she’s talking about teaching Palestinian kids via Zoom and then getting arrested for protesting against the UK’s designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist group. When she’s asked if she planned on being arrested when she joined the protest, she said she did and:
One direct consequence of allowing genocide, though, is that, in order to excuse it, you have to pass all kinds of laws that destroy democracy from the inside. I’d been angry for a while, and confused about what to do, and as soon as I was decided, I felt a relief.
They read me my rights and asked whether I knew I was breaking the law, and did I want to come easily or did I want to be an obstruction. And I said, ‘I’m happy to be arrested, because I don’t believe it’s an offense,’ and that I didn’t want to come easily, and so I lay down and imagined my heaviest self. I was imagining I was made of gold or lead, just enjoying the difficulty the police were having picking me up.
I love this idea of imagining herself as her heaviest self, as gold or lead. Sometimes I like imagining myself as a boulder — I turned into some poetry lines: be a boulder/too big to/lift too much/trouble to/move.
When asked if she’s always considered herself an activist, she says:
Gilgamesh, the Illiad, the Bible, Paradise Lost — all the poems that profoundly shake me are really about how we manage kings. The texture of a life devoted to poetry is activist, in the deep sense. Quite often it’s not activist in the superficial sense. You come at poetry with the momentum of having failed. It’s only when other communication is absolutely impossible that a poems has to exist.
Yes! I feel that with my poetry about vision loss and the new ways I’m learning to see and be now.
Wow, there is so much in this interview that I love, so much about Oswald that I love, including her discussion of insects as speaking with wings instead of mouths. And then there’s this bit about an old woman, “an angry old battle-ax,” who had only ever been one village over:
I used to go up the road just to talk to her, and during one of these conversations she broke off because she’d heard a bumblebee go into a foxglove and change the tone of its buzz. She said, ‘Did you hear that? I love that sound.’ I remember thinking, If you don’t move away from a village, that’s the sort of thing you notice. I made a determination at the point that I wanted to be that sort of person.
Me too! Oh, thank you Alice Oswald for saying such beautiful and interesting things and making me imagine the current world otherwise for a few minutes!
Yesterday was a beautiful day in Minneapolis, filled with fierce love as thousands of Minnesotans (I heard 50,000, but I’m not sure if that’s accurate), marched downtown. Today was terrible; another Minneapolis resident was executed by ICE. I’m struggling to write any words right now, but I wanted to at least write that.
bike: 30 minutes run: 1 mile -5 degrees
I hoped that working out might help me feel a little less overwhelmed and it did but not much. Guess I’ll have to try more deep breathing.
bike: 33 minutes run: 1.5 miles basement outside: -4 / feels like -22
Brrrr! And that wind! I was outside this morning, shoveling, but otherwise I’ve been inside. Devoted much of the day to surrounding myself with other Minnesotans words of love and solidarity, then turning them into a cento.
At the start of my bike, I watched the first episode of “Pluribus.” So good! Then I got to the lab scene with the rat and I realized it was too much for me right now. I found an old, “from the vault” 2018 triathlon on youtube and watched that instead. By the end of the bike, my left knee was feeling stiff, like it sometimes does. Hopped on the treadmill and listened to “Mood: Energy” while I ran. The first song was, “Harder Faster Stronger” and somehow it made me feel more anxious instead of less. But, Ok Go’s “Here it goes Again” helped.
After Consulting with our Team, We Are Choosing Love / Sara Lynne Puotinen
This is a call to everyone. This is a call to anyone. Here, now, in Minneapolis, our hearts are open. Here, now, in St. Paul, our hearts beat strong. Here, now, in Minnesota, we are choosing to take the day and fill it with resistance, solidarity, reflection, love.
Let us be clear: we are not powerless. We are not hopeless. Of course we have hope! And we will find each other. We will gather, we will keep moving.
We must raise our voices to acknowledge, now is not okay. ICE’s ongoing occupation is fascism. We are afraid, we are angry, we are exhausted. And we will continue to show up and to fill the streets with love.
This is not about choosing sides, this is about choosing love.
On Friday, January 23, 2026, there is a call for a general strike against ICE: ICE OUT MN. No work, no class, no shopping. As of 22 jan 2026, more than 500 local businesses are participating.
Many of them have declared their show of solidarity through social media posts. For the past few days, I’ve been gathering their words and turning them into new poems.
In today’s (1/22) practice, I typed up 3 pages of the words, printed them out, then sat at my desk and read and reread them. I wrote down words and phrases that I noticed on another blank sheet of paper with a jumbo pencil. Then I shifted those around and turned them into new lines. I don’t think it is finished, but I’ll post it here anyway.
bike: 33 minutes run: 1.5 miles basement outside: 11 degrees
Cold outside, ice on the paths, ICE on the streets. Even if the conditions were better, is it safe for me to go out for a run on my own? Since I am white, probably, but my vision is bad. It’s good enough to navigate the trail — cracks, bumps, curves — but not to get a sense of when I’m in danger. I can’t read signs — words, gestures, signals — and I can’t see faces or identify people well. Out by the river, if someone stopped me, would I be able to tell if they were ICE? If they were threatening me. I don’t know.
Am I being too cautious? Unsure. For now, I’ll go to the Y or the basement. I miss winter running.
Watched Jennifer Lawrence on Good Hang with Amy Poehler while I biked. It’s sponsored by Spotify, which I wish wasn’t the case. I thought it was funny when Amy asked Jennifer what her favorite song was and Jennifer said, ever since the radio went away, I can’t find new music. Where do you find it? I was expected Amy to answer with the obvious: I listen to Spotify. But she didn’t; she said she finds stuff on tik tok then buys it.
I listened to Mood: Energy again while I ran. Pressure / Billy Joel | No Sleep ‘Til Brooklyn / Beastie Boys | Final Countdown / Europe | Iron Man / Black Sabbath. When I wasn’t thinking about ICE instead of iron, I heard a line about boots of lead and thought of Emily Dickinson and “I Felt a Funeral in my Brain” — And then I heard them lift a Box/ And creaked across my Soul/ With those same boots of Lead again / Then Space begin to Toll. Love that poem!
Get Out Ice
Earlier today, writing about my bike and run yesterday, I was feeling a bit extremely overwhelmed by the headlines I encountered on Facebook. I sat with those feelings for several hours. Then, I saw this video from the Minneapolis Art Sled Rally this past weekend, and I snapped out of the deepest fear:
Minneapolis Art Sled Rally / 17 January 2026
Such love, as joy, as whimsy, as defiance! I had an idea: I should post an expression and example of Minneapolis / Twin Cities / Minnesota love every day. These examples are not suggesting that things aren’t bad (they are), but are claiming space for a powerful counter-narrative to fear and defeat and Minneapolis-as-lawless-hellscape: Love! solidarity, care, joy. I’m going to try and post something on facebook every day, something I haven’t ever done. I used to be much more comfortable with social media, and tweeted all the time. Then my vision declined a lot and I lost interest. Then I became too intimidated by it, afraid that I’d do something wrong — this is not an unfounded fear; there are many buttons/directions posted that are very clear to others, but are invisible to me and my cone-starved eyes. But, I have decided to try again, to be brave and share these examples with others.
I have also decided to archive all these examples on a page in my “How to Be” project on UN || DISCIPLINED: Love, Minnesota-style
note: I’m writing this first section the next morning because I exercised too late to write it then. I’m writing it after reading several headlines/accounts, watching a tiktok that describes how ICE agents are driving around looking for people who look black, brown, or asian to take. Without any cause, they pull these people out of their cars and take them away, leaving the car abandoned, sometimes still running, in the street. Or they break down their doors, pull them out of their houses, half-dressed (in below zero weather), and take them. I read a headline, posted by Senator Amy Klochubar,”St Paul mayor Kaohly Her “livid” after ICE wrongly targets family friend, escorts him undressed into cold and one from the city of St. Paul putting a temporary ban on towing abandoned vehicles. Unreal. Oh, and this was also after reading the message Trump sent to Norway explaining why he wanted Greenland (he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize) and Heather Cox Richardson’s discussion of the significance of this — could this be the final straw? the one that removes him from office?
A quick bike and run in the early evening. Too late and too cold to be outside, and probably too dangerous. Being sick has also made me not want to go outside. Because I’m inside, I haven’t witnessed a lot of ICE activity. Although, even if I was outside, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t see it with my bad vision. I know it’s out there. They target schools, taking parents/kids who look black or brown or Asian, and we live less than 2 blocks from two of them. Just yesterday they were spotted driving through the alley near the end of school.
I watched a running youtuber’s latest video while I biked, listened to a Mood: Energy playlist while I ran. Didn’t think about much. I don’t remembering noticing much either. One thing: after getting off the bike, before putting in my headphones and firing up the treadmill, I could hear the music Scott was playing upstairs while he made popovers. I asked him later what it was, something by Debussy. That’s his comfort music, I think.
Get Out Ice
note: I wrote this on 19 jan, in the morning
Yesterday, I had a great idea: gather together statements by local businesses on social media about what’s happening here, then turn it into a cento poem. And that’s what I did this morning! So wonderful to spend time with words of solidarity and love (and not hate).
What is happening in Minneapolis is terrifying; what is happening in Minneapolis is full of hope. Earlier today, or was it yesterday?, someone posted on facebook about how NBC needs to work on its sloppy reporting, then gave an example: a reporter suggesting Minnesotans are reeling from the protests. Reeling? Not from the protests. The non-violent and fierce ways so many people in Minneapolis and St. Paul are bearing witness and standing together against ICE is inspiring and beautiful and powerful embodiments of love. Here’s my poem:
Love
Love is not business as usual. Love is not a business. Love is a warm place to land. Generous open big enough to hold all who sit who stand who show up for each other even in fear and in grief.
Love is a space where our hearts our mouths our feet our hands our eyes activate love making love living love resisting.
In this heavy moment, we want to be clear: we no longer accept hate.
And with these words, we affirm what we know always to be true: We love, we love, we love.
The statements I used come from the following businesses: Lynette, Hai Hai, Dogwood Coffee, Fireroast Coffee, Arbeiter Brewing, Venn Brewing, Mother Earth Gardens, Bull’s Horn, Black Coffee and Waffle Bar, Wrecktangle Pizza, Carbone’s, Longfellow Grill, Merlins Rest.
I’d like to do more of these. I’d also like to use this practice as a way to: develop a rich, messy understanding of love, to counter the narratives that suggest Minneapolis is violent and dangerous and needs/deserves to be occupied and punished.
I’m inside partly because I’m congested, partly because it’s cold, and partly because I’m a little more nervous to be out there alone these days. I miss the gorge. If I’m feeling better tomorrow, maybe I’ll go out for a short run. At the start of the bike, I struggled to stick with something to watch. I started with The Terminator — too dystopian — then switched to the first season of “The Traitors,” which I’ve been meaning to check out (for some reason I can’t quite remember). It was too much about manipulation and tricking people and not trusting anyone. Finally I landed on the first season of Schmigadoon. Will I return to on my next bike? I’m not sure. I love the show, I watched it when it came out, but I’m not sure I want to watch it again.
For the run, I put in a Mood: Energy playlist. It started with Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” then “Hip to be Square,” then a song I can’t remember, then ended with “Bust a Move.” A strange mix. The run wasn’t too hard, but it wasn’t easy, and I sweat a lot.
Even though I was in the dark, windowless basement, and it was boring on the bike and the treadmill, it felt good to move. The crud in my throat cleared up some, and I felt less tired. Ah, I love moving!
Get Out Ice (written earlier)
Still a little sick — crud in my throat, creaky voice, sinus headache — but feeling much better. I’m so proud of my city and my neighbors and the mayors of Minneapolis (Jacob Frey) and St. Paul (Kaohey Her — the first Hmong American mayor!) and my governor and senators and the attorney general and the congressional representative for my district (Ihlan Omar) and so many of the businesses nearby. All standing up with a fierce love for the people of Minnesota. Such beautiful and powerful expressions of resistance and love!
Keeping the Receipts
Speaking of neighborhood businesses, I’ve been struck by how powerful expressions of love and solidarity are in this moment, and how damning silence is. At the very least, I think a restaurant/business should express a concern for their own workers and acknowledge a need for the safety. This is not a political statement; it is a statement of concern and care for their workers and the community. Scott, FWA, and I were talking about it, and Scott mentioned examples around the city that he has encountered/read about, like, “No ICE” or “We love our immigrant neighbors.” I wrote about Lynette’s instagram statement two days ago and here are some other statements by nearby businesses:
1
At Merlins, hospitality isn’t just what’s on the table. It’s how we show up for the people around us. We stand with our immigrant community. We stand with those feeling shaken, overwhelmed, or unsure. And we stand for the innocent people who deserve to feel safe, seen, and welcome.
If you need a warm place to land, a moment of normalcy, or just to sit among neighbors who care—our doors are open. Always.
Everything going on in our city is horrific, that is true. It is also true that we are resilient and adaptable and fueled by our love and care for one another. We will continue to show up, stay alert, and support the growing needs of our community.
You know where we stand. We are stronger together! We know how familiar this feels. We know how to activate our hearts and stand with our community.
We will always create space to support our neighbors who have been participating in the “good trouble, necessary trouble”, to gather and be together.
Join us on Saturday, bring your ICE Whistle in solidarity for one free beer with the community. Thank you Southside for taking care of each other and showing up!
The nearby pub that we’ve been haunting for the past few years — literally haunting; we go there at least once a week — has made no statement, is only using social media to advertise their specials. Scott has reached out to them several times asking why they haven’t said anything about what’s going on. So far, no response. It’s (long past) time to only haunt places that are here for our community.
And, here’s another example of love and support for the community. Hai Hai is not in my neighborhood, but it’s a restaurant I’ve been wanting to go to for almost a year. Now is the time — just not next Friday, when it’s closed for the protest!
Hola Arepa & Hai Hai will be closed on Friday, January 23 in support of the general strike to remove ICE from our cities and get justice for Renee Good. It is important to us to stand with our community in fighting against these injustices and to allow our teams the opportunity to protest or to take a day off for much needed rest and reflection.
Choosing to close on a Friday night in January is not an easy decision for a small business during a notoriously slow time of the year, but we feel it’s important to take a stand and acknowledge that as long as ICE is occupying our city, it’s not business as usual.
This is not business as usual. Yes! They continue with some useful ways for supporting them:
If you want to support us and your other favorite restaurants, please choose a different night this week as your Friday. Taco Wednesday date night? Sunday family brunch hang? Or buy a gift card for a future visit. It’s a difficult time for Mpls & St Paul small businesses everywhere, so every bit counts and your support means the world to all of us and our teams.
an idea! Tomorrow, gather a range of statements from local businesses and turn them into a cento poem about love.
Silence Will Not Protect You
As I think about the importance of publicly acknowledging what is happening, I keep thinking about Audre Lorde and her powerful essay, “The Transformation of Silence Into Language” from Sister Outsider. I studied this essay/book 25 years ago in grad school and taught in 15 or so years ago.
My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
We have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
Beast Mode Mary
I continue to be shocked/delightfully surprised by the relevance of Little House on the Prairie to life in the US these days. Last night, Scott and I watched “The Bully Boys” (season 3, episode 9). Three brothers — 2 adults, 1 teenager — move into Walnut Grove and begin conning, intimidating, assaulting Walnut Grove. They buy stuff from the Olesons on credit, but never pay; they “buy” lumber from Mr. Hanson, then sell it to another of his customers; they “assault” Ma (in the scene they harass her, make her drop her eggs, restrain her, but there seems to be a suggestion of even worse things happening); they beat the shit out of Pa when he confronts them, breaking 3! of his ribs; and the youngest brother punches Mary and gives her a black eye. Reverend Alden counsels his congregation to turn the other cheek and to welcome the men. Mary tries to cover up what happened and to avoid Bubba — that’s the kid-bully’s name. But near the end, during recess, he steals her school tablet, and that, along with learning what has happened to Ma and Pa at the hands of the older brothers, is a bridge too far for Mary. She goes Beast Mode on Bubba — tackling and punching him. When he fends her off, another girl tackles him, then another. Finally, all the girls — maybe a dozen — jump on him and whoop his ass. Silent, weakened by fear and separation, they suffered alone at the hands of the bully. Together, they were strong and defiant and powerful. Inspired by the girls, Reverend Alden calls out the men at church as doing the devil’s work, pins one of them against the wall (Beast Mode Reverend!), and rallies the men of Walnut Grove to run the bullies out of town — Take only what you brought with you! As they march out in disgrace, the women sing, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory. No, I don’t agree with everything in this episode, but wow, was it wonderful to watch it and recognize what Minneapolis is doing right now (just one example for yesterday)
minneapolis update: peaceful protests last night, more protests today, Noem/Trump are attempting to escalate it, Walz calls for peaceful protests and “good trouble”, FBI takes investigation away from Minnesota, public school is cancelled for rest of the week after ICE enters campus and threatens staff/students at Roosevelt High School (the threatening was yesterday, the cancellation begins today).
Icy outside, so inside on the bike and the treadmill. Important to get in some exercise for stress relief. Watched clips from the US figure skating championships while I biked, listened to Mood: Energy” while I ran. Songs: Panama/ Van Halen; We Got the Beat/ Go Gos; I did Something Bad/ Taylor Swift; My Sharona/ The Knack — an at least one other song I can’t remember now. It felt good to move, especially for the second mile of my run. A few times, I felt like I was floating. The thing I remember most: my bobbing shadow off to the side, in the shadows, near the old coal shoot — yes, my house is old enough to have a coal shoot in the basement.
Translated from the French by Gabriella Bedetti & Don Boes
from the time we were talking to stones we took on their meaning their time and now their memory is in us it walks in our footsteps it moves in our warmth we no longer distinguish between what they say and us the time of the stones is us and we are full of cries that we leave in our wake like stones holding on to each other to find among them our path
This morning, barely one day after a woman was shot and killed by ICE here in Minneapolis, this poem speaks to me in a different way than it would have the day before. Before I would have thought about the time of stones as living in geologic time or talking to/with/as stones as echoes or Kafka’s parable of Prometheus in which Prometheus becomes part of the rock (“According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.”) but now I’m thinking of the stones — like Emily Dickinson’s granite lip — as tombs and the dead talking (or trying to) talk to us:
If I couldn’t thank you, Being fast asleep, You will know I’m trying With my Granite lip!
Windy, icy, cold, so I decided to stay inside. Finally began watching The Thursday Murder Club while I biked. I like it; especially with audio descriptions. Listened to my new audiobook, Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars, while I ran.
No great thoughts or images on the bike or the treadmill. Just a chance to be distracted from difficult feelings — frustration, worry, regret, sadness — felt as I try to help FWA figure out his future.
a fun experiment
For many years now, I’ve been thinking about how I might be able to use a text that’s been meaningful to me in my thinking and writing about the Mississippi River Gorge: a 2002 Gorge Management Plan prepared by Great River Greening. In writing about the gorge, I’ve often referred back to this 140 page document for information about the geography, geology, ecology, and cultural/social history of the area. And I’ve thought about using its text in some way. An erasure poem? A blackout? Those are the two types of found poetry that I’m most familiar with. Today, reading an interview with Lisa Olstein about her new collection, Distinguished Office of Echoes, I was reminded of a third type of found poetry: cut-outs. Here’s an excerpt and another from the book. My first reaction: yes, I should try this! But then, as I (tried to) read Olstein’s examples, I realized that these poems aren’t accessible and are almost impossible for me to read. I don’t want to write in a form that I can’t even read myself. But, maybe I can think about/think through another version of found poetry that is accessible to readers (like me) that have low vision or no vision.
A first thought: find phrases or one syllable words that can be made into chants/running rhythms.
And, I’m realizing that this idea of writing something with Cleveland’s words is leading me a project I’ve been thinking about for a few years: ekphrastic poems + how I see + writing about the gorge/gorge management as a work of art as ekphrastic + anti/anti-pastoral poems. Just the other day I was thinking — maybe I wrote about it, too — about 2 directions I could go for 2026: M(e)y(e) Emily Dickinson, on ED’s vision poems and their importance for me, and How I See — ekphrastic/pastoral/visual art.
run: 1.7 miles neighborhood / river road trail 29 degrees 50% very slick ice
Not ideal weather for a run. Were there any other runners out there? I can’t remember; I do recall seeing one walker. A lot of the sidewalk, road, trail was fine — not slick at all — until it wasn’t. Every so often, a slippery spot, some I could see, some I couldn’t. I skittered several times, having to take little half-steps. No sense that I was almost about to fall. I think I was lucky today that I didn’t twist or strain or break anything.
My body didn’t tense up in anticipation of sliding or falling, but I also wasn’t relaxed. Constantly trying to see or feel the ice. Did I notice anything else?
10 Things
flitting birds, emerging from trees
rusted orange in the floodplain forest
the loud scraaaape from a neighbor’s shovel
na ice-covered river
a strong wind — not heard or seen but felt, burning my ears and my face
car wheels losing traction on snow/ice, turning around in the middle of the street
puddles on the path
the edges of the road, dry then super slick then wet
puddles on the sidewalk, not in the usual spots — the house on the next block, the house past 46th — but just around the corner
noisy trucks near a school, doing some sort of repair work involving banging and backing up and scraping and pounding — heard, not seen
bats!
Reviewing old entries, as part of my On This Day morning ritual, I encountered a poem with the great line,
Fix your gaze upward and give bats their due, holy with quickness and echolocation (Abecedarian for Dangerous Animals/ Catherine Pierce
Give bats their due. Yes! This line led me to other bat poems — last year or the year before I created a bats tag — and to these wonderful lines which I’ve written about before:
Think of it—to navigate by adjustment, by the beauty of adjustment. All those shifts and echoes. (Threshold Gods/ Jenny George)
To navigate by adjustment, shifts, echoes. Can I do something with these lines, add them to my echolocated poem at the end, Ringing Still, or another poem in the final echolocated section? Hmmm….echolocated is about being located/found by others. The (current) title of this collection is echolocate || echolocated. There’s a gap/tension between locating and being located, the one doing the locating and the one being located. In past years, I’ve imagined these two subjects (the locater, the located) as one Sara (the Speaker) trying to located another Sara (the reader), a You and simultaneously an I. No. Too much explanation. There’s is a swirl of something in my implied speaker addressing a You which is not me, and also me, and my consistent reference to the person going to the gorge and running and noticing (which is what I am doing) as the girl or she — which, if I haven’t already mentioned it is an actual girl — me, age 8:
Sara, age 8, in my soccer team uniform.
Instead of spelling this out, I’d like this to haunt this collection. Does it?
bike: 30 minutes run: 1.3 miles basement
Scott and I were planning to go to the y, but it started sleeting and snowing, and the wind was blowing, so we didn’t. Instead I went to the basement and biked. I started watching a documentary that I’ve been wanting to watch for more than a month: Come See Me in the Good Light. It’s about the poet, Andrea Gibson. Beautiful.
Then I got on the treadmill and ran while listening to my new “Eye Tunes” playlist on shuffle:
Breakfast in America/ Supertramp
Double Vision/ Foreigner
See You Again/ Miley Cyris
Tell Me What You See/ The Beatles
Eyesight to the Blind / The Who
Eye of the Tiger / Survivor
Open up your eyes now, tell me what you see It is no surprise now, what you see is me (Tell Me What You See/ The Beatles)
tell me what you see, I can’t wait to see you again, take a look at my girlfriend, not seeing straight, she’ll give eyesight to the blind, he’s watching us all with the eye of the tiger.
Feels like -6 isn’t too cold for me, but I’m still trying to be careful with my right glute/hip and the snowy, uneven paths seemed like a bad idea. So, I biked and ran in the basement instead. While I biked, I watched the Brooks High School Girls Cross Country Championships. Wow, those girls are fast! And mentally tough. The hills on that course look awful.
As I finished my bike, RJP came down the stairs. She comes over almost every day (from her apartment) to say hi and see Delia. I took a break and we had a great talk about her latest success with knitting and using breathing patterns in deciding how often to knit and purl and the value of small goals that are designed to be about cumulative success instead of one big achievement. I mentioned SWOLF and asked her if she had any good acronyms for it:
Swimming with octopi, looking for fish Sara wishes October lasted forever
run!: 1.25 miles treadmill
Last week, Scott tried the treadmill and the belt wouldn’t move, but it did today. Hooray! And I ran without pain during or after the run. Excellent. Did my old treadmill routine of listening to the first few songs of Taylor Swift’s Reputation as I ran. I listened to “Look What You Made Me Do” on my cool down walk and decided that it would be a good song to listen to on the track while doing some speed work. Moderate pace in the verses, much faster in the chorus. I’ll have to try it next week.
Echoes, a Quarry and hybridizing echolocations
A few hours earlier, I came across and wonderful submissions call for the journal, Waxwing:
Send us your work that hybridizes, blends, resists the boundaries between fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art.
Waxwing wants to publish fiction and nonfiction that can stand alongside poetry: stories and essays where language is the primary concern. We seek writing that is like the characters and creatures we named the journal after—Daedalus made something that had never before existed, Icarus joyfully dared to do what hadn’t been done, and the eponymous birds seem to be what they’re not. We’re interested in narratives that risk, that come close to failing but land on the other side, not in the sea, and like the red tips of feathers that look like sealing wax, we love flourishes. We’re not interested in virtuosity that pleases the masses, but we do crave intensity, and stories that feel a little dangerous. We seek to showcase the particular and the peculiar, the odd and the revelatory—we want to read stories and essays that make us feel like we are learning something, even if it’s something we can’t quite explain.
I’m trying to put something together from my manuscript and my echolocation project. At the end of my draft, I have a piece titled, “Echoes: a Quarry.” It is a list of all of the one, two, and three syllable words from my poems. I collected them and used them to create my rock, river, and air echo/chant poems. I want to do some thing with sound (me reading the words altogether, and online — Scott said he could do write code that would scramble up the words to make new chants) and with visuals (a map locating the echoes. I’ll spend the rest of the day trying to think through it.
An experiment with quarrying words. Find all of the one, two, and three syllable words in a favorite poem. Turn them into a new poem that offers echoes of the original.
Before I got my eye put out/ Emily Dickinson
1
I got my eye put out liked well see have know way told me might Sky mine tell heart would split size stars much noon take could birds road look when news strike dead so guess just soul pane sun
2
before other creatures today meadows mountains forest stintless between finite motions dipping morning’s amber safer upon window
3
incautious
My poem:
Today stars are in motion, in- cautious of birds, Sun. I see my way split before the noon sky. Tell me, dead eyes (mine) — finite, dipping be- tween soul’s meadow and heart’s forest — when it is safer to look.
It rained, then snowed last night. Today: 2 inches of icy snow on the ground. Even so, I decided to go out for a run. I got bundled up and headed out. Almost immediately I realized it was too icy and my legs and feet tensed up. I was less worried that I would slip and fall, and more that I would run strangely and strain something. So I ran for a few blocks, then turned up a block and walked back. It was disappointing because it felt good to be outside, to breathe in the cold air. Returning, I heard a strange, almost squeaking, creaking noise. I thought it might be some branches rubbing near a fence, but when I looked at them I couldn’t see anything. A minute later, I encountered a woman with a dog. She called out, it’s the sandhills! they’re migrating! I said — oh, they’re up in the sky?! how cool! I’m assuming she meant sandhill cranes — I just looked it up and yes, it was Sandhill cranes! I listened to their call and it sounded like what I was hearing earlier. Nice! I’m so glad I got outside!
Before I biked, I had to put my bike back on the stand and pump up the tires. It’s the first indoor bike of the season. I watched the rest of Lucy Charles Barclay’s race recap from the 70.3 World Champs. I’m always impressed with the mental toughness of the professional runners and triathletes.
Running on the treadmill wasn’t fun. I needed better music — and a better attitude, I guess. I’d rather be running outside or at the ywca track. I listened to a podcast, which didn’t help me forget that I was running in the dark basement on a treadmill. I’m still glad I did it and that I can burn some energy in the basement when the weather is too bad to be outside or to drive to the y.
I finally decided to start watching the Apple+ show, See. A plague has wiped out all but 2 million people. The survivors are blind. At the time of the series, centuries later, vision exists only as a myth. The first episode begins in a remote village. I wanted to watch it because I’m curious how blindness is represented in the show. I should add that I am watching the show with audio descriptions on; I don’t think I’d be able to watch without them. My first question: what do they mean by blind? They never specify. Is it pure darkness, or can they detect some light?
The blind villagers function normally; they navigate with long sticks and dogs and ropes that are strung up all around the village. Also: wind chimes and bells. Many of them have extremely good hearing.
If you’re lying, I will hear. Nothing escapes my ears. I hear doors closing in your voice.
Just as I was stopping my bike, the evil queen appeared. I’m not sure what her deal is yet — I just know that she’s evil and she wants to kill the two babies that have just been born in the village because she hates their father and has a bounty on his head.
Do I like this show? Not sure. I’ll keep watching. One thing that was difficult — the fight scene between the queen’s henchmen, the witch finders, and the village, led by Jason Momoa. It was long and very visual — so much audio description.
While I ran I listened to the mood playlist: energy. Not sure why this is the case, but running actually helps loosen up my back when it feels a little tight. I only ran a mile, but it was enough. Now I’m tired and hungry!
before the run
In his introduction of the poem-of-the-day for the slowdown poetry podcast, Major Jackson says,
Today’s marvelous poem reminds me we exist in liminal zones where the extraordinary renders the ordinary visible and uncanny, an assertion of the imagination that makes our world shimmer.
The ordinary as uncanny, shimmering. I love this description and Heather Christle’s work for this reason. My lack of functioning cone cells makes more of the world uncanny and shimmering. Often, things are not quite and almost. Everything seems to be vibrating and pulsing, soft and slow. And my reliance on peripheral vision means I am much more aware of movement. Before, when my central vision worked, I had an easier time blocking that movement out, but now I see all of it. While this is a problem, it is also offers the possibility of seeing the world differently, of accessing the magic and wonder of it.
How do you say ‘inopportune’ in a small forest of cell phone towers disguised as bizarrely regular trees? I am asking in case it happens, because anything can and even does. Sometimes I want to shrink and move into a miniature model village mostly because the particular green of the imaginary grass corresponds with how my body believes joy would feel if joy were to happen here on Earth, where my eyes receive light in this certain way: limited, but not without pleasure. As a child I visited one model village so extensively constructed I fell into a state of complete wonder— ‘They thought of everything!’ even the person running late for the train, and the window left slightly open to the storm— and I should like to request the arrival of this sensation in response to the world at its actual scale— just imagine! Someone has even gone to the trouble of filling the egg cartons individually with smooth brown eggs and one—such detail!— has broken, but not enough to be noticed before the carton has been paid for and brought home. Sometimes artificially I will induce this feeling in myself by going silent at a large restaurant gathering, pretending —until it is real—that each person is speaking from a highly naturalistic script, having carefully rehearsed each tiny gesture, the mid-sentence reach for the salt, and I fall immediately in love with my companions, in awe of their remarkable talent for portraying with such detailed conviction the humans I know as my friends.
I can’t quite put it into words, but this poem speaks to a conversation Scott and I were having last night. He was pointing out all of these minute details about our environment, like how the pinball machine was set up and leveled, and how that process affects game play and your enjoyment of it. There was something about the attention to the details and learning more about all the (almost) invisible things required to make a thing work properly and then describing that work as “care” work that is echoed in this poem.
Future Sara, will this make sense to you? It connects to being oriented toward care and wonder and finding delight in the small details.
Sitting at my desk in the front room before heading out for a walk, I could hear the wind howling. I wrote in my Plague Notebook, Vol. 24, the wind purpled the sky. Later, walking with Scott and Delia, feeling and hearing and seeing the wind, I said it again and explained it to Scott: the blustery wind, like someone mad and full of bluster, their face turning purple with outrage. I had been planning to try running outside today, but after being pushed around by the wind, I decided I’d prefer to be in the basement.
My favorite things about the wind: the way it swirled the leaves on the sidewalk; turning the corner and feeling the wind on my back, seeing the leaves flying ahead of me.
bike: 30 minutes run: 1.5 miles basement
Watched part of S2: episode 1 of Sprint on Netflix while I biked. I’m so glad I put on the audio descriptions! I could never read the big block text they used for identifying people and locations. It’s pretty good, even though they’re using a worn storyline: rival sprinters, one is flashy and talks a lot, the other is quiet and avoids the spotlight.
Listened to a running podcast for the first 10 minutes, then an energy playlist for the rest. I didn’t want to do much in case my back or hips flared up. They both seem fine — not completely pain free, but not painful either. It felt good to get my heart rate up for the first time since Saturday.
Writing this part of the entry at 11:45 am, it’s even windier with 47 mph gusts! Very glad I didn’t go outside to run!
the purple hour
The final purple hour. I’ve enjoyed devoting time to this color. Today’s goal: to write some lines inspired by my exploration.*
rituals/ceremonies for each of my main colors? see CA Conrad on red
2 shadows, cast on the closed curtain, light source: a neighbor’s security light shadow 1 = a thick smear of bird poop on the glass turned into a small form on the curtain shadow 2 = the thin branches of the serviceberry bush, shimmering in the wind, thin shadows vibrate on the curtain
The wild/ing in this girl is purple, I think, A deep and dark purple.
Machetazo!, Bony Ramírez & Blonde Dreams, Alison Saar
you can take the girl out of the wilderness you can strand her bewilder her for a time you can even hang her upside down in your rickety attempt to shake loose the source of her power but you won’t ever disentangle the wilding from her the force of a thousand suns unfurling and hurling her toward the ground you won’t be able to erase the traces of salt lacing her ravenous dreams oh you can try unwebbing her feet but the lizard in her will keep sunning itself as the day is long and at nightfall will crawl up your walls lurking at the corners of your vision goading you on while she thwarts your every endeavor abandoning her tail anything required of her to keep eluding your capture
*Here’s a first draft of something about purple:
Purple Things
a wind-stirred sky / the space between your eye and the object you’re looking at / agitation / the light from a full moon filtered through the blinds / the square shadow it casts on the carpet / deep inside the beat a thought a dream / darkened doorways / a bruise / mold / mist / a sunset after a volcano / a fashion craze / a widow’s shroud / fibs / a house, settling / the beginning / the end / interiors / oxygen-starved extremities / ornamental grass / asters / tantrums / restlessness / the buzz beneath / impending thunderstorms / ink / iodine / inheritance: a mother’s jacket, a daughter’s despair / fake fruit flavor / static / the only color I see when I wake up in the middle of the night
bike: 30 minutes run: 3 miles outside temp: feels like -13
Thought briefly about going outside for a run then remembered if I stayed inside I could bike and watch more of The Gorge, which I did. I have 30 minutes left. Lots of action and jump scares and secret military operations and old film reels that reveal science experiments gone wrong and evil private corporations forming unbeatable mutant armies and chemical leaks and spiders with human skulls and more spent ammo than seems possible and . . . . I’m not sure how I feel about it all yet. One thing: earlier, when they first entered the gorge, the poet-sniper-main character (Levi) quoted T.S. Eliot and “This is how the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” This sure sounds like a bang. Two possibilities: 1. he nods to the line and has some witty quip about it, like if we’re going to end, let’s do it with a bang, not a whimper (ugh!) or 2. a much quieter conclusion, where they are not destroyed and the gorge is not destroyed evil is only slightly contained and will continue to slowly simmer and spread. Will Levi finally read Drassa his poem about her? Will he quote some other poetry? Will the movie end in poetry instead of war?
While I ran, I listened to an amazing podcast with a poet I just happened to write about yesterday: Rebecca Lindenberg. Wow! What an amazing conversation.
about how acceptance and resistance co-existfor her as she lives with chronic illness (type 1 diabetes)
I mean, what I feel is not acceptance. I did use that word earlier, but I don’t think that that is what I feel. I think what I feel is persistence more than anything.
And I feel ongoingness and I feel hope. . . . I don’t experience hope as a passive feeling, like hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul, I’m like, maybe, but you have to feed it and change the food in its cage and take it out and let it fly. . . . I understand hope as a series of acts of meaningful devotion. And I feel that because so much of the maintenace of a diabetic body is routines that you do every single day, if I think of them as small rituals instead of routines, then it doesn’t feel like I’m obeying my disease.
Persistence, ongoingness, the practice of hope, a series of (small) acts of meaningful devotion. I feel these things in me as I navigate diminished vision and potential blindness.
the purple hour
4:05 am / dining room
Tried to sit down and think about Monica Ong’s “Lavender Insomnia” but was too restless, agitated — not from thoughts, but a buzzing left leg.
11:10 am / front room
the violet hour (twilight)
T.S. Eliot’s violet hour in Waste Land: At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Civil twilight = dim but artificial light is not needed, bright stars are visible = violet
Nautical twilight = dimmer, sailors can use stars to navigate horizon, you need artificial light to do things = plum?
Astronomical twilight = almost full darkness, dark enough to see galaxies, nebulas = eggplant
I’m still thinking about T.S. Eliot and “The Hollow Men.” Hollow is such a great word. I didn’t realize T.S. Eliot lived until 1865 (edited on 19 feb 2026 — that’s quite a typo! not 1865 but 1965), and long enough for there to be a recording of him reading it. Those last lines!
added 19 feb 2026: Listened to this poem again. Wow! I can’t believe I didn’t tag this with shadows. So much shadow!
bike: 30 minutes run: 3.05 miles outside temp: -1 degree / feels like -18
Public schools were canceled today because of the cold. I don’t have a kid in public school anymore (hooray!) but I do rehearse at a high school on Tuesday nights for community band. When schools are closed band is canceled. Bummer.
I have run when it felt like 20 below, but 18 below was too cold for me today. Also, I figured out something I wanted to watch while I was biking: The Gorge. There is very little talking in it; it’s almost all visual. Luckily, I had the audio description on. I think I would have missed most of the movie without it. What a relief, for my eyes and brain, to hear the descriptions. About 20 or 30 minutes in, the movie was dragging and I wondered if I could keep watching it. Then bam, a suprise! I was done with my bike so I stopped, but I’m looking forward to watching more of it now. The lead actor is a poet and writes every day. Will he ever mention one of his favorite poets, or quote a line from them? In one of the last scenes I watched before I stopped, he told the other main character that he was writing a poem about her. He would only give her the tentative title: She collapsed the night (I think it was collapsed, but it could have been collapses?). added, 20 feb 2025: Finished the movie and Levi’s poem is mentioned, but Eliot’s line is not — an unsatisfying ending.
I started the run with a podcast, but moved to my energy playlist again. Listened to a few rock songs with electric guitar and thought: electric purple. Then, purple sparking on the surface or on the underside of the surface shimmering shaking distorting and dis or mis or strangely coloring my perception of the world. Purple as energetic electric chemical reactions with ganglion cells. Then I heard another song — why can’t I remember which song? — with a great beat that I was able to get inside of: feet, the beat of the song, the speed of the treadmill, a chorus in tight unison. Could this be the purple part of the beat?
During my morning poem-a-day practice, I read this:
The title is from [Immanuel] Kant’s description of reason, and I want to pry what’s moving and plaintive about it apart from what’s world-ending. Not because I care about Kant but because, from the standpoint of reason, genocide can be justified.
This explanation brings me back to my first year of grad school — fall 1996, Claremont, CA — in a class on Horkheimer and Adorno and critical theory. I remember learning about the limits of reason and the violence of modernity and the hypocrisy of claims for freedom and democracy by those in power.
plum = part of the rose family, prunes when dried, something sweet — a plum job, a plum deal, plummy (adj)
plumb = pipes/plumbing, plumbum (Latin/lead), lead weight attached to line — used to indicate vertical direction, vertically (adj), absolutely — plumb wrong / exactly — plumb in the middle (adv), plumb the depths (v)
plump = having a full rounded form (adj), dropping placing or sinking suddenly and heavily — they plumped down (v), making or becoming plump — plumping a pillow (v)
a plum assignment plumb out of luck plump up an ego
the stain of love is upon the world! Yellow, yellow, yellow it eats into the leaves, smears with saffron the horned branches that lean heavily against a smooth purple sky! There is no light only a honey-thick stain that drips from leaf to leaf and limb to limb spoiling the colors of the whole world—
you far off there under the wine-red selvage of the west!
Yellow and purple. Reminds me, again, of Robin Wall Kimmerer and asters and goldenrods!
If a fountain could jet bouquets of chrome yellow in dazzling arches of chrysanthemum fireworks, that would be Canada Goldenrod. Each three-foot stem is a geyser of tiny gold daisies, ladylike in miniature, exuberant en masse. Where the soil is damp enough, they stand side by side with their perfect counterpart, New England Asters. Not the pale domesticates of the perennial border, the weak sauce of lavender or sky blue, but full-on royal purple that would make a violet shrink. The daisylike fringe of purple petals surrounds a disc as bright as the sun at high noon, a golden-orange pool, just a tantalizing shade darker than the surrounding goldenrod. Alone, each is a botanical superlative. Together, the visual effect is stunning.
Why do they sand beside each other when they could grow alone? Why this particular pair?
Color perception in humans relies on banks of specialized receptor cells, the rods and cones in the retina. The job of the cone cells is to absorb light of different wave lengths and pass it on to the brain’s visual cortex, where it can be interpreted. The visible light spectrum, the rainbow of colors, is broad, so the most effective means of discerning color is not one generalized jack-of-all-trades cone cell, but rather an array of specialists, each perfectly tuned to absorb certain wavelengths. The human eye has three kinds. One type excels at detecting red and associated wavelengths. One is tuned to blue. The other optimally perceives light of two colors: purple and yellow.
The human eye is superbly equipped to detect these colors and send a signal pulsing to the brain. This doesn’t explain why I perceive them as beautiful, but it does explain why that combination gets my undivided attention. I asked my artist buddies about the power of purple and gold, and they sent me right to the color wheel: these two are complementary colors, as different in nature as could be. In composing a palette, putting them together makes each more vivid: In an 1890 treatise on color perception, Goethe, who was both a scientist and a poet, wrote that “the colors diametrically opposed to each other . . . are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye.” Purple and yellow are a reciprocal pair. Our eyes are so sensitive to these wavelengths that the cones can get oversaturated and the stimulus pours over onto the other cells.
Goldenrod and asters appear very similarly to bee eyes and human eyes. We both think they’re beautiful. Their striking contrast when they grow together makes them the most attractive target in the whol emeadow, a beacon for bee.s Growing together, both receive more pollinator visits than they would if they were growing alone.
Braiding Sweetgrass / Robin Wall Kimmerer
3:06 / dining room / 18 feb
the rattle of the vent as the warm air is forced through it
my dark reflection on the stainless steel dishwasher door, caused by the dim string of lights in the front room cast on me as I stood on the rug in the dining room — silvery purple
a creaking house, settling after the heat stopped
a hiss in my head
what are the origins of magenta? why were the vikings purple and gold?
purplish blue = indigo
reddish purple = magenta, purplish red = fuchsia
the crab apple trees and their fuchsia funnels (Ada Limón)
Magenta is named after a town in Italy (Magenta) and a bloody battle for independence in 1859
10:00 am / front room
Searching for magenta on poetryfoundation.org, I found some very cool looking exercises from Rebecca Lindenberg about perception, including one using Ezra Pound’s ideogram. Lindenberg offers this example:
CHERRY FLAMINGO ROSE IRON RUST
Say the students choose, for example, yellow. It is likely they will start by suggesting, again, the usual concrete items we associate with that color—lemons, bananas, the sun, corn on the cob, sunflowers. After they’ve exhausted those, it’s important to keep asking—what else is yellow? Taxis, rubber duckies, corn tortillas, rain slickers, caution tape, butter. Then, onion skins, sticky notes, school buses, yield signs, egg yolks, urine, grapefruit rinds, fog—and now we’re getting somewhere. Now we’re not talking so much about what we think of as yellow, we’re talking about what we actually see as yellow.
Once the board or screen is full of things we see as yellow, it’s worth pausing to remind students that we aren’t just making a picture of yellow. What the class chooses will suggest something about yellow—but it doesn’t have to be everything there is to say about yellow. It doesn’t have to be comprehensive, just visceral, evoking “yellow-ness” (or “teal-ness” or “tan-ness”). Then, another vote. Or rather, a few rounds, in which each student gets two votes, until you narrow it down to the final four. And ka-pow! You’ve made an ideogram.
Lindenberg suggests a homework assignment: pick a color, brainstorm at least 25 things related to the color, narrow it down to four, write a paragraph of explanation. I think I’ll try this with purple — just one, or a series of purple moods?!
note: I’m resisting the inclination to dig deep into articles/essays/posts about Pound and imagism. I might (will) get lost in theories and concepts and schools and jargon and devote all my time to understanding and knowing instead of making and feeling. That’s Dr. Sara’s style, not mine!
updated a few hours later: Watched about 20 more minutes of The Gorge. In one scene they’re walking through a yellow fog and into a purple wood. I used my phone to take a picture. Don’t think it quite captures the intense colors.
yellow into purple
In this scene, yellow and purple are used to evoke a hellscape. The half-dead skeletons with trees growing out of them are referred to as hollow men, which is a reference to T.S. Eliot’s poem. The poem keeps coming up; I think I should read it. Wow — just read it. Here’s a bit from the middle and the last lines, which Levi, one of the main characters, recites as they walk in purple (violet) air.
Shape without form, shade without colour. Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom Remember us—if at all—not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams In death’s dream kingdom These do not appear: There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging And voices are In the wind’s singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star.
—
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
bike: 25 minutes run: 3 miles outside temp: 1 degree/ feels like -7
Too cold for me today. Watched some races while I biked — I need to find a good movie or show!, listened to “Energy” while I ran. I stopped at 15 minutes for a few seconds, but when a good song came on — I can’t remember what — I decided to start running again. Then I kept going until I hit 30 minutes. Nice! My small victory for the day.
During the first half of the run I couldn’t quite lock into a rhythm. My feet seemed slightly off with the belt; I was on the edge of the beat. When I made the treadmill just a little faster, I entered the beat. I could barely hear my feet striking and I couldn’t feel the belt moving. Very cool. It felt similar to when I’ve locked in with the metronome. The other thing I remember is looking up at the dark window with the reflection of the light — the one that I’ve written about several times before, describing it as looking like an inverted moon on lake superior — and thinking it didn’t look like the moon anymore. I remembered why: Scott changed the light bulb from a round one to a rectangle one. It’s brighter too. My moon is gone. Bummer.
the purple hour
3:10 am / bedroom Full moon bright, spied through the dark slats of the blinds Slanted square of window with blinds cast in the carpet
Shadow of the blinds cast on McPherson* forearm: stripes Only seen in dim light; the light of this iPad erases it
*a typo — I decided to keep it in here. I don’t remember what I was trying to write that would have been autocorrected to McPherson. Was it just a slip of my fingers as I typed my?
(written 11 feb, 9:30 am) I remember the moon early this morning. Wow! So bright through the blinds. I wanted to walk over to the window and peek through the slats but I was afraid that it would wake Delia the dog, asleep on the couch. It was so bright that even from the floor with the blinds closed all the way, I could see it if I tilted my head just right.
I turned down the brightness of the iPad as much as I could, but it still made the room too bright. Right after I put my iPad away, the shadows were gone. I wondered if clouds were covering the moon. But once my eyes adjusted, the shadows were back.
We inherited these blinds from the old owner of this house. They let light in even when fully closed. How dark would it be in this room if we had different (better?) blinds? How much longer would it take my eyes to adjust to (grow accustomed to?) the dark?
I think these blinds, with their gaps, create a dark that has some light: purple light.
purple thoughts/stories
violet: the very shortest spectral wavelength humans can see to re-create the color purple requires excess: shellfish, lichen
Reading about mauve in The Secret Lives of Colors, I was reminded of the connection between old woman and purple. (I recall thinking about the connection as I ran the other day when the Red Hat Ladies with their purple clothes popped into my head.)
Soon enough, however, mauve went into that most Victorian of things: a decline. Overconsumption, as well as the continuing loyalty of an older generation, meant that the color soon became shorthand for a particular kind o faging lady.
The Secret Lives of Colors / Kassia St. Clair (170)
Then I thought about the final stanza of a poem (this whole poem is amazing, btw). I gathered for this blog a few years ago:
It’s a small deposit, but I’m putting my faith in reincarnation. I need to believe in the sweetness of one righteous image, in Bill Parcells trapped in the body of a teacup poodle, as any despised thing, forced to yap away his next life staked to a clothesline pole or doing hard time on a rich old matron’s lap, dyed lilac to match her outfit. I want to live there someday, across that street, and listen to him. Yap, yap, yap. (I Heart Your Dog’s Heart/ Erin Belieu)
Which led to another random thought about a recent (2019?) hair trend: lavender gray. Looking at some of the pictures I wonder if I could pull this look off — I already have the gray.
The Color Purple
Inspired by my study of purple, I decided to reread Alice Walker’s The Color Purple which I read and wrote about in my masters’ coursework. I was really into Walker and Morrison and the link between women’s spirituality and sexual pleasure. I haven’t read it since then — 25 years ago. So far — 40 pages in — I’m enjoying it. Why is it called The Color Purple? I had to look it up, because I’ve forgotten. There are plenty of answers, here’s one:
I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.
Shug Avery in The Color Purple/ Alice Walker
A helpful source: Unearth the Root of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. It describes the importance of nature and flowers to Walker’s vision of spirituality. This reminds me of Walker’s wonderful essay, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens.” Of course, I can’t find my copy of it right now. I’ll have to keep searching. The article also discusses the importance of horticulture for Black Americans and their African ancestors. I’m reminded of JJJJJerome Ellis’ Aster of Ceremony and their project of researching, naming, invoking the Plants that grew in the area where their enslaved ancestors “ran away”. A big chunk of the book is a Benediction, including the names of these plants, printed in purple. I’ve been reluctant to read it because it looked overwhelming with my bad eyes, but now I want to try. I think it will be another version of “The Purple Hour.”
update, a few minutes later: I started to read this section with my eyes, but it was difficult. I looked it up and discovered that my local library has the audio book. I requested it! A 2 week wait, but hopefully sooner. I’ll start on this whenl I can read the audiobook along with the paper book.
Woke up this morning to snow! Big flakes floating down. I watched them through the kitchen door. Beautiful. Within a few minutes, more flakes, faster, smaller. I sat in the arm chair inherited from Scott’s mom and watched the snow fall as I drank my coffee. A great way to start the day. Several hours later, when the snow had almost stopped, I layered up and went outside to shovel. Soft, fluffy snow, very easy to shovel. I listened to Season 2, Episode 3 of the Severance podcast. There was some wind, but it wasn’t too cold.
an image: shoveling in the back, I watched as a small, dark form swirled and skittered. It moved like a little bird. Was it? No, a leaf. Such a strange sight, watching a leaf that looked alive and not just animated by wind.
After sitting around all day — reading, napping, tracking the runners in the Black Canyon 100k Ultra, doing a FaceTime with FWA — I decided I needed to move. Went to the basement and biked. Then moved over to the treadmill and ran. Watched a few indoor track races during the bike, listened to the rest of the Severance podcast while I ran. That third episode of Severance — woah! The final minutes really freaked me out and triggered a memory from when I passed out last Christmas. Intense.
the purple hour
Woke up with very restless legs at 2:38 am. Too restless to sit and write anything. All I have in my notes is: more restlessness — shaking my legs
Low vision yoga in the morning. Biking and running in the evening: 8 pm. This has to be one of the latest runs I’ve ever done. Will it help my sleep and restlessness? Make them worse? Do nothing? I’ll report back tomorrow.
While I biked I watched an old 70.3 triathlon race. While I ran, I listened to the Energy playlist: Pump Up the Jam, Ballroom Blitz, Hip to be Square. During the bike, my left knee occasionally hurt, which sometimes happens. After the run, my lower back was a bit sore. Should I do something about my back, like take a break or get it checked out?
Anything else I remember? The shadows my swinging arms made. How warm I felt after just a few minutes on the bike. A parched throat. Feeling relaxed and happy to be moving inside.
purple hour
Woke up at 2 am last night. Unlike the night before, when my legs were so restless that I had to shake them for a few minutes, I felt calm and chill and unbothered by being up. Instead of going downstairs to sit at the dining room table, I bounced gently on my exercise ball in the bedroom. Here’s what I wrote:
Bedroom in low light — a quiet still purple, light and dark
Quiet? Silent heavy and light soft and thick
A fan — not white noise but purple noise the agitation of stirring air
A steady hum to cover other noises and to counter the stiff stuck frozen nature of sleep when we slow to almost a stop unable to move in sleep
A world not lacking color but possessing an abundance of purple
purpled pulsing heart pumping purple blood
steady relaxed rocking on my feels (a type: heels, but I like feels, so I’ll keep it!)
cracking spine small purple sparks
I typed up my notes on my iPad. I love the typo: rocking on my feels.
Just now, reading through these notes I thought, is purple noise a thing? Looked it up and, yes it is! It’s used in sound engineering and sound/color therapy and for help with sleep. Here’s a helpful video highlighting sound colors:
I appreciate the descriptions and examples in this video, even if I can’t quite understand all of it. I wonder — what color of noise was I hearing in my bedroom? The sound was produced by a fan. Maybe I’ll ask Scott to analyze it — he loves sound production/engineering. I don’t think it’s purple noise; purple noise seems too high. Listening to a purple noise album on Apple Music, I’m a little agitated.
Speaking of color noise — I wonder what color the wind howling through the gaps in screen and front door is?
Brrr. A quick bike and run in the basement in the late afternoon. Watched “Nobody Asked Us” on YouTube while I biked, listened to an apple music “energy” playlist. Didn’t think about much, just enjoyed moving and sweating a little.
Spent most of my writing day reviewing past entries from June and July. Instead of reading them with my eyes, I listened to them through my computer. It was nice to give my eyes a break. Lots of great stuff about lakes and swimming and the color of water in those entries. Nice to spend some time there when it’s so cold outside. Also a nice way to forget that Trump was inaugurated today.
bike: 25 minutes run: 1.4 miles basement outside: -5 degrees / feels like -10
I have run in colder weather than -5, but I was not interested in going out there today. Do I regret it? I don’t think so, but . . . . While I biked I watched some track races from the Paris Olympics, and while I ran I listened to the Apple Music “Feel Good” playlist. Listening to a different version of this playlist earlier in the week helped the run to go by faster, but the songs weren’t quite as motivating today. Had to skip through several of them until Rio by Duran Duran came on. Next: Rosanna/Toto, then Brandy/Looking Glass, then as I walked Afternoon Delight/Starland Vocal Band. That last one, wow. I don’t remember thinking about much as I ran. I remember imagining myself falling off of the treadmill. I wondered what song would come on next. I tried to lift out of my hips. I debated if Rosanna was a “feel good” song. And now that I think about it, Brandy as feel good? It’s sad. When Afternoon Delight came on I thought about Anchorman and Glee and wondered how anyone would not get what this song was about.
I memorized Wallace Stevens’ “Tattoo” and was planning to recite it while I biked and ran but then I forgot.
bike: 30 minutes run: 2.7 miles basement outside: 7 degrees / feels like -9
Tomorrow it’s supposed to be slightly warmer, so I decided to wait until then to run outside. While I biked, I watched the 2017 5000m men’s world championships with Mo Farrah. While I ran, I turned on an Apple Music made “Energy” playlist. It was great. I don’t really remember the environment — oh, except for that I was cold at first, in our unfinished basement, but then warmed up fast — but I remember my body during the bike. I was working on keeping my back straight and long over the handlebars. During the run, I remember the music and the stretches when I only noticed my legs when they were off the ground. Listening to the music and getting lost in my thoughts about vision and faces and names, I forgot chunks of time.
before the run — remember/forget: names and faces
Last night, I drifted off to sleep thinking about names and nobodies and how I wanted to gather past accounts about them today in this entry. During my “on this day” practice, while revisiting 14 jan 2020, I came across the documentary,Notes on Blindness, and John Hull’s description of losing all of his sight and the ability to remember faces. Hull asks,
To what extent is the loss of the image of the face tied up with the loss of the image of the self and with the consequent feeling of being a ghost or a mere spirit?
So now I’m expanding my thinking to names and faces.
First, a question, prompted by a bit of the Hull that I listened to/watched just now: What senses produce the strongest memories? answer: smell
a short from the longer documentary
I watched the part after Hull’s quote about the face and the self, and it helped clarify the quote more. First, his wife says:
I can’t look into his eyes and be seen. There’s no beholding in that sense of being held in somebody’s look.
To be seen is to exist. This is what lies behind the thought my older daughter has expressed, Oh Daddy, I wish you could see me!
It is not the person who cannot see the face that is the ghost, but the person who cannot be seen. Even as I often feel like a ghost moving through the world, I also feel like everyone else is a ghost or a specter, that I’m the only real and living thing. It’s complicated because I feel both: haunting and haunted.
Of course, sometimes I can see faces, or at least parts of faces, and I can still see gestures and bodies, so my feeling of loss and disconnection is much different from Hull.
And there’s more messiness about my understanding of all of this. To be sure, there has been a tremendous feeling of loss over not being able to see faces clearly, or to hold someone with a look; to behold and witness others seems to be part of what makes us feel human. But (or and?), some of this is illusion and cultural construct. Sight and seeing someone is not the only way we connect with them, or see them as a self. In fact, it’s not the most reliable. For me, there is something exciting (is that the right word?) about gaining a new perspective on vision and its limits, and about being motivated to care about the process of seeing, which I used to ignore.
Wow — how far am I wandering from remembering and forgetting here?
Now I’m thinking about names and faces and phrases like, put a name to the face. For a little less than a year, Scott and I have been regularly going to a pub near our house, The Blue Door. Much of the time, we’ve had the same waitress. I always recognize her — less by her face than her gestures — but I haven’t known her name. A few days ago, Scott finally realized he could check the bill for her name so now we know it. I wonder, what difference does it make? (How) do I feel more connected to her now that I know her name?
after the run: music
All of the songs I heard were good for energy and distraction, but a few of them felt especially connected to what I had been thinking about prior to my workout.
Reputation/ Joan Jett and the Blackhearts An’ I don’t give a damn ’bout my reputation Never said I wanted to improve my station An’ I’m only doin’ good when I’m havin’ fun An’ I don’t have to please no one I don’t give a damn ’bout my reputation I’ve never been afraid of any deviation An’ I don’t really care if you think I’m strange I ain’t gonna change
I think it was around the time she sang about not wanting to improve her station, I started thinking about names and “being somebody” and notoreity/notoriousness and when wanting to be known is desirable and when it’s not. Usually it’s not for me. I like to be left alone to do what I want to do. I also thought Alice Oswa
Poker Face/ Lady Gaga Can’t read my, can’t read my No, he can’t read my poker face (She’s got me like nobody) Can’t read my, can’t read my No, he can’t read my poker face (She’s got me like nobody)
Wow, these lyrics! Yikes. Anyway, I’m interested in the idea of an unreadable, stone face. That’s how most faces are to me all of the time. I can’t see small gestures or tells that help you to make sense of what’s being said. Now I’m wondering about non-facial poker tells. Here are two that I found: how they handle the chips/cards and table talk.
Rhythm Nation/ Janet Jackson With music by our side to break the color lines Let’s work together to improve our way of life Join voices in protest to social injustice A generation full of courage, come forth with me
As I heard these words, I thought about my discussion below about seeing, looking, beholding each other as the primary way to recognize each other’s humanity/selfhood. What about hearing and listening and playing music?
Bonus: It’s Raining Men/ The Weather Girls
Not directly related to faces and names, but hearing this song reminded me of one of my favorite sections in the blindness documentary. It is nine and a half minutes in and it’s about rain and how its different sounds on a tree or a roof or a garbage can help us to “see” a place with our ears.
Cold and icy and windy outside, so inside in the basement for me. Watched an old track race while I biked, listened to my remember to forget playlist as I ran. Happy to move my legs and work up a sweat. What did I notice? I don’t remember.
remember — inheritance
gestures, ways of speaking, expressions, eye diseases, anxiety disorders, curiosity, persistence, restlessness, strong legs, a love of water, a need for being outside, the impulse to run away, an edge dweller, conflict avoider, a storyteller
I remember a lecture I read by Mary Ruefle in Madness, Rack, and Honey.
Thinking about “I Remember” and remembering, origins and when things began. I thought about how there is a sort of origin point to all of this (my writing poetry) and it’s my eye doctor diagnosing me with a rare eye disease then saying, you should write about it which prompted me to want to work on my writing so I could better explain what I was experiencing. But, I had already been writing and already had those desires, so it was really more of a slight shift, a stutter step or a quick stumble off the path, just briefly, which changed the trajectory, slightly, incrementally. Difficult to pinpoint what all changes your path.
The first song that came up on my playlist was Fame. As I listened to the lyrics — Fame! I’m gonna live forever / Baby remember my name — I started thinking about being remembered forever and fame and names and immortality and Emily Dickinson and JJJJJerome Ellis and their “Liturgy of the Name” in Asters of Ceremonies.
from Liturgy of the Name/ JJJJJerome Ellis
My name, in the time when I cannot utter it, maps the space within me. In an instant the Stutter shuttles me from the present–the barber just asked me my name, my voice fluttering in my throat, struggling not to tremble as the razor presses on my temples–to an ancient place of breath, name, silence, time, creation.
. . .
When the door of my vocal cords closes, another opens. And through that open door I escape into a region I do not know what to call but which is vaster than the space of my body. You could say: my name is the door to my being, and in that interval when I’m stuttering, the door is left wide open and my being rushes out. What rushes in?
25 minute bike ride 1.5 mile run basement outside: 2 degrees / feels like -8 dew point: -6
No running outside for me today. Earlier this morning, when I would have gone out for a run, it felt like -21. Brrrr. I did a short bike and a run in the basement. I don’t remember noticing or thinking about much. One thought: I wonder where the mouse who lives down here is right now? This morning, Scott discovered evidence that it had made its way upstairs: 3 pebbles of poop on the cutting board. Gross!
Watched a T 100 triathlon race while I biked and Taylor Swift’s “Reputation” as I ran.
Here’s a poem I found about Emily Dickinson yesterday:
I will tell you why she rarely ventured from her house. It happened like this:
One day she took the train to Boston, made her way to the darkened room, put her name down in cursive script and waited her turn.
When they read her name aloud she made her way to the stage straightened the papers in her hands — pages and envelopes, the backs of grocery bills, she closed her eyes for a minute, took a breath, and began.
From her mouth perfect words exploded, intact formulas of light and darkness. She dared to rhyme with words like cochineal and described the skies like diadem. Obscurely worded incantations filled the room with an alchemy that made the very molecules quake.
The solitary words she handled in her upstairs room with keen precision came rumbling out to make the electric lights flicker.
40 members of the audience were treated for hypertension. 20 year old dark haired beauties found their heads had turned a Moses White.
Her second poem erased the memory of every cellphone in the nightclub, and by the fourth line of the sixth verse the grandmother in the upstairs apartment had been cured of her rheumatism.
The papers reported the power outages. The area hospitals taxed their emergency generators and sirens were heard to wail through the night.
Quietly she made her way to the exit, walked to the terminal and rode back to Amherst.
She never left her room again and never read such syllables aloud.
Before I started writing this but after my workout, I got up from my chair and my right kneecap missed the groove and slipped out hard. So hard that I uncontrollably yelled, “God Dammit!” No pain and it went right back in, or I was able to pop it back in. But it was shocking — mentally and physically. My LCL or meniscus seem as reticent to walk as my brain does — a strange sentence to write: can you imagine ligaments feeling something independent of the brain? Now I’m nervous about when this might happen again. As is usually the case, I had absolutely no warning. I didn’t do anything abrupt or dramatic; I just stood up and turned. I’ll get over it in a few minutes and stop imagining different scenarios in my head when the kneecap suddenly slides and it hurts and I can’t get it back into place. For now, I’ll breathe and attempt to remember how happy I was to work out before my subluxation.
It’s raining today, and there’s a wind advisory. Decided to go to the basement and do a bike run combo. After pumping up the air in my tire — it is still leaking air even though I got new tires last spring — I found the SuperLeague e-tri championships. I’ve been watching SuperLeague while biking in the basement since it started — when? 2018? Then I ran for 22.5 minutes while I listened to a “If Books Could Kill” podcast and then a playlist.
I don’t remember thinking about much except for that I had to go to the bathroom. Scott and I have new euphemism for it: unfinished business. Anything else? I recall looking straight ahead at the water heater and I remember feeling like a badass when I increased my cadence to try and match the bikers I was watching.
Here’s a victory: I didn’t think at all about the text exchange I had with FWA about what “fun” or “interesting” or “non-music” classes he could take to fill up his pretty bare schedule for senior year. No double major or minors for him. Just music, which he’s very good at, but still . . . . I’m trying to let him figure out his own way, but it’s so hard to watch him make choices that seem foolish or short-sighted. Sigh. Parenting is hard; backing off is hard; trusting is hard. When I worry too much, I’ll go back and watch his recital from Sunday and remember how proud I am of him and that he can (and is) creating an exciting future for himself.
update: I didn’t need to worry; he figured out some great classes on his own: Japanese!, Environmental Geography, and Criminology.
before the bike and run
Yesterday was the poet, Tomas Tranströmer’s birthday. He would have been 92. I’ve posted a few poems from him on here before. While looking for “air” poems, I found this one. It’s an ekphrastic! Those ekphrastic poems keep appearing. Are they trying to encourage me to keep working on my ekphrastic project? I’d like to believe so. Anyway, here’s the Tranströmer poem I found:
It’s not a sheltered world. The noise begins over there, on the other side of the wall where the alehouse is with its laughter and quarrels, its rows of teeth, its tears, its chiming of clocks, and the psychotic brother-in-law, the murderer, in whose presence everyone feels fear.
The huge explosion and the emergency crew arriving late, boats showing off on the canals, money slipping down into pockets — the wrong man’s — ultimatum piled on the ultimatum, widemouthed red flowers who sweat reminds us of approaching war.
And then straight through the wall — from there — straight into the airy studio in the seconds that have got permission to live for centuries. Paintings that choose the name: “The Music Lesson” or ” A Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.” She is eight months pregnant, two hearts beating inside her. The wall behind her holds a crinkly map of Terra Incognita.
Just breathe. An unidentifiable blue fabric has been tacked to the chairs. Gold-headed tacks flew in with astronomical speed and stopped smack there as if there had always been stillness and nothing else.
The ears experience a buzz, perhaps it’s depth or perhaps height. It’s the pressure from the other side of the wall, the pressure that makes each fact float and makes the brushstroke firm.
Passing through walls hurts human beings, they get sick from it, but we have no choice. It’s all one world. Now to the walls. The walls are a part of you. One either knows that, or one doesn’t; but it’s the same for everyone except for small children. There aren’t any walls for them.
The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall. It is like a prayer to what is empty. And what is empty turns its face to us and whispers: “I am not empty, I am open.”
I love this poem and how it imagines the world outside of the painting and its relationship to the world inside of it. Starting with the first line: It’s not a sheltered world. The noise begins over there, on the other side of the wall . . . . That alehouse, that psychotic brother-in-law. The explosion, the money being dropped into the wrong man’s pocket. Then the airy studio and the seconds that have got permission to live for centuries — the differences between what we notice and try to remember and what we ignore or try to forget — what is worthy of attention, a painting, and what is not.
What is worth noticing in a poem describing a painting, and what is not? The Vermeer painting the poem is titled, “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter,” but there’s no mention of the letter or the woman’s expression, and the blue described by Tranströmer is the blue fabric on the chair, not of the woman’s jacket.
This poem is about the wall, the other side of the wall, the pressure that the other side creates, pressing in on us. The wall between our interior and the exterior world. The edge of the void, the abyss. All of this is kind of, almost, not quite making sense to me. I should spend some more time rereading Tom Sleigh’s“Too Much of the Air: Tomas Tranströmer“.
I’m struck by the last lines:
The airy sky has taken its place leaning against the wall. It is like a prayer to what is empty. And what is empty turns its face to us and whispers: ‘I am not empty, I am open.’
I’m thinking of the gorge here and the limestone walls that contain it and how it is both empty of land/rock and filled with air and openness. To think of the void — the unknowable, unsayable, mystery — as both frightening (emptiness, nothingness) and inviting (openness, possibility).
Yesterday I talked about believing in the unseen. Today I’m thinking about what it could mean to be believe in the unseeable. Unseen could mean, not-yet-seen or unnoticed, but unseeable suggests that seeing is never possible.
Before writing this, I was reviewing an old log entry from April 16, 2022. In it, I discuss Elisa Gabbert’s article about poetry and the Void.
They [poets] write in the line, in the company of the void. That changes how you write — and more profoundly, how you think, and even how you are, your mode of being. When you write in the line, there is always an awareness of the mystery, of what is left out. This is why, I suppose, poems can be so confounding. Empty space on the page, that absence of language, provides no clues. But it doesn’t communicate nothing — rather, it communicates nothing. It speaks void, it telegraphs mystery.
By “mystery” I don’t mean metaphor or disguise. Poetry doesn’t, or shouldn’t, achieve mystery only by hiding the known, or translating the known into other, less familiar language. The mystery is unknowing, the unknown — as in Jennifer Huang’s “Departure”: “The things I don’t know have stayed/In this home.” The mystery is the missing mountain in Shane McCrae’s “The Butterflies the Mountain and the Lake”:
the / Butterflies monarch butterflies huge swarms they Migrate and as they migrate south as they Cross Lake Superior instead of flying
South straight across they fly South over the water then fly east still over the water then fly south again / And now biologists believe they turn to avoid a mountain That disappeared millennia ago.
The missing mountain is still there.
The Shape of a Void / Elisa Gabbert
This past weekend, Scott and I watched the 2 part documentary about Steve Martin, STEVE! I really enjoyed it. I remember responding to this idea offered by one of Steve Martin’s artist friends:
How to close the void. I think that’s the nature and the drive in art, it comes from that deep awareness of that void.
STEVE! — 53:30, part 2
I agree with the second part of that statement, about the deep awareness of the void, but not the first — at least how it’s worded. It’s not to close the void, but to navigate it, develop a relationship to it, engage with it, learn how to live with it. I mentioned this to Scott and he argued that the void in this quotation is not the unknown or mystery, but something else. Maybe lack or longing? A desire to be whole? To have/feel meaning? I still don’t like the word close. Can you ever close the void? Tranströmer doesn’t think so; it’s always on the other side of that wall. Even with a wall between you and it, you feel its pressure in your ears. And it’s this pressure that drives/shapes/enables your art — that makes each fact float/and makes the brushstroke firm.
A final (for now) word on this ekphrastic poem: I like how Tranströmer is responding to the work of art in this poem, how we uses the image to reflect on the abyss/void, history, interior/exterior, and why we make art. I want to think about it some more and try to write something for my “How to See” project inspired by his approach.
bike: 4 minutes run: 3.5 miles outside: feels like 13
Snow and ice on the ground. Wind. Feels like 13. Inside today. I would have done more on the bike, but my calf started to feel a little strange — tightening, but no pain.
The run was good — a few flares, then my heel made some noise at the end, again, no pain, just tight, I think. I locked into a steady, slow pace and listened to the latest episode of Nobody Asked Us. Des told a story about her recent NY 1/2 marathon and how she should have woken up 30 minutes earlier in order for the coffee to do its job — iykyk. The story was funny — I laughed several times — and also fascinating. She talked about how she couldn’t push the pace because if she tried, it would have been a big mess. She was able to control it by managing her effort and working with her body, not against it.
Later, giving a pep talk to Kara for her upcoming race she said something like, You’ll be running along and then suddenly someone in a banana costume will pass you and you’ll say, “hell no, that ridiculous thing can’t beat me!” and you’ll speed up. Thinking about our encounter with the fast banana in our 10k race I wonder, are bananas a thing in races now? Will I see more bananas next month?
before the run
Yesterday I mentioned that it was Robert Frost’s 150th birthday, but I forgot to mention 2 things.
First, when I told FWA about it, he said, And I took the road less travelled and that has made all the difference — or something like that. A few minutes later, as we were walking to the garage to leave for the airport he called out, Mom, look — then walked off the sidewalk into the grass, looped around a bush, then returned to sidewalk and said, See, the road less travelled. Wow.
Second, in honor of Frost’s birthday Poetry Foundation posted his poem, Acquainted with the Night, which I recall first reading through Edward Hirsch’s essay, “The Pace Provokes My Thought.” Acquainted. Another word for familiar with, know of or known to, on friendly terms. I want to add this word to my list of alternatives to know/ing, along with ED’s accustomed, as in We grow accustomed to the Dark. I like the friendliness of acquainted, which is slightly different than the “getting used to” of ED’s accustomed. I also like that it’s friendly, but not too friendly; there’s still some distance from whatever it is that you are acquainted with — an acquaintance not an old friend.
Now I’m thinking about the word familiar. Two immediate thoughts. First, an idea from Alice Oswald that I revisited the other day:
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.
So, familiar is bad for poetry? We need to make the familiar strange, fresh.
Second — I just spent 15 or 20 minutes attempting to find the log entry and poem that made think of this second thing and couldn’t, so I am very reluctantly giving up on it. — thinking about poems and how they can also take the strange and make it familiar, or take strangers and make them friends. I recall reading a poem — I think it was something about ROBINS! — I’m keeping this strange sentence in as evidence of my mind at work. After I gave up on finding and just tried to remember what I said, suddenly I recalled what the poem I was searching for was about and how reading it connected me to a stranger: robins. So I searched back through my posts for “robins” and finally found it. Hooray!
Lately I’ve been reading a lot about how poetry makes the familiar strange, but I think poetry can also make the strange familiar. Give us a door into the unfamiliar so we can get to know someone else and their experiences. The door in for me with this poem was all the robins. This past week, I saw so many fat robins on my crab apple tree, swaying and bobbing and getting drunk off the shriveled up apples.
Here’s the line from the poem that helped me get acquainted with its author, David Eye:
Cousin–When a dozen robins blew into the yard yesterday– I’d never seen so many–I watched them hop, cock their heads, grab the thaw’s first worms. Such a pleasure, those yam- colored breast feathers. (from Letter from the Catskills/ David Eye)
And now I’m thinking about the different ways that poetry has helped make the strange familiar to me, especially in terms of my vision. Since I rediscovered poetry in 2017, I’ve been reading, studying, and writing it as a way to better navigate my strange and uncertain and difficult experiences of slowly losing my cone cells. I’m building a new world and a new way to be that’s heavily populated with poetic lines, ideas, methods.
Last year, I wrote a cento in which I gathered lines from poets invoking color. The original title of it was, “When Poetry Replaces Dead Cone Cells, a cento”
Yesterday snow, today rain. Slick and slushy. Yuck! Decided to skip the bike and go straight for the treadmill. Listened to a Hit Play Not Pause podcast about fixed and open mindsets during perimenopause. In the past, I’ve been critical of the mindset concept, especially how it was preached to my daughter who was struggling with crippling anxiety in elementary school, but I appreciated the episode. I like the idea of excavating the fixed ideas we tell ourselves — but I prefer story or narrative — and transforming them. Many of these stories are buried deep and take some work to uncover. As I was listening to it, and agreeing with a lot of it, I was also thinking: it’s hard to do that work when you’re coming undone with anxiety. I remember my daughter feeling so frustrated and overwhelmed and pissed off when some adult would tell her, Just open your mind! Don’t be so fixed and stubborn! I know when I feel like I can’t breathe because I’m all worked up for something, I don’t have the ability to expose intractable beliefs!
Here are some fixed stories I’ve been telling myself for a while about doctors, some of which I inherited from a mother who had been traumatized by doctors as a kid: They can’t understand what’s happening with me. They won’t believe me. They will just give me useless advice or advice that makes me worry even more or want to do a bunch of unnecessary tests. I’m better off figuring it out for myself — you’re on your own, kid. Some of this is true, but not all of it. And there are doctors who can help me, at least sometimes; I just need to find them. And, if not doctors, there are other people too, like physical therapists. Which is all to say: my calf still feels strange and I should look into scheduling an appointment!
Okay, no more writing. I have 10 hours left to read my wonderful book — The Thursday Murder Club — before it is automatically returned. Can I do it? With my eyes, it will be close.
update: I finished the book! It wasn’t a long or difficult book, but still a challenge for me to read with so few cone cells. Yesterday, when I was trying to read, I kept falling asleep after every sentence. But I did it.
A big storm, just starting, but not quite. Now, light snow. We’re expecting 5-9 inches. I wasn’t sure how icy the sidewalks were or how ready my calf was to run, so I decided to work out in the basement.
calf update, for future Sara (and maybe her physical therapist?): during the race yesterday, my calf felt a little strange a few times — a slight tightening? no pain — but was otherwise fine. After the race: some soreness and tightness. today during the bike: a few more flares, an occasional twinge with a little pain. during the run: started feeling sore about 8 minutes, then a little strange. It’s so hard to know what the right thing to do is — stop running? ignore it as nothing, or as a calf that cramped and is now recovering? schedule a pt appointment? If I can get an appointment, I’d like to see a pt. Even if the calf is nothing, it would great to be checked out before serious marathon training begins.
Watched the women’s road race (cycling) from Tokyo while I biked. When the silver medalist, Annemiek Van Vleuten, crossed the line, she thought she had won gold; she didn’t realize that someone in the breakaway had stayed away. background: A. Van Vleuten had been about to win the gold in Rio but had a horrific crash into a cement barricade. She put off retiring for another 5 years just to try and win the gold in Tokyo. Wow. How do you recover from that disappointment? I’m always amazed at the resilience of athletes.
While I ran, I listened to a winter playlist. Other than my calf, I felt good.
Earlier today, I found an article about James Schuyler and this wonderful poem, which I may have read before, but was delighted by today:
And is it stamina that unseasonably freaks forth a bluet, a Quaker lady, by the lake? So small, a drop of sky that splashed and held, four-petaled, creamy in its throat. The woods around were brown, the air crisp as a Carr’s table water biscuit and smelt of cider. There were frost apples on the trees in the field below the house. The pond was still, then broke into a ripple. The hills, the leaves that have not yet fallen are deep and oriental rug colors. Brown leaves in the woods set off gray trunks of trees. But that bluet was the focus of it all: last spring, next spring, what does it matter? Unexpected as a tear when someone reads a poem you wrote for him: “It’s this line here.” That bluet breaks me up, tiny spring flower late, late in dour October.
The analysis in this essay is all helpful to me, but I was particularly struck by this bit:
. . . Schuyler’s description of the flower transforms it into art, and that this kind of transformation is his signature poetic activity; it happens again and again in his poems: he describes what he sees before him as if it were a painting so that observation of the natural world becomes ekphrasis. That’s why—to skip down a little—the leaves are likened to a rug, crossing outside and inside, nature and culture, and those leaves “set off” the gray the way a painter or sharp dresser uses one color to set off or complement another, why the air is like a made thing, too, if one you eat, and why the bluet is called “the focus,” the way art critics say something is “the focus of the composition.” Schuyler’s words are paintbrushes, what he describes becomes a painting (though he treats it as already painted)—paint, a medium that splashes and then holds. There are examples of this everywhere in his books. In “Evenings in Vermont,” for instance, a rug again mediates between inside and outside, art and nature: “I study / the pattern in a red rug, arabesques / and squares, and one red streak / lies in the west, over the ridge.” In “Scarlet Tanager,” the bird in the tree provides “the red touch green / cries out for.” In “A Gray Thought,” “a dark thick green” is “laid in layers on / the spruce …” And so on. Touches, layerings: color as paint, natural phenomena perceived as art.
This idea of natural phenomena as art and of Schuyler as describing flowers with painting terms and of him doing ekphrastic poems might be a way into my “How I See” ekphrasis project!
Finished the 2nd episode of season 1 of Dickinson, started the 3rd while biking. I’m really appreciating the audio descriptions. So much easier to watch shows! I’m also surprised at how normal/natural/not disruptive the audio descriptions are. Is it that way for people with good vision? I’ll have to ask Scott after we watch something with AD turned on.
Listened to a winter playlist while I ran. Just a short run to burn off some restlessness, to rest my eyes from reading/writing, and to add to my weekly total of miles.
Before the run, I worked on another image for my “how I see”project. Maybe I should take the 3 I’ve already done and do more with them?
8 feb 2024
original description: My view from above the gorge: bare limbed trees, all trunk and thin branches. A few trunks are thick — like the one near the center of the image or the one leaning on the left side — but most are thin, creating a transparent screen between runner (me) and river. The ground, in the bottom third of the picture, is mostly dead, curled-up brown leaves. Sometimes, this is what I see even when there aren’t thin, bare branches everywhere — my view slightly obscured by something in the way — dead cone cells, I think — creating fuzz or static or a slight pulsing or wavering of lines. Also, if this picture were in black and white I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. Often I have to ask Scott: is this in color or black and white?
one sentence about the most important thing in image: This cluttered view of bare trunks and thin branches creates a screen between runner (me) and river and resembles what I sometimes see even when there aren’t thin, bare branches everywhere — my view obscured by something in the way, that I can’t move, that keeps the real (focused, clear, open) view just out of reach.
a second sentence about the second most important thing: The image is only of swirling forms — tree, leaf, river — as my eye struggles (and fails) to land on solid lines, instead bouncing from branch to trunk to leafy floor to river to sky to branch again. (This cramped, thickly tangled space overwhelms my eyes and my brain.)
a third sentence about the third most important thing: With its bare ground and dead leaves, it looks like this picture should be of the gorge in November or April, but it was taken in one of the first Februarys without at least 1/2 foot of snow on the ground.
The most important thing about this image is how the branches create a net which mimics how my vision often works — I can almost see what’s there, but not quite. Secondary, but connected, is the feeling of being disoriented, off, almost but not quite, untethered, which comes from swirling forms and the climate crisis — there’s almost always snow on the ground here in February. Where are my Minnesota winters?
bike: warm-up run: 3 miles basement outside: 4 inches of snow
Snow! Finally. My first real shovel session of the winter. Thought briefly about running outside on the trail, but when Scott told me he had heard the city hadn’t plowed the bike path, I decided against it. I watched more of the first episode of Dickinson with the audio description on while I biked. Listened to my winter playlist while I ran. I blocked the display panel, so I wouldn’t know the time. When I finally checked, I thought it would be 15 minutes at the most. It was 25. Wow.
Watching/listening to the audio description, it was interesting to notice when/how they chose to describe something and when they didn’t. An example: In one scene, Sue is sitting in the parlor. We see her looking and pointing, then we see a basket with a letter in it hanging outside of the window. Sue says, Austin. Look. At this point, the audio description (AD) says, Sue points to a hanging basket. Austin opens the basket and removes a small envelope addressed to Sue. I was struck by the AD choice to wait to describe Sue’s pointing until after the action was over. Something — poetic whimsy? — was lost in not describing Sue’s strange pointing — it seemed, at least to me, almost comical. Should it have been described? I’m not sure; I mention it to highlight how ADs involve choices of what to include or not include, often for clarity or brevity.
I must have still been thinking about this choice to not immediately describe the pointing while I was running because I suddenly had an idea about the significance of what my image descriptions leave out. I wanted to remember my thought so I pulled out my phone to record it, but the audio is messed up and I can’t understand what I’m saying. Bummer. My descriptions will be explicitly subjective. I want to emphasize how we always make choices when describing what we’re seeing — what’s important and what’s not. Our brains do this too when we’re seeing — it’s called filtering.
before the run
While rereading an entry from this day (15 feb) in 2022, I discovered that past Sara had been thinking about alt-text as poetry. I mentioned wanting to create alt-text for my beloved mannequin photos and posted some links:
I’ve already started using the first link. Just now, I read through the twitter thread. Very helpful! Here are some highlights — BTW, putting together these notes has used up a lot of my visual “spoons” for the day.
Not describing everything, but getting to why the image is there:
I think people who find providing alt text overwhelming think too much about describing every last detail in the image, when it’s more like, ok, why did YOU post it? …focus on why you’re posting the image or what it’s supposed to do or how other people would recognize it
Alt-text predates “accessibility”:
“alt” here is short for “alternate” and originates from HTML—back in Ye Olde Days if an image took 10 minutes to load or otherwise broke, you’d provide alt text that the browser would display in place of the image so you still knew what was going on
different than an image description, alt-text is only for necessary images, not decorative ones:
and alt text is different from image descriptions; alt text describes the purpose of the image and isn’t typically included if something is purely decorative—but do note that even a gif for example carries semantic meaning and is thus NOT purely decorative
intended to be brief
alt text is meant to be short, as it would get cut off by the image bounding edges otherwise
example of alt-text vs. image description
alt text for a chart: “Graph showing increase in alt text use on Twitter” image description for a chart: “A graph titled ‘Increase in alt text use on Twitter.’ The y-axis shows percentage of images including alt text. The x-axis shows time in years from 2008–2022…”
craft it
don’t be afraid to put your personality into alt text or be funny or use alt text to extend your shitpost, like imagine using a screenreader & your entire TL is dry descriptions until “a dog so cute I screeched” appears
look to audio descriptions for good examples of image description and using brevity
I think there’s a lot to learn from audio descriptions too for how to provide alt text & image descriptions! try turning on audio descriptions on a show or movie and observe how to pack in detail, especially given the time constraints—you only have a few seconds to describe smtg — boba fett’s audio descriptions are amazing, they’re wonderfully evocative while also including details I wouldn’t have known, not being a star wars fan (like they note that the palace is jabba’s and name which character’s helmet he picks up)
it’s subjective
accessibility is a fluid concept that depends a lot on audience; there’s no one “best” way to write alt text or an image description, because fundamentally it’s about what details other people care about, and that will change across topics and groups
an extended example of using alt-text to further/enhance the story
I am DYING, here is an incredible example of alt text augmenting the experience for someone using accessibility features—it calls out only the visual features that are important (’90s aesthetic, scalloped border) and provides the context that makes this reply hilarious
Katherine Crighton @c_katherine
Screencapture of a Denny’s tumblr ad. Of key interest, aside from its very 1990s aesthetic, is the scalloped border around the ad–at the time, it was intended by Tumblr’s parent company to denote to casual readers that the contents within the border were a paid advertisement. Specifically, only those who had paid for space would be granted the scalloped border. Denny’s, the restaurant chain and purveyor of surreal humor on social media, demonstrated with this ad that while the intent was to monetize this border, in actuality all one had to do was take a screencap, drop in your own ad, and then post the resulting image via the normal, non-monetized process– it would then appear the same way to the end-user, whether or not Tumblr’s owner recieved a dime. This method of deriving ad income was dropped shortly after the Denny’s “ad” pointed out this flaw.
Some very helpful ideas in this thread —
the why/purpose is the focus. In my “how I see” images, I’m not interested in describing everything in the image — I probably can’t because of my limited vision, but the ways it serves as an example of “how I see.” I’m also interested in bringing some elements of ekphrasis into this — what are those? I need to spend more time thinking about that!
the idea of brevity. I’d like to make these descriptions short. I think it might be helpful for my creative process to pick a meaningful number of characters or words or syllables. I’ll think about that some more.
listening to audio descriptions for guidance — I think I’ll bike this morning and watch/listen to a Dickinson episode! I did!
a ramble of thoughts:
thought one: Recently, I’ve started proof-reading my poems by listening as the screen reader reads them. I noticed that the speaker (mine is Fred — according to system preferences on my mac) can do enjambments (a sentence split up over multiple lines) when the sentence is at the beginning of the line. But when the sentence begins in the middle of a line, Fred pauses at the end of that line and reads the next line as a new sentence. Enjambment is much more a visual device. My alt-text poems should not use visual devices, but rely on aural ones. What are these? I know rhyme, meter, alliteration, assonance. Time to study! I’ll start with my Mary Oliver poetry handbook!
thought two: I’m just remembering a great line from June Jordan in her guidelines for critiquing a poem:
Punctuation (Punctuation is not word choice. Poems fly or falter according to the words composing them. Therefore, omit punctuation and concentrate on every single word. E.g., if you think you need a question mark then you need to rewrite so that your syntax makes clear the interrogative nature of your thoughts. And as for commas and dashes and dots? Leave them out!)
So, try writing my descriptions without punctuation. BUT, I’m also thinking of Dickinson and how important punctuation (em dashes, for example) were for her. How could I use punctuation to shape how Fred speaks my words?
thought three (barely formed): One feature of many ekphrastic poems is a contentious/combative dialogue between word and image. What about twisting that to push at the conflicts between hearing a word versus seeing an image?
All these thoughts might be too much, and might not lead anywhere I want to go, but I’ll keep with them for a little bit longer. I was just telling Scott last night, or was it this morning?, that I appreciate how past Sara includes discussions of intended plans. Sometimes I don’t act on these plans — and maybe it seems like I have too many ideas or that I’m all over the place, or that I’m not following through — but it’s cool to be able to trace the origins of the projects that do happen. And the plans that I didn’t act upon? Maybe I just not ready for them yet.
we can get more out it alt-text than just compliance:
SF: Something that has always been a hope of mine with the project is that for people who aren’t as familiar with access, it introduces them to a way of thinking about access as creative and generative and collaborative and process-oriented, and that might also influence the way they think about access in other parts of their lives.
BC: Alt text is so often approached through the lens of compliance, like, Okay, let’s just get this done. But when you’re paying attention to the language you’re using and how you’re putting it together, that’s already changing things. That’s already shifting things.
space and symbolism
BC: I was talking to Chancey Fleet, who works at the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library in New York, and Chancey said something to me and I was just like, Whoa, I have to really think about that. She said, “Is it that we really live in such a visual culture? Is the most important thing visual, or is it space and symbolism?”
I was thinking about that all day yesterday. And going back to this exhibit I went to yesterday, there was a metal piece that kind of looked like scaffolding or architecture. And then we had the chance to walk through it, and it was like, Yeah, this is the experience. It’s walking through it and understanding the space of it. It’s not necessarily, OK, this part’s five feet tall, it’s metal, and it intersects with this piece that’s metal. It was so much more about walking through it, navigating it, and even navigating it with someone.
I think that might be something I’ll start to think about more with alt text: symbolism and space and how those fit in when you’re describing something.
SF: I love that idea of thinking about symbolism. I often find that in descriptions, when someone uses a metaphor or a comparison, it really helps me understand what the subject of the description is really like, and that feels really related to this idea of symbolism. It’s like: What are your associations with this thing, rather than just with how
bike: 10 minute warm-up run: 4 miles treadmill, basement outside: 6 degrees, feels like -7
Because I was sick earlier this week, I’m being cautious and not running outside when the feels like temp is below 0. Running on the treadmill isn’t as interesting, but it is helping me to keep my heart rate down.
Watched a Hot Ones while I biked, listened to the audiobook for The Woman in the Window (in honor of windows month!) for almost 3 miles, then my winter playlist for the last mile.
The run felt easy and not too tedious. I looked over at my shadow — a giant head swaying. I think I saw the shadow of my ponytail swinging a few times. When I looked again, I lost my balance a little and stepped off the side briefly. Oops.
In The Woman in the Window, Anna is agoraphobic and has been stuck in her fancy house for 10, or was it 11?, months. She keeps her windows shut tight and spies/watches/looks at her neighbors through them (with the help of a high-powered camera lens). In the chapter I just heard (18), a woman she is watching, Jane Russell, looks back and waves, which freaks Anna out. She realizes that just as she watches others, they could be watching her.
side note: I know very little about this story other than that someone is murdered, Anna sees it, and no one believes her. Listening to this chapter and being introduced to Jane Russell, I’m guessing she’s the one getting murdered. I’m also getting the feeling that not only will people not believe that Anna saw the murder, they won’t believe that Jane Russell is real. She’s just Anna’s drunk/over-drugged hallucination. Am I right, or have I seen The Lady Vanishes too many times (thanks 1980s HBO!) Continuing with Lady Vanishes vibes, I’m wondering if the small portrait Jane sketched of Anna that she hastily shoved in her drawer will be proof (if to no one else, at least to herself) that she’s not making it up! Jane does/did exist! In The Lady Vanishes it’s the message written in the fog on the window, or the sugar packet that proves the little old lady who vanished actually exists — am I remembering that right? I think I’m conflating the 1938 original with the 80s remake here. Anyway, I’m probably wrong about Jane not being real. She has a son who can verify her existence. It was the random moment when Jane sketches Anna that made me think of this scenario. Future Sara, let me know after you’ve finished the book!
update from feb 1st Sara: A lot of what I thought was right, but not quite. Lots of slight twists. For example, everyone believes Anna exists, but she’s someone else. The portrait does come up and does reinvigorate Anna’s flagging belief in what she thinks she saw, but it doesn’t serve as an a-ha moment or matter much to others. And all the stuff with the son? I probably shouldn’t have been, but it surprised me.
In addition to the actual windows in her house, there’s also the window of the computer screen. After she waves back at Anna, Jane comes over and they talk. Jane asks Anna what she does in the house all day. Anna describes the chatroom she participates on and the french lessons she takes online. Then Jane calls the computer, “her window to the world.” The window as Windows (mircrosoft) has come up in my exploration of windows and their meanings already — earlier today even, when I was reading the Part 2 article I mention a few paragraphs below.
Magritte and windows
(written before the run) On the 15th, while rereading entries from that day in past years (thanks to Scott’s “On This Day” plug-in!), I encountered a great vision poem that I had read before, but not that closely, I guess, because I missed how much it spoke to me and my experience with vision loss. The poem: Ekphrasis as Eye Test/ Jane Zwart. And the verse that particularly spoke to me was this:
Other losses begin in the middle of the field: redacting the kiss at a picture’s center– wrapping lovers’ heads in pillow slips; hovering doves at eye level anywhere hatted men stand. They could be anyone, the strangers Magritte painted almost as their mothers, maculas wasted, would see them.
the kiss, lovers’ heads in pillow slips: The Lovers
Magritte’s mother killed herself by jumping off a bridge when he was 13. When her body was found days later, her nightgown was wrapped around her head (I can’t remember where I read that — found it!)
When I read these lines, I didn’t immediately get the references I mentioned above, but I did recognize the featureless faces and wasted maculas in my own vision. I recall liking Magritte exhibit when I was kid — I had a poster of the business men floating in the sky — but I hadn’t thought about him much since.
I inherited my mom’s copy of a 1992 exhibition she saw at the Art Institute of Chicago, but I hadn’t looked through it much, if at all. I picked it up and saw the cover — his painting with a train emerging from a fireplace — and thought: Charles Bonet Syndrome! CBS happens to some people as they lose their central vision; it often involves strange hallucinations. I read about people seeing waterfalls coming out of skyscrapers, old carriages coming down the street, and a dozen cooked eggs on a fireplace mantel. A train emerging from a fireplace seems to fit in these.
Magritte on my desk, next to Forrest Gander’s “Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpas” under the glass
Of course, there are other meanings intended with this train, but I immediately saw it as CBS hallucination. Looking through the book at all the featureless faces and faces obscured by apples and doves, I recognized my own inability to see faces. Very cool.
This morning I decided to dig into Magritte a little more. I discovered (or maybe remembered) that one of his reoccurring themes was windows — fitting for this month’s theme! Fearing copyright issues (I’ve been burned before), I’m not posting any of the images here. Instead, go here for examples: Magritte windows.
In my brief research (googlin’), I found this: Part 2: Magritte’s Window Paintings. At the end of the post there’s an article on the symbolism of windows, with some useful descriptions:
This intimate relation between the window, seeing, and perception (cf. eye/gaze) has become part of everyday language: the eyes as windows to the soul (or heart, or mind) [1] point out the possibility of looking inside a person through the opening of his eyes, where an inner state is reflected.
note: 1 The notion of the ‘eyes as the window to the psyche’ goes back at least to a text by the Skeptic philosopher Sextus Empiricus (2nd century A.D), who might be citing an even earlier text. Cf. Carla Gottlieb. The Window in Art. From the Window of God to the Vanity of Man. A Survey of Window Symbolism in Western Painting (New York: Abaris, 1981), pp.49f.
I’m always searching for references to this phrase as I interrogate the idea that we see each other’s souls, and their humanity, by looking into their eyes.
The window as an opening in a wall refers to an absence which can be filled – by a material (glass, wood, paper, stone), by that which is seen through it, or by something rather immaterial like light or air. If defined as an absence, the window becomes a frame for its variable content, a marker of difference between what is inside and outside.
I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about Nothing lately, so I’ll have to add this idea of absence/frame to my list of ways of understanding the word/concept. Maybe I’ll add it to the series of Nothing poems I’ve been working on, which have emerged from my stripping down and reimagining my Haunts poem.
bike: 10 minute warm-up run: 3.65 miles basement outside temp: 9 degrees / feels like -4
for future Sara: Tuesday night while sitting in the South High band room, listening to the community jazz band rehearse, I suddenly felt sick — a little like I might faint again, hot and tingling all over, very sensitive to loud sounds. Later on the way home in the ridiculously cold car, I had the chills and felt like I might throw up. Went home and straight to bed. Stayed in bed all the next morning. Not covid (I tested), but maybe the flu?
update, 29 dec 2024: I’m pretty sure that what I experienced was a panic attack. I had another one in May and then went on lexapro.
listening to my Window playlist: I Threw a Brick Through a Window/U2
I feel much better — almost normal — today. I’ve decided that I had the flu and the flu shot I got in November prevented it from being more severe (whew!). Of course this experience gave me some mild anxiety — was I sick, or was the faint-feeling signaling some bigger problem? How long would I be sick? At some point, would I have trouble breathing? Sigh — I dislike how much more I worry these days.
Tip Toe Thru’ the Tulips with Me/Annette Hanshaw
Since I felt pretty good today, I decided to try running on the treadmill. After my feet warmed-up in the cold basement, I felt great. Listened to my winter 2024 playlist and covered the panel displaying the time. I kept telling myself, one more song and I’ll check how much time I have left. When I finally checked, the time was at 31 minutes! Very cool; I thought maybe it would at 21 or 22 minutes. I like playing this game when I’m running on the treadmill; much better than staring down at the display.
Open a New Window/Mame Soundtrack
Noticed my shadow running alongside me. Stared at the water heater straight ahead of me: fuzzy and shifting very slightly. Also, the image had some static.
Look Through Any Window/The Hollies
As I write this, I’m making note of the window songs that are playing. It’s a bit difficult and I feel pressure to hurry up and write something before the next song comes on.
Nan You’re a Window Shopper/Lily Allen
In Nan, You’re a Window Shopper Allen complains — is she complaining or lamenting? — about her nan whose life is so constricted — taking a look, but you never buy/ and mad as fuck/only just alive
Is is no more than an eyehole On the outside scene Making everything –The snow, the runaway dog, The boys brawling and the car Skidding against the tree– Content to be contained Within a reasonable frame? Or could it be
A casement dividing A real Observer from a view Of untrammelled possibility, Its pane connecting A man in a room in Steam heat and a battered chair With his future Which he could not see Were it not there?
Window Shopping/Just Derrick
Perhaps it’s the lens that allows Errant swifts and swallows In a downward swoop Of their tumbling flight To glimpse the man waiting For the future to happen– While he’s caged in time They’re free to look in, And its gift is insight.
Junk/Paul McCartney
I noticed that Hoffman’s next poem is titled, Door. I’ll have to read that one when I study doors!
From Junk:
Buy, buy, says the sign in the shop window Why, why? says the junk in the yard
Bust Your Windows/Jazmine Sullivan
I’ll bust the windows out your car You know I did it ’cause I left my mark Wrote my initials with a crowbar And then I drove off into the dark
Maybe I’ll try experimenting with a themed playlist? I could listen and pick out a few lyrics from each song, then write about them, or turn them into a poem?
bike: 15 minute warm-up run: 3.7 miles basement outside: -1 degrees, feels like -18
When I checked the weather earlier the feels like temp was -22 and it has to be feels like -20 or warmer for me to go outside for a run. Would I have gone out there if I knew it had warmed up to feels like -18? Possibly. Oh well, the bike and run inside were fine. I listened to a new playlist I created while I ran and didn’t think about much except for my form — swinging my arms, lifting my hips, keeping my shoulders relaxed and my core sturdy.
I looked up and straight ahead at the water heater in front of me. It was fuzzy in the center. As I looked at it, I noticed my shadow — much bigger than me — off to the side.
Okay, now I remember one thing I thought about: the mouse/mice that live in our basement. Would I see one of them flit by? (nope.)
Looking out my window, I just saw someone run by on the sidewalk. So, someone is willing to run in this cold.
Another thought: before I ran I was thinking about a quote from Theodore Roethke that I posted on jan 15, 2020:
Today there’s no time for the mistakes of a long and slow development: dazzle or die.
I wrote about it in an “On this Day: January 15, 2020/2022” page this morning. I was wondering about the value of dazzling in a quick flash versus shimmering with a slow burn. Then these words/ideas popped into my head: flare, flame, a candle burning at both ends, a mushroom erupting and busting through the pavement, moss growing over rocks, fungi nets spreading underground.
I also thought about spending some time on the phrase “slow burn.” Just now I looked it up on Poetry Foundation (search: slow burn) and found a wonderful poem, Over Time by Martha Collins. Here’s one bit of it:
Then gone and then to come: all the time, except the split second, except—
All the time in the world.
And out of this world?
Oh little heart on my wrist, where are we going?
Oh little heart on my wrist! 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. Very cool!
bike: 30 minutes basement run: 1.15 miles outside: 7 degrees / feels like -10
A short run today because I’ve run every day this week so far, and because it’s windy and snowy and cold outside. Watched the first 20 minutes of Jennifer Lawrence’s comedy, No Hard Feelings, while I biked. I like her and I’m finding this movie funny so far. I listened to Taylor Swift’s Reputation while I ran. Tried out my new bright yellow shoes for the first time. I like how they feel and how they look. Quite possibly they will be the shoes I wear when I run the marathon next October. I don’t remember thinking about much as I ran — I focused on my arm swing and staying relaxed and lifting my hips. We turned the treadmill the other way a few months ago so now I won’t see my inverted moon on the dark window anymore. What strange image will replace it? I don’t remember any today. But I’ll have to look for one the next time I run on the treadmill, which will probably be on Monday; it might be arctic hellscape cold then.
architectural prop: By my Window, The Angle of a Landscape
her envelope poems resembled a window with curtains
a magic lens — the warped quality of 19th century windows: the world let loose, nature liquefied — her practice of looking/writing — up and out the window/down at the paper — descriptions as incremental fragments (A Slash of Blue! A Sweep of Gray!)
the window grid creates a pattern — 12 panes — reflected in the formal structure of her poems (degrees, steps, notches, plunges) — each word, line, or stanza is well-defined slot/pane that spotlights an image/emotional state/quality of experience — ’Tis this – invites – appalls – endows – Flits – glimmers – proves – dissolves – Returns – suggests – convicts – enchants Then – flings in Paradise – (Fr 285)
an act of undoing in each pane — nature loosening up (a neat frame in a formless center)
each pane a diagram of rapture
looking through/touching the glass, she connected with the artisans who made it, who left evidence of their labor –warps and striations that were once the artisan’s breath (windows made through glass blowing? wow)
glass blowing and imagery of fiery furnaces, metal flames, boiling, white heat
mid 19th century — glass consciousness
ED’s poems as her own form of glass blowing — creative process of transforming words into poems = making sand into glass into windows
the window grid creates a pattern — 12 panes — reflected in the formal structure of her poems (degrees, steps, notches, plunges) — ’Tis this – invites – appalls – endows – Flits – glimmers – proves – dissolves – Returns – suggests – convicts – enchants Then – flings in Paradise – (Fr 285)
I love this idea of how the windows influenced the form of her writing. Also, the combination of the orderliness/structure of the frame and the unruliness/undoing-ness of her words. It might be fun to use my windows — 2 sets with 2 panes each, a bar in-between the windows, one set in front, one to my right side — as the structure for a few experiments. As I write this, I’m thinking about Victoria Chang’s truck moving across each window frame and Wendell Berry’s black criss-crossed frame.
Here’s a wonderful ED poem that is mentioned in the article:
3 miles treadmill, basement 35 degrees / feels like 28 windy / earlier, snow
It snowed last night. Maybe 2 inches. I decided to run in the basement instead of going outside in the cold and the wind. While I ran I listened to a You Are Good episode about the horror movie, The Changeling. I’m not familiar with the movie but it’s on the horror movie puzzle we’re working on right now, so I was curious. Now I think I want to see it.
Not much to remember about my run. Can I think of 10 things?
Almost 10 Things
I forgot my headband and even though my hair was pulled back in a ponytail, stray hairs kept flying out and into my face. I think running on the treadmill must cause static
the hairs feel like little spider webs and are annoying
I thought sweat would help tame these hairs, but it didn’t. They kept harassing all through the run
I briefly stepped off the treadmill mid-run to set up the podcast. The belt made a loud whirr that sounded like it might fly off at any minute
sometimes, but not all the time, I forgot my feet were touching the ground and I felt like I was floating
on the podcast they talked about how the main character, George C. Scott, was an old dad — he was in his 50s, but was an old 50s — Sarah Marshall called it a 70s 50s. She also compared him to her dad and said that they were both born smoking cigarettes, which aged them more rapidly
why is that what I remember?
my left hip was a little stiff
treadmills are boring and I kept looking at my watch, hoping the time was going faster
I don’t like running on treadmills that often. We just rejoined the Y for the winter so maybe I won’t have to? If I do, I’d like to do some interesting experiments. Maybe more reciting poetry or listening to more podcasts or audio books?
It’s Halloween, and here’s a wonderful poem in celebration of it:
The Crayola crayon box on skinny legs squeezes close to the patch-eyed pirate on my doorstep, goodie bags outstretched
like ours were long ago—We knew we were the lucky ones, living in the apartments, where we scored more
M&Ms and Snickers bars in twenty minutes than the kids in fancy houses did in an hour. But it wasn’t the candy that enticed us,
most of mine forgotten on the kitchen shelf for months after the initial gorging. It was the whole town complicit
with superheroes and monsters, my sister morphed into a frog in Mom’s t-shirt and green socks, Mr. Carson dressed in fluorescent
skeleton bones we dashed past to reach the fairy godmother at the front door, our faces upturned and open—
We forgot if we were a kid who couldn’t spell, a boy sprouting acne at nine. We just fastened a lion’s fuzzy face over our own and roared.
Speaking of Halloween, we have had the same decorations for 6 or 7 years. Cheap Target skeleton lights, a styrofoam tombstone, and hands and a skull that light up and look they’re coming out of the earth. It’s not amazing, but I like decorating a little and it looks cool from down the street. For the past week, the lights haven’t been working and I couldn’t figure out why. Scott finally checked: someone cut the cord. Why? Such a bummer.
3 miles treadmill, basement outside: rain, all day
My first treadmill run since last February. Wow. I listened to “Nobody Asked Us,” the podcast with Des Linden and Kara Goucher, and it helped make the time go by faster. Running inside is fine, but rarely inspiring. Sometimes a podcast or audiobook helps.
Can I possibly create a list of 10 things I noticed? I’ll try:
10 Things
My treadmill faces a window that is covered over and under our deck, so no view, only dark emptiness — and the reflection of a lit bulb, looking like a full moon in a starless sky
my feet hurt for the first mile; I think it might be my shoes
I didn’t wear a hat or a headband and fine bits of my hair kept slipping out of my ponytail
at one point these fine strands were standing straight up — static from running on the treadmill?
later, these same strands were wet, dripping with sweat, and plastered against my neck
hard to get into a rhythm at the start; my feet felt heavy
10 minutes into the run, everything lightened up and I felt like I was floating above the treadmill
several times, my hand hit the front bar — I like to run close to the front
my cheap treadmill works just enough, but not well. It won’t start until the speed is at almost 2, then it goes faster than the speed on the screen. If you adjust the speed too many times, the numbers on the screen get all scrambled. This happened today, and for over half of the run I was staring at strange, squiggly lines instead of numbers
I didn’t hear or see it, but I thought about the mouse (or mice) that are probably sharing space with me down in the basement. I imagined one of them running across my feet
Did it! These things were not really about a place, but about my body. Maybe this winter, when it’s too dangerous to be outside, I should try some experiments with noticing and focusing on my body moving?
Discovered this poem the other day:
It Must Be Leaves/ Jane Hirshfield
Too slow for rain, too large for tears, and grief cannot be seen. It must be leaves. but broken ones, and brown, not green.
Speaking of the phrase, it must be, I came up with a title for my poem about the color yellow, which ends with the idea that some things will always be yellow, even when I can’t see them. The title? If it’s a banana, it must be yellow. This title was inspired by a science article with the same name: If it’s a banana, it must be yellow: the role of memory colors in color constancy
The aftermath of the second round of the epic snowstorm: 4 inches of mostly soft snow. Cold, but not too cold, outside. Listened to the audiobook, Moonflower Murders as I shoveled. The coldest part of my body: my fingers. Even with gloves on, they were getting numb. More snow than I expected. I think I remembered hearing some other shovels scraping, at least one snowblower droning. Already we have big piles of snow on the edges of the driveway, near the garbage/recycling/organic bins on the side of the garage, and on the front sidewalk. If we get more snow tonight, where will it all go?
walk: 15 minues neighborhood me, Delia, and Scott 18 degrees
Brrrr. The temperature had increased by 4 degrees but it felt colder because of the wind. About half of the sidewalks we walked on were shoveled. The un-shoveled ones didn’t seem like they had 4 inches of snow on them. Did they? The most enjoyable, warmest feeling direction to walk was east. Heading south, west, or north, we felt the cold wind in our faces. I could sense a brain freeze induced headache about to happen. Delia didn’t care. She sniffed the edges of every block, her tail wagging as she gave attention to the yellow missives from the other animals who had walked these same sidewalks.
bike: 20 minutes run: 1.5 miles
Because of the wind and the snow, I decided to move in the basement today. Watched the first 20 minutes of the Netflix documentary, Break Point, while I biked. Listened to more of my audiobook while I ran. Wore my new running shoes: Saucony Ride 14s, color: Jackalope (white with orange accents, a red tongue, blue laces). Not my first choice, but they were in my size and $40 less than any other color. Now that I have them, I think I especially like the blue laces.
Before heading downstairs, I started memorizing a poem by Heather Christle that I especially like, “What Big Eyes You Have.” I worked on the first 2 sentences:
Only today did I notice the abyss in abysmal, and only because my mind was generating rhymes for dismal, and it made of the two a pair, to which much later it joined baptismal, as — I think — a joke. I decided to do nothing with the rhymes, treating them as one does the unfortunately frequent appearance of the “crafts”adults require children to fashion from pipecleaners and plastic beads.
Wow, it is fun to memorize poems. And, it really helps me to do a deep reading of the words and ideas and rhythms and rhymes. I wish I had time to memorize all of the poems I love!
Here is a Pastan poem that seems fitting to read after encountering so many of her dark ideas about death and its inevitability and wondering why her poems were almost always so dark.
walk: 30 minutes with Delia neighborhood 26 degrees
Sun! A bright blue sky! Birds! Fresh, cold air! Clearer sidewalks! Wind chimes! What a wonderful walk. I moved slowly, stopping every few steps for Delia to get another sniff. I inhaled deeply, feeling the cold air open up my sinuses. I mostly listened to the birds, but a few times I saw the blur of a tiny body traveling from one branch to another. I noticed the sprawling oaks, their gnarled limbs towering over the sidewalk. I stepped on the thin sheets of ice covering puddles and heard them crack and crunch and then the water squish. I remember thinking that I wasn’t interested in naming what I was noticing, just experiencing it. I felt relaxed and open to the world and happy for these moments.
Most of the sidewalks were clear. On a few corners it was still solid ice. The corner with the mailbox was especially bad. Yikes!
I almost forgot — how could I forget? A birch tree in the middle of the block, its branches blindingly white, illuminated by the sun. Sparkling. I could almost hear a chorus singing its alleluias!
bike: 22 minutes run: 2.35 miles basement outside: an ice rink
After yesterday’s slippery run, I decided I should stay inside today. Biked in the basement with some Dickinson, ran with a running podcast. As I often mention with my basement workouts, it’s difficult to find much to wonder about in such a dark, cold, unfinished space.
Before I worked out downstairs, I started planning the fifth lecture for the class I’m teaching. It’s going to be about the connections between wonder and play. I was reminded of it as I ran and listened to a professional runner turned triathlete talk about how being a beginner and having no expectations or pressure can help you to have fun in your training and in life. I started thinking about having fun and being a kid and the idea that fun and play are usually dismissed as not taking something seriously. It’s all fun and games to you. Or it’s too easy — that’s child’s play. But trying to remember your kid-self, being a beginner, opening up to fun, is something many of us have to work at — to practice — as adults. (Also, being a kid isn’t always easy.) Kelli Russell Agodon has some great things to say about play and wonder in this interview, which I plan to use in my class: Beauty and Play with Kelli Russell Agodon.
In the video interview, Agodon reads her poem, “Grace”:
Even those who are living well are tired, even the rockstar who swallowed the spotlight, even the caterpillar asleep in a unbalanced cocoon. Who knows how to be happy when a lamb is birthed just to be slaughtered at a later date? It’s so tiring how every day is also a miracle— the drunk bees in the plum blossoms, the sliver of sun through the branches and on an early morning walk we find the farmer’s granddaughter has fallen in love with the lamb, so it will be saved and named Grace. And we are spared for a moment, from a new loss and life frolics across a field of wildflowers never knowing all it has escaped.
Thinking about the idea of no pressure or expectations, Agodon says this in another interview:
I am quantity over quality, but a lot of the really bad poems will never come out of my laptop. I love writing a poem a day. And I have no problems writing bad poems, just writing something thinking, oh that was just practice. That was just a writing exercise. That poem is never going to go anywhere. I don’t want to revise it. Again, it’s just to enjoy the creation. But when I do choose a poem to revise, then I highly craft it.
And here’s something else she writes about taking walks and finding images:
Rumpus: I think of your poems as being “dense,” and by dense I mean tight and even crowded at times as you fly from one image to another. The imagery is always surprising, line after line. I wonder how you do that?
Agodon: I wonder how I do that, too. Could this mean I’m a word/image hoarder? Maybe my poems are the rooms you go into where everything is stacked to the ceiling? Like those antique shops that have a fascinator balancing on a Mickey Mouse phone on a blue Fiestaware plate toppling above a purple suitcase with a sticker that reads: London. Maybe it’s that I’ve always been a very visual person who notices the small strange details, and they stick with me. Like yesterday when I went for a walk, I saw a toothpaste cap under a tulip and I kept thinking—why is that there? There was a robin there and I started thinking, “What if that toothpaste cap was actually the robin’s bandleader hat.” Kooky stuff, but maybe because while I have six sisters, they were all much older than me, so much of my life felt like being an only child so I was always looking for ways to entertain myself, and I still am.
bike: 15 min warm-up run: 3.2 miles outside temp: 2 degrees / feels like -15
Because of the cold air, the icy paths, and the 10 mph wind, I decided to move in the basement today. Finished the episode of Dickinson I had started a few days ago while I biked, listened to the latest episode of If Books Could Kill (Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus) while I ran. Running on the treadmill in the basement is very different from running outside. A dark, unfinished basement with windows mostly blocked by a shelf with old lamps on it. Staring straight ahead, I can see a blank tv screen and then behind that, a dark window and the old coal chute. To the side, shelves with old paint cans (left) and a long work bench (right). Not much to notice, except spiders and dust. Difficult to run for that long and to remember any of my thoughts. I don’t mind running down here on occasion, but I couldn’t do it all the time. I’m so glad that I have the gorge.
a moment of sound
On days when it’s too cold for me to move outside, I record a moment of sound. Today’s moment was on my short walk back from the alley, where I had brought out some trash. It features my favorite, crunching snow, and another irritating delight: the cold, shrill creak of our iron gate. I walked through the snow in my small backyard and stopped briefly by the crab apple tree:
jan 30 / 3:00 pm
Here’s a poem I found on twitter today by Dana Levin about walking and thinking and wandering/wondering and being in and out of a body:
To be born again, you need an incarnation specialist—a team from the Bureau of Needles to thread you through— Your next life turns on an axle of light—which Plato likens to a turning spindle—what was that? I mean I knew
what a spindle was from fairytales—how it could draw blood from a testing finger, put a kingdom to sleep— but what did it actually do, how did a spindle look in real life? I didn’t know. As with so many things: there was fact and there was
a believed-in dream . . .
Everyone had one back in the ancient day, spindles. When we had to weave our living-shrouds by hand. “A slender rounded rod with tapered ends,” Google said. Plato’s, so heavy with thread, when viewed from the side, looked like a top— though most diagrams assumed
the hawk-lord view . . .
Moon thread, threads of the planets, earth thread. Your thread. Everyone else’s. Nested one inside the other, a roulette machine— If a thread could be spun from liquid light was what I kept thinking— imagining a sluice of electric souls between the earth wheel’s rims— there “I”
was a piece of water, Necessity wheeled it around―Necessity, who was married to Time, according to the Greeks— Mother of the Fates. Who would measure and cut your
paradise/shithole extra life . . .
Well we all have ways of thinking about why, metaphysically-speaking, anyone’s born— though the answer’s always Life’s I AM THAT I AM —how it hurls and breaks! on Death’s No there there . . .
—which sounded kind of Buddhist.
According to the teachings we were all each other’s dream . . .
And soon able to vanish—
out of the real without having to die, whoever’s got the cash—to pay the brainier ones to perfect a Heaven upload—to cut the flesh-tether and merge
with the Cloud . . .
Well we all have ways of constructing Paradise. To walk alone deep in thought in a city park was mine for several minutes, thinking about spindles. Before the vigilance of my genderdoom
kicked in—
And there it was, the fact of my body— all the nerves in my scalp and the back of my neck, alive— How it moved through space, how close it had strayed toward concealing trees, my female body— Jewish body—inside my White body—dreaming it was bodiless
and free . . .
to decide:
how and when and if to fill the body’s hungers— how and when and if to walk in thought through the wilderness . . .
before Death comes with its Fascist hat.
Its Park Murder Misogyny hat.
Its Year Ten in a Nursing Home stink
hat—
However spun
my thread . . .
Anyway, it’s peaceful here in the park, at midday, if a little deserted. I’ve moved to the path that winds closer to the street. Thinking again, as I always do, about body and soul. How they infuse each other. How they hate each other. How most people pledge allegiance to one or the other. How painful it was! To be such a split
bike: 25 minutes run: 2.25 miles basement outside: winter storm/snow
Winter storm today. Heavy snow mixed with some freezing rain. No running outside or driving to the y. Glad to have the bike and treadmill in the basement. While I biked, I watched a few minutes of a documentary by Tracksmith called “The Church of the Long Run.” (interesting side note: a search for “the church of the long run tracksmith” will also take you to tracksmith’s catalog for long run gear — the marketing of a sacred ritual…I have mixed feelings about this, and no time to explore them). Also watched some of the 2012 Women’s Triathlon from the London Olympics. As I ran, I listened to a book: Disappearing Earth. Such interesting storytelling about the disappearance/presumed kidnapping of 2 young girls and its impact on a wide range of women living in remote Russia.
After I finished my workout, I quickly had my last meal before a (nearly) 2 day fast for a colonoscopy on Thursday morning. My first colonoscopy. I wonder how I’ll handle not being able to eat tonight and all day tomorrow? I’ll be very glad when it’s over.
note: I don’t want to write that much about it now, but for the sake of future Sara and because this log is, among other things, about aging and learning to love/live in and with an aging body, I’ll say that this colonoscopy is stressing me out. Difficult to put into words (maybe a poem after?), but it’s about a lot of different things: frustration and feelings of helplessness over bad insurance and medical care that prioritizes profit over patients, too many people I love dying or diagnosed with different forms of cancer lately, anxiety over what I will or won’t be able to see because of my bad vision as I check-in and deal with people at the clinic, wondering if they’ll find anything that explains my gastro problems for the past 6 months. To relieve anxiety, maybe I should turn colonoscopy into anagrams?
a few minutes later: I thought colonoscopy would be difficult, so I tried endoscopic (for endoscopic exam) and it was hard too. Here’s how I did it. I put each of the letters on a different post-it note and then moved them around on my desk. I could only think of 3. I like this post-it note approach. I’ll have to try it again! Maybe I should use some old scrabble letters?
It’s not an endoscopic exam, it’s a
No Cod Spice Exam Ponce (as in the Atlanta road, Ponce de Leon) Disco Exam In Cop Codes Exam
Not the greatest, but still fun to try!
Working on my winter wonder class that starts at the end of this month. Seems fitting as I look outside at the snow falling, then stopping, then falling again. The snow has been heavy, but not blizzard-heavy. Not quite as bad as in this poem by Linda Pastan that I’m planning to use in my class:
the snow has forgotten how to stop it falls stuttering at the glass a silk windsock of snow blowing under the porch light tangling trees which bend like old women snarled in their own knitting snow drifts up to the step over the doorsill a pointillist’s blur the wedding of form and motion shaping itself to the wish of any object it touches chairs become laps of snow the moon could be breaking apart and falling over the eaves over the roof a white bear shaking its paw at the window splitting the hive of winter snow stinging the air I pull a comforter of snow up to my chin and tumble to sleep as the whole alphabet of silence falls out of the sky
bike: 10 minute warm-up run: 3.35 miles basement outside temp: -7 / feels like -25
Scott, RJP, and I braved the cold and drove over to the Y. Empty parking lot. Closed early for the holidays because of the extreme cold and wind. Oh well. Drove back home and did another treadmill workout. Covered the display panel, turned on a running podcast, and ran with hardly any idea of how long I was moving. I wanted to check my watch a few times, but I decided to wait until there was a pause in the podcast for the sponsor. Almost 33 minutes. Wow, I had no idea I had been running for that long. Mostly listened to the Olympic 1500 runner Heather MacLean discuss being an introvert, talking to the trees in a Flagstaff forest, and struggling with the pressure of running at the Olympics. I tried to think about color and the idea of orange and buoys.
This morning I had thought about orange in relation to navigation and reorienting myself in terms of open water swimming and life and wanting to become a bird (using quantum mechanics and blue light for navigation) or one of the monarch butterflies that fly across lake superior on a route designed to avoid a mountain that hasn’t existed for centuries. Orange, literally and figuratively, is about navigation and orientation for me. It’s the first color I couldn’t see that started my awareness that something was wrong with my vision. It’s the color of the buoys that I’ve used every summer since I was diagnosed for practicing “how to be when I cannot see” — learning how to negotiate/navigate without the certainty of sight. It’s the color that I’ve noticed the most when I tracking how my peripheral vision works and is helping me use the remaining bits of central vision.
In winter, we find her invisible against the furrows of cottonwood bark. Her swivel and lean follow us until we sit on the old polished log we call creature. She blinks, swells her feathers out, shakes and settles.
It’s a good day when I see an owl. We watch until she drops—a fall opening to swoop and glide. What is it with lesbians and owls? Someone asked. I’ll leave the question there. There’s a world
the old trees make of water and air. I like to feel the day undress its cool oblivion, currents moving the one mind of leaves, shadows deeper with the breath of owls. Just the chance she might be there watching makes me love—no—makes me loved.
So much I love about this poem: the short lines, economy of words, how the narrator has named the log creature, that it’s a good day when she sees an owl (not because it’s an owl, although that’s cool, but because she thinks that if she sees a certain something, she’ll have a good day. Mine is roller skiers or turkeys), the cool oblivion, the breath of owls, shadows as both (?) a noun and a verb, the ending line.
indoor bike: 15 minutes bike stand treadmill run: 1 mile outdoor run: 2 miles 34 degrees / icy drizzle
Woke up this morning before 6, opened the door to snow. What? Less than an inch, but all the trees were covered in white, the deck too. I had no idea. Oh well, I knew it would melt and that it wouldn’t be difficult to run in. A few hours later, having put on my early winter running attire — black running tights, black shorts, pink jacket with hood, black running vest, cap, headband, gloves — I opened the door to icy rain. Wtf? Again, I had no idea.
I will run in cold. I will run in snow. I will run in rain. I will not run in icy rain.
Decided to do a quick bike warm-up in the basement, then do a short run on the treadmill. Felt so good when I was done that I decided to believe that it wasn’t raining anymore. It was, but barely. Ran through the neighborhood, trying to avoid all the closed sidewalks and roads, and onto the river road trail at 32nd. Everything was dripping, but nothing was slippery. The main things I remember from the run are: puddles, the soft sounds of falling water — not sure how much of it was rain, and how much of it was just dripping trees, beeping trucks, and deep dark brown trunks.
As I write this entry, only minutes after I finished my run, the sun has come out and the sky is bright. I suppose if I had just been patient and waited a few more minutes, I could have avoided all the drips, but why would I have wanted to do that?
Something I learned this morning: I should do a 5-10 minute warm-up on the bike, or the treadmill, before I go out for a run, especially when it’s very cold outside. Why have I never thought of this before?
It’s October, so of course I’m thinking about ghosts. I also happen to be editing some poems about ghosts/haunts that I did last year. Here’s a poem I found yesterday:
Rain and wind. Short workout in the basement. Had to pump my bike tire up again. Definitely a leak. Took me only a minute to pump it up. I was reminded of how much I struggled to do it a few months ago when I hadn’t done it in a while. Thought how important habits/habitual practices are for me. Watched most of the 2018 Ironman television coverage while I biked. Listened to Taylor Swift’s Reputation as I ran. Have no memory of what I thought about.
before the workout
Day 3 with dirt: loam. Thinking more about compost and soil and humus, I suddenly remembered loam. I discovered this word a few years ago and it has made it into at least one of my poems. Some definitions of loam use the word humus, others don’t.
3. A soil of great fertility composed chiefly of clay and sand with an admixture of decomposed vegetable matter.
from Oxford English Dictionary online (via local library)
noun
a fertile soil of clay and sand containing humus.
from Oxford Languages (Google’s dictionary)
Doing a brief search on loam and humus, I also found discussions of the distinctions between sand, silt, and clay. According to an answer on Quora, the difference is about particle size. This answer also offers the following distinction between loam and humus:
Loam is a mixture of clay, sand and silt and benefits from the qualities of these 3 different textures, favoring water retention, air circulation, drainage and fertility.
Humus is a highly complex substance still not fully understood. It is a stable and uniformly dark, spongy and amorphous material which come from the mechanical degradation of organic matter. Humus is fertile and gather all properties suitable for optimal plant growth. It is formed by complex chemical compounds, of plant, animal and microbial origin
Searched “loam” on Poetry Foundation and found a few poems:
I say to the named granite stone, to the brown grass, to the dead chrysanthemums, Mother, I still have a body, what else could receive my mind’s transmissions, its dots and dashes of pain? I expect and get no answer, no loamy scent of her coral geraniums. She who is now immaterial, for better or worse, no longer needs to speak for me to hear, as in a continuous loop, classic messages of wisdom, love and fury. MAKE! DO! a note on our fridge commanded. Here I am making, unmaking, doing, undoing.
MAKE! DO! I love the different ways to read this, as: making do, managing, getting by, finding a way with limited resources and make something! do something! create act.
Just one more poem with loam in it. Powerful. Loamy roamers rising.
Or the land was ours before you were a land. Or this land was our land, it was not your land.
We were the land before we were people, loamy roamers rising, so the stories go, or formed of clay, spit into with breath reeking soul—
What’s America, but the legend of Rock ‘n’ Roll?
Red rocks, blood clots bearing boys, blood sands swimming being from women’s hands, we originate, originally, spontaneous as hemorrhage.
Un-possessing of what we still are possessed by, possessed by what we now no more possess.
We were the land before we were people, dreamy sunbeams where sun don’t shine, so the stories go, or pulled up a hole, clawing past ants and roots—
Dineh in documentaries scoff DNA evidence off. They landed late, but canyons spoke them home. Nomadic Turkish horse tribes they don’t know.
What’s America, but the legend of Stop ‘n’ Go?
Could be cousins, left on the land bridge, contrary to popular belief, that was a two-way toll. In any case we’d claim them, give them some place to stay.
Such as we were we gave most things outright (the deed of the theft was many deeds and leases and claim stakes and tenure disputes and moved plat markers stolen still today . . .)
We were the land before we were a people, earthdivers, her darling mudpuppies, so the stories go, or emerging, fully forming from flesh of earth—
The land, not the least vaguely, realizing in all four directions, still storied, art-filled, fully enhanced. Such as she is, such as she wills us to become.
note:
Dineh, “the people,” what the Navajo called themselves
for Frost = The Gift Outright / Robert Frost … discovered this was the poem he read at Kennedy’s inauguration, through this helpful analysis, Political Poeticizing (found when I searched, “Robert Frost settler colonialism”)
One more thing: Returning to the idea, in Sandburg’s and Mazur’s poem, I’m thinking about the smell of loam. Here’s something helpful I found:
We feel something deep in the smell of that fresh-soil, and it is one of those mysteries that takes us back to a place in time. The smell of soil invokes something so deep that it never really can be described. Can you describe the smell of soil in a forest, freshly tilled field, or in a swamp? Have you ever wondered if fresh tilled soil has always had the same sweet aroma?
Actually it’s not the soil we smell but the bacteria that enters the soil through the geosmin. It’s the bacteria that is producing the chemical that we smell. The smell will be different depending on where the soil is found. Healthy, productive soils should smell fresh, clean and pleasant or have little odor at all. If the soil smells like ammonia or has a rotten odor that is a good indication there is poor drainage or lack of oxygen in the soil.
The unique smell is because soil is not just dirt. Healthy soil is living and is a complex ecosystem with an abundance of bio-diversity. “Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals”. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949. Soil…..”the Latin name for man, homo, derived from humus, the stuff of life in the soil.” Dr. Daniel Hillel
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.
Watched the second to last episode of Dickinson while I biked, then ran a mile while listening to Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” (which I heard on The Current yesterday and thought it would be fun to run to. Mostly, it was). The Dickinson episode was titled, “Grief is a Mouse,” and, among other things, was about Emily (mother) imaging that a mouse in her bedroom was her dead sister Lavinia. She tells a story about how Lavinia loved mice, keeping them as pets — feeding them cheese and naming them after her favorite fairy tale characters. Then she talks to the mouse-as-Lavinia and says goodbye to her. I liked this sweet explanation for why Emily (poet) might have written a poem titled, “Grief is a Mouse,” although I might also like not having an explanation for why she chose a mouse to describe grief. It reminds me of an essay I read about Emily Dickinson last year:
Whenever I introduce Dickinson’s poems into my classes, I always begin by doing a version of an exercise that I learned from one of my great mentors, Carolyn Williams, and that has long circulated through a community of people who work on 19th-century poetics. Over the years it has come to be called “Dickinson Mad-Libs.” The way it works is this: I choose a line, a stanza, or a whole poem, and I take out some of its words (usually nouns and adjectives, but sometimes verbs as well), and I simply leave blanks where those words were. Then I ask the students to fill in the blanks. I tend to switch up which poems I use, even though I know several that work particularly well. I’ll never forget the time I used “Grief is a ________.”
Students go ahead and put in the blanks what is expected: Grief is a pain, Grief is a bitch. The ones who want to take imaginative leaps deliver up: Grief is a thunderstorm, Grief is a tidal wave. But I can pretty much guarantee that no matter how many budding poets you have in a class, nobody who hasn’t already read Dickinson’s poem would ever write the phrase the way she wrote it.
There are lots of fascinating conversations to have about what, exactly, Dickinson might have meant when she wrote “Grief is a mouse,” but the more interesting point, to me at least, is simply that Dickinson was a master of unexpected, yet absolutely perfect, word choice.
Before I went downstairs to exercise, I worked on my second read-through of Dart. I’m making note of all the voices that appear. It’s helpful as a way of tracing how these voices flow from one to the next, sometimes easily, more often as interruptions. In focusing on these voices, I’m starting to see the tensions over the language used to describe how the river works, especially in terms of order and control. I’ll have to write more later, when I have time.
Here is one of the poems read in Dickinson (season 3, ep 9):
Partly because I wanted to watch more Dickinson, and mostly because of the thick, wet snow that has covered the huge puddles on the sidewalk making everything a mess, I decided to bike and run inside this late morning. Before I started biking — on my bike, on a stand — I pumped up my back tire. There’s a small leak, so I’ve been pumping up the tire all winter. Finally, I have gotten the hang of my complicated pump and the strange (to me) tire nozzle!
While I biked, I watched another Dickinson episode. I stayed on the bike longer to finish it. In this one, Emily realizes (again) her Dad is a sexist jerk and that her brother Austin was right. Then she meets up with Nobody and falls through an open grave to travel to the other side of false hope. This part of the episode was difficult for me to see, it was too dark, but it looked like she was in a bizarro version of her house (with weird lighting). She ends up on a Civil War battlefield, dressed in uniform, watching as Henry calls out something like, “victory is ours!” Then, Emily sees true hope: a bird in the tree. I checked and I have 2 episodes left.
While I ran, I listened to the first three songs on Taylor Swift’s Reputation. I didn’t think about much, just moved, which I always like to do.
Yesterday, I came up with a project (or experiment?) for the rest of March. I will closely read Alice Oswald’s 48 page poem about the River Dart. It’s called Dart, and I got it for Christmas this year — after years of having it on my wishlist. I’ve wanted to read it for some time (I first mentioned it here on June, 2019) because I love rivers and Oswald and I’m very curious about how she writes about a river. Plus, after working for some time on a series of poems, then a proposal for a class, I’d like to dive deep into someone else’s words for a while.
Today, some background and a few pages. First, here’s how Oswald describes her project at the beginning of the book:
This poem is made from the language or people who live and work on the Dart. Over the past two year I’ve been recording conversations with people who know the river. I’ve used these records as life-models from which to sketch out a series of characters — linking their voices into a sound-map of the river, a singing from the source to the sea. There are indications in the margin where one voice changes into another. These do not refer to real people or even fixed fictions. All voices should be read as the river’s muttering.
Dart / Alice Oswald
In an earlier description of her project for The Poetry Society, Oswald offers more details about this project, both before and during her work on it. All of it is interesting, but I was especially intrigued by her method for combining the recordings of others talking about the river and her imagination.
I decided to take along a tape-recorder. At the moment, my method is to tape a conversation with someone who works on the Dart, then go home and write it down from memory. I then work with these two kinds of record – one precise, one distorted by the mind – to generate the poem’s language. It’s experimental and very against my grain, this mixture of journalism and imagination, but the results are exciting. Above all, it preserves the idea of the poem’s voice being everyone’s, not just the poet’s.
I’d like to try doing this with the documenting of my runs: experimenting with combining recordings with my memory/imagination of what happened.
This poem begins at the start of the east River Dart at Cranmore Pool with an old man (Old Man River? or is that an American expression?) who walks the river. Here are a few lines I especially like:
listen to the horrible keep-time of a man walking, rustling and jingling his keys at the centre of his own noise, clomping the silence in pieces and I
I don’t know, all I know is walking.
What I love is one foot in front of another. South-south-west and down the contours. I go slipping between Black Ridge and White Horse Hill into a bowl of the moor where echoes can’t get out
Speaking of the bowl of the moor where echoes can’t get out, I found a BBC tour of the Dart. The opening lines seem to speak about that echo-trapping moor. Also, the line, “What I love is one foot in front of another,” is wonderful. I could imagine that as a poem title.
Here’s another bit that I especially like:
one step-width water of linked stones trills in the stones glides in the trills eels in the glides in each eel a fingerwidth of sea
bike: 25 minutes run: 1.55 miles basement outdoor temp: 17 degrees / feels like 5
It wasn’t the cold that kept me inside today, but the water from yesterday that turned to ice overnight. So many slick spots on the sidewalk and the road! I read my entry from last year on this day, and it was 54 degrees outside. And I wore shorts. Shorts?! As much as I like winter running, I’m ready for spring. Less layers, open walking paths. I’m tried off dodging big ice chunks and running on the bike trail.
Biking and running inside wasn’t so bad. Finished watching the Dickinson episode I started on Feb 23. In this one, Emily and Lavinia take a wild ride on a gazebo and end up in the 1950s where they meet Sylvia Plath. Emily’s parents find some hemp growing in Emily’s conservatory and decide to smoke it. I’m not sure how many episodes I have left, but it’s not many.
While I ran, I listened to an old playlist: Lizzo, Justin Timberlake, Ke$ha. Felt good. I don’t remember thinking about anything, or noticing anything. No strange smells or shadows or hairballs that look like spiders wanting to jump on me. Running on the treadmill is helpful for enabling me to move when I can’t outside, but it’s not very exciting or inspiring — especially when the treadmill is in the cold, unfinished basement of a 100+ year-old house.
Found this poem by Aracelis Girmay on twitter yesterday. Wonderful!
Please raise your hand, whomever else of you has been a child, lost, in a market or a mall, without knowing it at first, following a stranger, accidentally thinking he is yours, your family or parent, even grabbing for his hands, even calling the word you said then for “Father,” only to see the face look strangely down, utterly foreign, utterly not the one who loves you, you who are a bird suddenly stunned by the glass partitions of rooms. How far the world you knew, & tall, & filled, finally, with strangers.
One of my favorite poetry people pointed out the line, “who loves you, you” and I’m so grateful. Maybe I would have noticed this hidden message/one line poem on my own, but not as soon. I love imagining this as the center/heart of this poem, as the poem within a poem. It makes me want to try to do this too, to put in a line that offers something extra.
I don’t remember accidentally taking a stranger’s hand in a crowded store when I was a kid, but I do still remember the absolute terror of realizing I was lost, and alone, in a store. I remember pacing around, trying to calm myself down as I looked for my mom. Such an awful feeling: flushed face, tingling scalp, queasy stomach.
bike: 25 minutes run: 2.4 miles basement 3 degrees / feels like -10 about 5 inches of snow
Brr. I thought about running outside (I almost always do), but the feels like temperature is -10 and the paths are covered in snow, which is probably hiding ice, so I went to the basement. Tomorrow it will be as cold as today, but I’ll go anyway.
Finished the rest of the Dickinson episode I was watching where Emily and her family take a “daycation” (Lavinia’s words) to an insane asylum. Emily’s dad does not commit her in order to become a trustee. Emily’s mom wants to stay, but isn’t allowed, so when they return home, she announces that she will be going upstairs to sleep. Confused and concerned, Lavinia asks, “For a short nap?” The elder Emily answers, “No. Wake me up when the war is over.” Meanwhile, Henry (a free Black man who used to work for the Dickinsons, abolitionist, married to Betty, who traveled South to fight for the Union) is teaching a group of free Black soldiers, or almost soldiers if the white men in charge would give them the rank and better uniforms and weapons and the pay they deserve, to read. Emily’s mentor, Higginson, is the main white man in charge and, although his intentions seem good, he patronizes and bullshits them. It’s an interesting juxtaposition: Higginson as both Emily’s mentor and a well-meaning but clueless white savior/liberal.
As the Dickinsons are leaving the asylum, Emily recites this poem (in her usual way on this show: voice-over, with the cursive words scrolling fleetingly across the screen):
A little Madness in the Spring Is wholesome even for the King, But God be with the Clown – Who ponders this tremendous scene – This whole Experiment of Green – As if it were his own!
As I ran, I listened to Taylor Swift’s Reputation again. I tried to avoid looking at my watch, so the time would pass faster, or without notice. It mostly worked; it is still much harder to run for more than 20 minutes on the treadmill. Much easier outside. I didn’t think about anything as I ran — did I? I don’t plan to run on the treadmill much beyond February. I should try to experiment with ways to find delight, or be curious, or to track how words move as I do before March happens.
And here’s another poem that isn’t really about anything else I’ve mentioned here yet, but I wanted to remember it, especially the lines about the bird:
The images don’t explain a story. They are a counterpoint.
It’s understandable to mistake them for metaphor, but still, a mistake.
The trouble comes from thinking. I could stop there. The trouble comes from thinking an image is a story.
This is how painting began. Little glimpses into little worlds. Little glimpses into the faces of the divine.
But we know that the gods don’t really look like us.
Yes, all Western art.
I can’t speak to that.
Berger says the image, disconnected from a fixed location, proliferates, and changes through new context, strange juxtapositions, reframing.
What they do to us, yes. The stories they tell us, and how we accept those stories.
He is less interested in the stories we bring.
If I show you an image of a bird flying, you might think freedom, or graceful, or wings. You might remember your mother pointing to the sky, naming the bird starling, heron, crow. But all of that is yours.
The bird is just the bird, flying, following the magnetic fields of the earth home.
I did not say the trouble was a bad thing. I only said that it was trouble.
bike: 22 minutes run: 1.3 miles 6 degrees / feels like -9 snow (about 4 inches so far)
The snow and cold are here. And some wind too. Today, I’m inside. Started another Dickinson episode. In this one, the “girls” (the Emilys + Lavinia) accompany Edward to an insane asylum for women. The younger Emily is too curious and poetic for the warden; he deems her a lunatic and is trying to pressure Edward into committing her. Will he do it? I’ll have to find out in the next episode. The other Emily (mom), decides she wants to be committed so she can have some rest, while Lavinia starts crying uncontrollably with an inmate who is distraught over the death of her boyfriend/fiance in the war.
Listened to Taylor Swift’s Reputation while I ran on the treadmill. This album isn’t very original, but the beats in it match my foot strikes well. It helped me to feel like I was flying or floating or slightly untethered for a few minutes.
Nothing interesting to notice in the basement today. No spiders or sara-shadows or unpleasant smells wafting down from the kitchen.
Found this poem while scrolling through a journal I’m submitting some poems to:
For longer than memory, we thought giraffes silent, their thirteen-foot windpipes too great a climb for the air pushed from the bellows of their lungs to quiver the cords of their voice boxes.
The truth is, they hum under cover of night, and given the long tube of their tracheas, I imagined they sound like didgeridoos, and it seems that’s so—low and throbbing,
a lullaby for a gangly baby—though in fact we don’t yet know why they hum. Perhaps it’s merely for the pleasure of it, like my wife who can barely breathe without also singing.
Did she always sing like this? I queried my mother-in-law. Yes, she said. She hummed constantly. It drove me crazy! But I like the way song waves move through her, use her,
as if she were the soundtrack to her own life, a movie made for joy. Of course, it’s possible giraffes simply convey giraffish data with their rumbling vibrations. But I prefer to believe
they’re humming from a sense of safety, knowing they can let their guard down, that they’re among their own kind, humming through the dark hours on a swell of happiness.
