Tag: vision

april 30/HIKERUN

hike: 53 minutes
minnehaha off leash dog park
40 degrees

At the beginning it was chilly this morning, even with gloves, but by the time we were heading back to the parking lot, it had warned up. More green. Another very LOUD woodpecker. Fun encounters with other dogs. One of them was just a little smaller than Delia and covered in chocolate fur. Something about how they darted around made me think they weren’t dog but some other creature — Thing 1 or Thing 2 popped into my head. More good and difficult conversations with FWA. I’m trying to respect his need to figure things out on his own timeline, but it’s very hard to watch and not say anything.

When we got back to the house, Scott told me that he read an article in the Star Tribune this morning about how they might have to shut the dog park down. It’s sacred Dakota land and some (many? all? — I haven’t read the article; it’s behind a paywall) tribal leaders want it returned to the Dakota people. I would be very sad if this wonderful park closed, but I support the Dakota people and their claims to the sacred land. I hope some sort of compromise can be reached.

run: 4 miles
river road, north/south
49 degrees

An afternoon run. A little warmer and much sunnier. So crowded on the river road! Car after car after car. Near the trestle, the cars were backed up — at least 10 cars stopped in a line, extending both ways. The floodplain forest below the tunnel of trees was thick with green — no more river view here.

After climbing out of the tunnel of trees, I heard voices below me in the gorge. Rowers! The rowers are back! A few minutes later, I saw a roller skier. Two wonderful signs of spring. Now it just needs to stay warmer!

strings

This morning, I decided to work on a new poem. Instead of holes, and my blind spot, it’s about strings and threads and the lines that connect/tether me to words and meaning. I created this poem out of words from a favorite NYer essay: “Mystery Man.” I mapped it out, then printed out the words in bigger text, then pinned it up on my cork board, then connected the words with black embroidery thread, making it look like a murder board. Here’s the poem. Each stanza is from a different page.

the strings
that tie

eye

to word
to world

are
un

ravelling.

the strings that tie / eye / to word to world / are un/ ravelling

Is the string/thread dark and thick enough to see clearly, or should I go for thin black yarn?

I like the idea of this resembling a murder board, particularly in relation to my use of the word “unravelling.” Unravelling has two, almost opposing, meanings: 1. to fall part, to undo and 2. to solve a mystery, to make clear, to unknot or disentangle. So, the ties between eye, word, and world, are both coming undone AND are becoming more clear.

april 29/RUN

4.65 miles
veterans home, reverse
47 degrees

Sunny, cool-ish. Overdressed in tights and my hooded pullover. Everywhere green and gorgeous. I was too dazzled by the green to notice the river. Was it sparkling? I also didn’t notice the falls — how hard and fast were they falling? I do remember giving a quick glance to the creek: gray, open, flowing fast.

When I wasn’t thinking about anything, which was much of the time, I thought about not running too fast and pushing through tough moments

10 Things

  1. a class-sized group of kids down in the oak savanna — running above, I heard their voices, then saw them hiking below the mesa on the winchell trail
  2. passing a guy on veterans bridge — I was about the say hi when I noticed he was talking into a phone
  3. the surrey kiosk is up — today, on a wednesday, it was empty and closed
  4. running down the locks and dam hill, passing a man, exchanging greetings — hello / hi
  5. encountering a series of bikers — spaced far enough apart that I wondered if they were together — the first two had bright headlights on
  6. from behind, the faint noise of bike wheels moving very slowly, finally passing — a woman very upright in a bright yellow jacket biking very casually
  7. explosions of white blossoms on some of the trees lining the trail
  8. a mower at wabun, the smell of freshly cut grass
  9. the parking lot at veterans home was crowded and full
  10. a moment: running just north of the 44th street parking lot — shadows then suddenly more light: a net or web of shadows, some sprawled, some with little circles at the tips (the buds of trees)

When I saw these shadows I stopped running, pulled out my phone, and took a few pictures. A thought: this net of shadows would be the grid/net obscuring the text of a NYer essay. I’ll have to play around with it. As I kept running, I thought about shadowboxes and silhouettes and playing around with them in a visual poem. I stopped twice more to take shadowed pictures.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

I decided to post all the pictures that I took so I could study them some more. I like imagining these shadows as a net or a veil, a weaving/gathering of threads/strings/lines that affect my view of what is beneath them. Here it is the sidewalk, on the NYer page, it’s the words.

a thought: I’ve been trying to create neat and precise (well, precise-ish) grids of lines to mimic the Amsler grid, but does that really express/show how I see, or how I feel about, the words as I try to read them? What if I drew a “normal” grid directly on the text and then made the grid elevated above it more slanted, askew, not straight or orderly?

a few hours later: I made another frame out of cardboard and then tried to turn it into a loom that I could thread a grid on. Unsuccessful. Too hard to cut the slats enough so I could wind thread through it. I’m not completely giving up on this idea, but I think I’ll take a break from it. A little discouraging, but that’s okay. I think I just need some time to build up the skills to figure it out.

april 28/EYEDOCTOR

Went to an eye doctor this morning that I saw 8 years ago. Back then, early in my processing of my vision loss, I had accepted it, but I didn’t know much about my vision and I was a bit overwhelmed. When I told the doctor I had been diagnosed with Best’s Disease, he said that it didn’t look like Best’s to him; it was a more vague cone dystrophy. He was very clinical in his approach and way of communicating and I thought he was an asshole. Today he was just as clinical, but I didn’t think he was an asshole. He was nice and openly admitted that they don’t know a lot about these eye disorders and he explained that I might have Best’s, and I might not. There were no answers. There was also no acknowledgment of my vision as a strange or serious thing. Only neutral language and talk of returning in a few years to have it checked again. Oh, and the suggestion that my thinning retina looks similar to age-related macular degeneration and might respond to injections in my eyes every two months for the rest of my life. But, those injections won’t improve the retina thinning, just help it not thin anymore, and there haven’t been any studies on eyes like mine so there’s no guarantee that they will work and that means the very expensive procedure definitely won’t be covered by insurance. I left the appointment feeling frustrated and disappointed. Scott and I talked about it as we walked back to the parking garage. I recall saying something like, it sucks to lose my vision, but what makes me okay with it is that it’s so strange and fascinating. I want a doctor to acknowledge that strangeness. After saying that I’m unusual in my perspective and that most people want reassurance that it’s not too strange or severe, Scott added: you want to lean into the freakiness of it. Yes I do. I don’t care that there’s no cure, or that they don’t know much about it. I don’t want to submit to (and pay for) every expensive test they have to exhaust the possibilities of what it could or couldn’t be. I just want an expert to acknowledge the strange and serious and terrible beauty of my vision! But of course, the medical approach to eye care, with its emphasis on fixing and curing and making people “normal” again, doesn’t allow for that.

Here’s a positive thing that came out of that appointment: I advocated for myself! The doctor was about to leave and even though he didn’t ask if I had any questions, I offered one: do you have any resources for living with low vision. He said, oh, of course, that’s a good idea! I’ll give you a referral for a low vision specialist and occupational therapy. Yes. I’m ready to learn more about low vision specialists and their approach to vision and vision loss! (I know that I’ll have to be very clear about what I want and need — and it’s about tips and tricks for navigating and not how to be normal! Advocating for myself her was a big deal; getting information about low vision resources was one of my main reasons for this appointment!

And one more interesting thing, a concept that could be the title of a poem, or at least the primary influence: Variant of Uncertaint Significance. When talking about genetic testing and using it to try to determine what exactly my eye condition is he mentioned it multiple times.

VUS When analysis of a patient’s genome identifies a variant, but it is unclear whether that variant is actually connected to a health condition, the finding is called a variant of uncertain significance (abbreviated VUS). In many cases, these variants are so rare in the population that little information is available about them. Typically, more information is required to determine if the variant is disease related. Such information may include more extensive population data, functional studies, and tracing the variant in other family members who have or do not have the same health condition.

found poems (non Holes)

Before leaving for the ophthalmologist, I returned to a favorite erasure collection, A Wonderful Catastrophe, and read a few poem that offer inspiration:

from A Wonderful Catastrophe/ Colette Love Hilliard

I listen to the leaves
and
try to forget about
that
World within my head

from A Wonderful Catastrophe/ Colette Love Hilliard

I
remembered
loss could be
beautiful

I was hoping to run today, but I didn’t have time before my appointment, my eyes were very dilated for hours and I wouldn’t have been able to be out there in the very BRIGHT sun.

april 27/MAKING

Before working on my Holes project, a quick walk as the rain hit with Delia the dog. At first only a drizzle, but by the time we made it around the 2nd block, rain. I could barely tell with my raincoat on — a bright green jacket inherited from my dead mother-in-law — and my hood up. For the rest of the day: rain. No heavy storms, just a steady rain.

drip drip drop little April showers

Making

First, more fun with distressing plastic. I “drew” an Amsler Grid on a ziploc bag. Then I draw another one with my blind spot in the center. Then I cut the center of the spot out. I like this technique, and it’s very easy to do, and to replicate!

The perpetual problem with this plastic: it looks cool when I hold it up, but it doesn’t quite work when placed on the page: you can’t see the distressed grid and it doesn’t obscure enough of the words.

At some point, another thought: create a frame out of strips of cardboard. First I tried strips that were 2 inches thick. I slotted the strips to make the frame, then put the distressed plastic with the amsler grid/blind spot over it. I placed this frame over one panel of Holes 4. I liked it, but it was messy. And difficult to read. I wondered, would making a thinner frame help? I made one with 1 inch strips and added a different distressed Amsler grid. Still messy, still not quite right.

assessment: I like the idea of the frame, but I need to work on the execution — learn to cut the cardboard more neatly. Also: I need to make the words just a little more legible — if not, the actual words, the shadow of their presence.

1
2
3
4
  1. image of poem panel — I like how the words of this panel create their own poem: it‘s you that is something (yes, I know that it is technically its and not it’s, but I don’t care)
  2. side profile of 2 frames
  3. the first attempt with the thicker frame
  4. second attempt with the thinner frame placed over a panel where the words of the poem have been cut out

None of what I made was very successful, but it’s so much fun to try making things. Even as I still am not very good at it, I love that I keep trying. And I can tell I’m gaining confidence and improving. I still struggle to cut through cardboard effectively, but my lines are getting straighter. I’m glad I’ve stopped using my bad vision as an excuse!

note: if I can figure out how to more effectively execute the cardboard frame, I could use it as a loom for my thread grid!

also

Here are 3 other things that I’d like to make note of, and return to:

1 — achilles exercises

To help with achilles pain, strength the calf muscles: the gastrocnemius and soleus. I want to check out the 5 exercises mentioned in this post.

2 — The Art of Kindness, Helen J. Shen interview

I’ve barely started listening to this amazing interview with Helen J. Shen! There’s some great insight on the difference between being nice and kind and how to acknowledge, then let of of imposter feelings, and that’s just in the first 17 minutes!

3 — crocheted technology

Scott sent RJP and I a link to this brief post about crocheting — I don’t crochet, but I’m thinking a lot more about fiber arts these days!

For tomorrow: a run, a ophthalmologist appointment (how bad is my vision these days?), and reading more poems — and posting one here. I’m really enjoying all the making and experimenting, but I haven’t been reading other people’s poetry that much in the last month1.

  1. Right after writing and publishing this thought I realized that I have been looking at and posting poetry — I’m reading Her Read by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth and loving it. I’ve been looking at visual poetry, but not any other forms. ↩︎

april 26/RUN

4 miles
up wabun / down locks and dam
59 degrees
overcast

It is supposed to rain all day tomorrow, so I ran today. Warm — shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. Spring! I ran south on the trail. Lots of bikers but no reckless biking. I almost wrote that I forgot to look at the river, or that I don’t remember what I saw when I looked at the river, but then I remembered that I noticed it at the bottom of the locks and dam hill. Blue-gray and choppy,

sight of the day: a little kid (2 or 3?) hanging over the edge of a part of the wooden fence on the edge of the hill leading down to the oak savanna, an adult holding onto them tightly. What can you tell from a scene while running of a little kid with their back to you? Not much, I guess, but it felt like the kid had a wonderful curiosity, and the adult with them was supporting/encouraging/safeguarding it.

running thoughts: I felt strong and more confident, having run the 10k race yesterday. I ran too fast — I need to slow down! After the run was finished my achilles felt a little strained or strange or both. One of my funning YouTubers has achilles problems and they keep them in check by doing calf raised after every run. Maybe I should try that?

10 Things

  1. smell: cannabis somewhere nearby
  2. a cardinal’s pew pew pew call
  3. a bike peloton (15-20 bikes) on the paved path
  4. someone on e-bike zooming by on the road
  5. more green buds
  6. some empty benches, some occupied
  7. someone on a bike biking alongside a runner — marathon training, maybe for Grandma’s Marathon?
  8. a white car speeding down the locks and dam hill, turning around, then speeding back up it
  9. gnats! one landing on my check near the edge of my eye — I could see a black spot in my peripheral vision
  10. the boot hanging off a stalk in a neighbor’s yard is still there, a month later

holes

Today I’m experimenting with different ways to visualize my Holes 4 poem:

you look at words. you don’t see the gaping hole. you see seltzer fizz and a nothing that is something not sharing its secrets.

First, I cut up a ziploc bag and made dots in it with a pencil. This looks like fizz or static or snow, which is cool. A problem: you can feel it, but you can’t really see it. How to make those marks show up? Then I cut the static ziploc into the shape of my blind spot — actually, I cut out 20 of them. It’s still not visible, but I like the texture and the idea of making the visual less visible. I think I’ll use these somewhere.

After spending some time with distressed ziploc bag and not getting anywhere, I tried a different approach. First, streamline the poem, get rid of the fizz, and get over the idea of trying to represent fizz or static. Here’s the new version of the poem:

you look at words, you don’t see the gaping hole, you see a nothing that is something not sharing its secrets.

When I shortened the poem, I was able to “find” it on four instead of six of the pages of the new yorker essay.

Next, instead of trying to make fizz, I decided to distress a new sheet of ziploc plastic with a criss-cross pattern. I really like it!

view 1
view 2

I really like this way of distressing the plastic. And, it’s easy to do and to replicate! When I put it directly over the text of the essay, it didn’t obscure the text enough. Soon I realized that it needs to be at a slight distance. I keep coming back to the idea that these poems need to be 3-D. How should I do that?

april 23/MAKING

No run today. I’m taking it easy because Scott and I are running a 10k race this Saturday. Neither of us are ready and we will certainly be walking some of it, but it’s the official start of marathon training, which is exciting.

youtube

Yesterday at Arbeiter, Scott and I talked about YouTube and possibilities for vision-related videos. He talked about consistency, fine-tuning the process, and finding a small and regular way to create videos. I mentioned one idea: I could do brief videos — shorts? — in which I describe a moment of Sara-seeing, or Sara not-seeing. Strange examples happen every day — not seeing words that I’ve already written and writing over them; not being able to read text quickly or billboards at all; not seeing something that is bright red and obvious to everyone else — like a cardinal; not seeing a face and automatically looking through my peripheral to find it. Most of these I’ve mentioned aren’t that funny, but I have lots of instances of strange/absurd/funny ones too. The key for starting this project: keep it simple and short; I’m not interested in having this take over the other things I’m doing right now. The next step: figure out the process and start doing them.

holes

This morning, I’m re-working Holes 1. So far, I’ve drawn the Amsler Grid directly on the text for panels/pages 1 and 2. Then I printed and cut out the words of the poem and placed them on/over the grid. When I looked at the picture I had taken of it, I wasn’t satisfied. The words weren’t visible enough. Next I tried something I keep returning to but haven’t quite figured out: a 3D grid made from thread and pins above the grid + blind spot on the page. I like the effect of this, but now I need to figure out how to attach the words to the grid. Should I create a third layer with only the words? And should that layer be on top or in the middle –and, if in it’s in the middle, how do I do that?

holes 1, side
holes 1, above

I discovered something interesting as I worked on this poem as 4 different panels/pages. Each of the pages, which include words from different parts of the longer poem, create their own poem. Some of those poems work better than others, but they can all be read individually. The smaller poem in this panel is:

a hole in
your
is

Okay, the other panels don’t work as well as poems, but I bet I can tweak them to make them work. Another challenge!

A recap for Holes 1: keep thinking about how/where the words fit on the grid (and how they make visible the idea of the poem, a hole making an uneasy fellowship with the word; ruminate: should there be a single or double grid on this one?; and how can I tweak the words to make 4 individual poems?

big picture thoughts: This series offers a progression towards more confusion, or a more peculiar relationship with the word as a reader. I want to demonstrate that progression visually through the changing configuration of the hole, the string/line/thread, and the word. So far, I’ve been experimenting with what material to use to represent the hole — pencil shading, black netting. Next up, the plastic bag! I also want to try making the “magic” blind spot decoder that I mentioned yesterday: when you place it over a certain spot, a new poem is revealed.

As for the string/line/thread, I’m using a double grid. I also want to try a crime board, where the thread becomes a string that connects all of the words. And, a hanging mobile with the words dangling from strings — does it need to spin? Other thoughts: broken or knotted strings AND strings coming out of the center hole and angling out to sections of words. I should write these up and match them to my poems!

Her Read/ Jennifer Sperry

This book! It’s an erasure of a history of art book by Herbert Read that only includes one woman sculpture, and only as an afterthought.

From the introduction to the erasure:

Thread, fabric, the Fates, the spin, life span — women in all the ages past made what was both essential and perishable: life, cloth, food.

When you look at the cover of this book, you find an identity inextricable from embroidery: the cover of Herbert Read’s book, its original title and author, are altered with stitching and patchwork — so we are first called to think of erasure by cross stitching, a crossing out that is, at the same time, a women’s traditional kind of making, and not unlike the fibrous threads that close a wound. Or, Ariadne’s thread, a clew that leads out of the labyrinth of Western iconography.

Some great thread thoughts! I’m mentioned this a few weeks ago: I want to use thread in my found poems/erasures as a way to connect with my fiber artist Mom who died in 2009, and my fiber artist daughter, RJP, who is currently majoring in fashion design in college. And, to my grandmothers — one, a sewer, knitter, and cross stitcher (Orliss), the other a weaver (Ines). And more broadly to women’s way of making. This mention of Ariadne is intriguing to me — I need to revist that story; I like the idea of the line of the grid as a thread that leads me out of a maze of some sort.

cover, Her Read / Jennifer Sperry

I think I read that the red splotches are Sperry’s blood, from a wound she received while using a knife to cut the spine of the book.

april 20/MAKING

I thought I might take a walk today, or a run, but in the end I decided to watch the Boston Marathon and then experiment with different materials. Fun!

holes

A few more experiments: a plastic grocery bag (1); black netting (2)

1 — grocery bag

This material was difficult to cut and not as effective as the ziplock bag: effective = distorted, harder to read, creating a disconnection with the words

2 — black netting

I like the netting and the feeling of black. However, this netting was hard to cut! So hard that I couldn’t manage to cut the inner hole to expose the word/s of the poem. I should ask RJP for advice, or have her cut it. Examining the effect closer, I like it. Now I need to find out how to cut a hole into for the poem word! And, how should I attach this netting?

2 layers
3 layers
4 layers
2 layers / 2 holes

I asked FWA which version he preferred and he liked the lighter look with 2 layers. I can’t decide. It will probably be easier to decide when I figure out how to cut out the center and expose the words. Which one offers the better balance of emphasizing the poem word while not being too dark.

I asked Scott and he thought that working with black netting might be too difficult and that the look of it also had been done before. He’s a fan of the ziploc bag look. I like that look, but I don’t think it translates from a distance, and the “big picture” is part of what I’m trying to achieve. Also, as I told RJP, part of why I am doing these poems is to show what my vision is like as I read (and, if I’m being honest, to “prove” that it’s real and substantial). I’m still liking the netting most. Is there another material that could achieve a similar effect but was easier to work with? What about window screens? I like window screens because they are already framed. Could I find some used ones at ReStore? Does the screen offer enough of a distortion?

No time to look for screens today, so I decided to play around with the netting some more. I printed out the words and pinned them on top of 3-5 net holes. One of them has a lattice drawn under it, one is shaded in with pencil, a few have 3 holes, some four, one five. The hole with five also has the outline of the hole erased. Which treatment works best?

lattice / 4 nets
shaded / 3 nets
outline erase / 5 nets

Impatient as I am, I quickly pinned the word to the nets to the paper and took the picture in full sun. It’s a bit messy and the shadows are obscuring part of the text. Even so, I like this effect! I’m looking forward to working on it some more tomorrow. Future Sara (or, Sara sent somewhere — still not sure if that works) also needs to figure out how to direct the viewer/reader to the order of the words of the poem. A number by each? A key with panel numbers next to the word?

april 18/RUN

3.25 miles
locks and dam no. 1 and back
41 degrees / feels like 24
wind: 16 mph / gusts: 27 mph

That wind! I seemed to be running into in every direction. Had to wear my winter layers: tights, 2 shirts and a pullover, hood, gloves. One too many layers and unnecessary gloves. The sun and sharp shadows, combined with the green grass and new flowers made it look warmer and springier than it was. By Wednesday it’s supposed to be 79 degrees. Then, by the end of next week, 50s. That’s a Minnesota-spring for you.

grids and holes

To distract me from the run, I decided to listen to my “Window” playlist. When I got to “Waving Through a Window” I started thinking about the window as a barrier between me and the world, which made me think of the grid on my visual poems as not only being about mapping and locating and connecting (as thread or string or line), but as net or a veil or a thing that blocks my immediate access to the word and the world. Yes! The grid as both offering connection and preventing it, or obscuring it, or weakening it.

Here’s another version of the double grid that I did last night. I noticed that I am feeling much more confident with my graph making. I worried less about it not being straight and just drew lines and most of them are straight, or as straight as I want!

double grid, version 2

I wonder what this would like if it was twice as far away and made out of some of my thicker thread? I’d like to see, but using what? Should I find some wood and nail long nails into the wood? Yes! Should that be tomorrow’s project? I’m sure we have a scrap piece of wood and some long nails in the basement!

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the grid/thread/string aspect of this project and how to make it, but I don’t want to forget the hole. Reading through my entries from March, I found this:

I’d like to push at this idea of a hole in the vision, with the hole not being (just) empty or a void, but something — like a rabbit hole: an in-between space, a passageway, a liminal space, a threshold, but also a clearing (JJJJJerome Ellis), the Nothing around which something functions, the gorge.

A few thoughts:

First, I’d like to return to my original version of Holes 1, with my blind spot around each of the words. I want to experiment with different ways to “make” that blind spot — color it in with dark pencil; erase that pencil, leaving only a trace; a plastic bag; a net of thread; sparkles or something that resembles static — how do you realize that?; the black netting I bought with RJP. Instead of Holes 1, I’m using Holes 5c about the two holes.

Second, I’d like to find a New Yorker article about a gorge or a river or a field and make a hole poem out of it. I found an article: The Landscape in Winter

april 17/RUN

5.25 miles
franklin loop
63 degrees / drizzle
humidty: 85%

I beat the storm! Yes, there was drizzle, but no strong wind or thunder, so I’ll take the victory. Today I felt strong and relaxed and capable. Not anxious or overwhelmed. Today I also feel vulnerable and open to the world, ready to embrace any slight shifts in perspective.

Image of the Day: Running north on the east bank, looking down at the river: a sea of bright, fresh green. On this side of the gorge, between lake and franklin, there used to be a park down below, so there’s wide stretches of cleared land and open grass. Even knowing that, the green looked like water not grass to me, high up on the bluff.

Realization of the day: Returning to the west bank, running south, admiring the straight-ish ridge line across the gorge and wondering how it could be almost uniform, I realized something: this ridge line was made by humans — leveled after logging and road and residence building. What did it look like before settler colonists arrived?

on training for the marathon: Today I ran 9, walked 1. After crossing over Franklin, I did a 5 minute walk to get my heart rate below 170. Then another 9/1. After this last one I checked how long it took to get my heart rate down to 135: 2 minutes. A goal for future Sara: cut that time in half, or even more.

10 Things

  1. flashes of white flowers on the edge of the bluff: the spring ephemerals!
  2. little kid voices, laughing, somewhere deep in the gorge
  3. a guy yelling near a car parked across the parkwy on seabury — was it “fun” yelling as he played with a kid, or “unhinged” yelling at someone?
  4. chickadeedeedee
  5. a verbal greeting with a walker: good moring! / good morring!
  6. honking geese, a honking car horm
  7. a grayish-brownish-blue river, empty
  8. bright LED headlights, cutting through the thick gray air
  9. slashes of bright green are beginning to appear in the floodplain forest!
  10. several stones stacked on the ancient boulder

grids and strings and threads (oh my)

It’s a few hours after I returned from my run and it’s hailed twice and thundered and dropped 15 degrees since then. Boo. I tried a new thing with Holes 3: drew a graph directly on the words, mapped the words on the xy axis, lightly shaded in the words, repinned the grid over that, and then used thread to finish it. I like the doubling, almost out of focus feeling that the pencil grid and the string grid create. I don’t think the words are clear enough yet. I’ll have to keep working on that.

double grid
double grid, a slightly closer look (find fall and almost)

Here’s something else I tried: encasing the words in circles (using a penny) then roughly erasing the circles:

ghost hole effect

Another thought: map the words on a grid, then color in the rest of the grid box around the word or phrase from the poem. How would that look? Maybe I’ll try it on a smaller scale?

april 16/HIKE

60 minutes
Minnehaha Off-Leash Dog Park
68 degrees

Another hike with FWA and Delia. So beautiful! Today, FWA shared a realization about something that happened to him in 5th grade that was traumatic and has had a lasting impact. This realization explains so much about him and how he retreated into himself in middle school. My heart aches for that sweet, young boy! Oh, how I wish I would have recognized it when it was happening for what it was! But, I’m not sure I could have; I don’t think he even realized how much it impacted him until now.

dog names overheard: Daphne (a french bulldog); Carly (a standard poodle); and Danny, short for Lt. Dan (from Forest Gump (a corgie — Lt. Dan because he has no/short legs) and Ari (no idea what kind of dog Ari was, I never saw them, just heard their owner irritatingly calling for them ALL the time — Ari! Ari! Aaaaarrrriiii!)

10 Things

  1. a stopped, silent motor boat
  2. thin white foam on lapping the shore
  3. a log floating by, looking like a beaver (at least to me)
  4. more flashes of green
  5. a gaggle of honking geese, first flying then landing somewhere under a bridge
  6. a black puppy with white paws the same size as 10 yr old Delia
  7. a dirty golden retriever jumping on me (I didn’t care)
  8. a sweet mid-sized white dog acting like a cat, approaching then leaning into me (also didn’t care)
  9. a new entrance to the dog park, set farther in and farther from the road
  10. woodpeckers knocking on wood! Once, a deep and very hollow sound — FWA and I guessed it was a big bird and a very hollow piece of wood. Another time, a quicker, softer knocking, sounding like a rattling jawbone to me

Near the end I mentioned hearing a rock bouncing off a hollow spot in the packed dirt, which prompted FWA to start talking about sink holes. There are lots of sink holes all around the river. At one point during this discussion, I thought about my holes project and how our discussion fit. Here’s one way to think about it: as we talked about sink holes I mentioned (or thought, I can’t remember) how freaky the idea of a hole opening up in the ground and swallowing someone or something unsettled me. Why is this so unsettling to me? The idea of being swallowed, of disappearing without a trace, of being trapped without an escape from somewhere deep? Could it also be the falling part too? The dizziness, your stomach dropping, the total loss of control? Possibly. Three thoughts related to my Holes series:

1

Dizziness. Feeling dizzy, like I might pass out, then a soft panic after trying to read for too long, or while trying to read labels at a grocery store. More than once, I’ve stopped and closed my eyes and held onto the grocery cart to ground myself.

2

Disorientation and feeling lost. I can’t read the names of stores or restaurants on the signs outside of buildings, so it can be very hard to get my bearings in a new place.

3

Delight. This morning, I watched the scene from the animated Alice in Wonderland again and marveled (again) at Alice’s reaction to falling down the hole. As she plunges into the darkness, she looks back at her cat standing at the top of the hole, and calls out to them in a delighted and excited voice, Good bye Dinah! Goodbyeeeeeeeee! Alice is not terrified or confused. As she continues to fall, she says something like, Now I will think nothing of falling down stairs!

grids and lines and threads

This morning, a return to thinking through the bigger picture of this series. A reminder from my thoughts from 7 april: the jacked-up spider web experiment in which NASA scientists gave spiders several different substances than studied the webs they created on those substances. A visual inspiration for this series! I’m printing out some images to put at the top of my cork board.

my cork board with the spider webs in the top right corner

Before the hike, I gave myself 3 tasks for today: 1. collect/work on Holes 5a, b, and c, also known as Hole Perspective, Hole Time, and Hole Process. Try to include “strings” or “pull the strings” in one of these poems; 2. draw/shade the dots encasing the words for Holes 3; and 3. work on the poem for Holes 6/Strings 1 — the book review about daughter’s memoirs

Holes 5a, 5b, 5c and Strings 1

Holes 5a

My hole perspective —
life on the way to
wonderland.

I fall
through a what is this?
feeling as text bloom into nonsense.

Holes 5b

hole time —
measured in word (or words)
one word then one then one word

Holes 5c

the hole process —
a small island where reading is still possible waits
as the large nothing that surrounds it grows

Strings 1


the strings that tie
words to the world of meaning
have come un done

I like these!

2 — Draw the holes in Hole 3

I did it. And it took much longer than I anticipated, so no third thing today. I drew larger holes and then created an elevated grid over it, first on my wall board and then on a piece of cork board on my desk. I think the holes are too big; they should be dots to match the center dot of the amsler grid and of points mapped on the x and y axis.

grid with big dots


I’d like to plot the small dots on the map of the text and then place the grid over it. I think I need to print the text directly on a graph to plot it properly — or is there another (easier?) way to do this?