Tag: vision

jan 31/RUN

3.2 miles
locks and dam no. 1 loop
34 degrees

Breezy. Wind coming from the north. Sunny, too. Lots of shadows. Today’s run wasn’t effortless but it wasn’t hard either. Somewhere in-between. Listened to my “Remember to Forget” playlist for the last day of the month. Even with my headphones in, I could hear kids on the playground across the road, some hikers talking on the trail below.

Listening to the songs, I thought about the tenderness of remembering and the satisfaction of forgetting. Also thought about how we all remember things differently, and most of us inaccurately.

10 Things

  1. the river was a patchwork of white and gray
  2. only a few lumps of snow scattered on the grass and the trail
  3. slick puddles
  4. a sagging fence, casting a crooked and forlorn shadow
  5. BLUE! sky
  6. a few of the benches were occupied — at least 2
  7. my favorite bench, above the “edge of the world” was empty, so was the one near folwell
  8. ran on all of the walking paths — clear!
  9. the sparkle of broken glass in a pile of leaves on the street in front of a neighbor’s house
  10. a chain link fence below on the winchell trail, illuminated by the sun, on the edge, at the part of the trail that is slowly sliding into the gorge (the rubbled asphalt stretch just past 38th street)

before the run

These evenings of long light
Must be high festival to them. It’s the time
When the light seems tender in the needles
Of the pine, the shimmer of the aspen leaves
Seems kindly on the cliff face, gleams
On the patches and gullies of snow summer
Hasn’t touched yet. 
(from The Creek at Shirley Canyon/ Robert Haas)

Reading this description of light in this beautiful poem, I’m reminded of Wednesday’s afternoon light. Stepping out on the deck around 4, I gasped as I noticed the light on the bare trees, glowing a soft green. An olive green, Scott thought. It seemed to be offering a glimpse of the future when winter was over. How should I describe that light? Not tender — dazzling? a show-stopper? But maybe tender, too. The light was soft on the trees — bathing them in light? — coaxing out them of their dreamed of leaves in the forms of the green glow.

And the creek is flush
With life, streams of snow melt cascading down
The glacial spills of granite in a turbulence
The ouzel, picking off insects in the spray,
Seems thrilled by, water on water funneling,
Foam on foam, existence pouring out
Its one meaning, which is flow. 
(from The Creek at Shirley Canyon/ Robert Haas)

The glacial spills of granite? Water on water funneling? Existence’s one meaning: flow? Wow! I love this description of water.

Read, We Could Just Gaga Our Grammar, this morning and it got me thinking that I need to do some more strange, fun, playful experiments on here. Return to the erasures? Sentence scrambling? Pick something off of Meyer’s Please Add to this List list?

Encountered, Lullaby of Jazz Land: A Found Poem Composed of Titles from the American Songbook, and am thinking of doing something with the titles or lyrics from my Remember to Forget playlist.

Turned randomly to a page in The Braille Encyclopedia and read “Body”.

The rest of the body works to compensate for what the eye can no longer do.

The Braille Encyclopedia/ Naomi Cohn

Cohn discusses a sore neck and back, muscle spasms, headaches. Do I feel any of these things? The occasional headache. Starting these sentences, I had forgotten about the dizziness, then I remembered when I felt it — the world suddenly swimming for a moment as I tried to read and write in this entry.

Then she mentions feeling very tired —

A kind of tired that feels like most of my trillions of mitochondria have decided they’ve cooked their last energy-meal, turned off the stove, hung up their aprons, kicked off their pinching shoes, and gone to lie down somewhere. For a very long time.

The Braille Encyclopedia/ Naomi Cohn

I feel tired often — maybe not as tired as Cohn. I take naps, or fall asleep mid-sentence. I have the luxury of measuring my efforts, (and lowering my expectations), not doing things that are too draining too often. Shopping is draining, especially grocery shopping. A few weeks ago, I had to stop at the end of the aisle, hang onto the cart, and close my eyes for a minute. Too many things I couldn’t quite see, lights that were too bright. Deep breaths. This used to make me anxious, but now, with the help of lexapro and the understanding that this dizziness is caused by an uncertain and overworked brain, I don’t worry as much.

after the run

After discovering James Longenbach’s poem, “In the Village,” earlier this month, I requested his collection Seafarer from the library. Here’s part 4:

from In the Village/ James Longenbach

Of ghosts pursued, forgotten, sought new—
Everywhere I go
The trees are full of them.

From trees come books, that, when they open,
Lead you to expect a person
On the other side:

One hand having pulled

The doorknob
Toward him, the other

Held out, open,
Beckoning
You forward

jan 30/RUN

5.25 miles
ford loop
38 degrees

38 degrees! Sun and hardly any wind and less layers. The snow is almost all melted and all the paths were clear. I repeated yesterday’s experiment: run a mile; stop to walk, pull out my phone, and recite an ED poem into it; start running again (repeat, 5 times total). Today I recited: We Grow Accustomed to the Dark; A Murmur in the Trees — to note; I Felt a Funeral in my Brain; I heard a Fly buzz when I died; and A lane of yellow led the Eye. Like yesterday, it helped me to stay steady with my pace. The lines that stuck with me the most are at the end of A Murmur in the Trees — to note:

But then I promised n’ere to tell
How could I break my word
So go your way and I’ll go mine
No fear you’ll miss the road

I thought about this road in relation to the road in We Grow Accustomed:

A Moment — We uncertain step
For newness of the Night
Then fit our vision to the Dark
And meet the road erect

You adjust and get back on the road, where life steps almost straight (the ending line of “We Grow”), and I’ll stay here in the Dark with the little men in their little houses and the robins in their trundle bed and this whimsical, strange world (images from A Murmur).

10 Things

  1. my shadow, far below in the ravine near Shadow Falls
  2. the view from the top of the hill after climbing from under the lake/marshall bridge — wide, open, iced surface
  3. the bells of St. Thomas ringing
  4. running on the east side, across the river from one of the schools, I could hear the kids on the playground all the way over here
  5. my shadow, on the railing of the ford bridge — I kept looking down to the iced river, searching for more of my shadow on the shadow of the bridge’s railing
  6. the river, near the ford bridge was all white, but further north, it was gray with white splotches
  7. the port a potty at the Monument was covered in black graffiti and the door didn’t look like it could fully shut
  8. close to where I heard the kids across the gorge, I noticed how steep the slope was — don’t get too close to this edge!
  9. a man below on the Winchell trail talking to little kid (or a dog?) — momma’s coming — as a woman approached them
  10. a kid on the playground: it’s soooo warm!

memory

Memory can edit reality in some such way and then the edited version is too good to let go. Memory makes what it needs to make.

A Lecture on Corners/ Anne Carson

I picked up Naomi Cohn’s The Braille Encyclopedia at Moon Palace last night!

Now, in my sixties, the Velcro of memory has lost its grip, glutted with lint. This makes learning braille–all its letters, punctuation, symbols, contractions, and their rules for use–puzzling. The mind’s memory fail. What takes over? Muscle memory, body memory, skin memory. My fingertip remembers more braille than my hippocampus.

The Braille Encyclopedia/ Naomi Cohn

So many different types of memory to think about!

An alternative to vision.

The Braille Encyclopedia/ Naomi Cohn

I rely on memory a lot to help me see.

jan 28/BIKE

25 minutes
basement
outside: wind gusts, 32 mph

I woke up with a sore right glute/lower back. Not terribly painful, but sore and a bit worrisome. Wanted to run in the warmer weather but wondered if it was a bad idea. Then I heard the howling wind and decided to believe that it was a sign: don’t run! So I went to the basement and biked instead. It helped! I should work on biking longer in the basement. It’s boring. My bike is on a basic stand — no shifting, no zwifting, just pedaling and watching something on my iPad. Today I watched some races; next time, a show or a movie.

Before my bike: I’m in the process of re-reading all of the poems I gathered this year and choosing lines to turn into my own poem. This process inspired three directions of thought:

1 — open

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.”
(Vermeer/ Tranströmer)

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?
(from Liturgy of the Name/ JJJJJerome Ellis)

Open doors say, “Come in.”
(Doors/ Carl Sandburg)

This discussion of open doors reminded me of something I remembered thinking/writing about in a log entry, but not when I wrote it. It took a few minutes, but I found it!

Running north, somewhere above the white sands beach, I started thinking about something I was working on earlier today about how my changing vision is closing some doors, opening others. I’m particularly interested in thinking about how it opens doors without ignoring/denying the shut ones too. Anyway, I suddenly had a thought: it’s not just that it opens doors, but it makes it so those doors can’t shut. I waited until I reached the bottom of the hill and then spoke my idea into my phone. Here’s a transcript:

It’s not just that doors open, they won’t shut. I can’t close them to the understandings that I’m both forced to confront but also have the opportunity to explore. But the key thing is that the doors can’t be shut. my notes recorded during a run on 3 may 2023

I came to this idea after thinking about how vision is strange and tenuous and a lot of guesswork for everyone. A big difference between me and a lot of other people is that I can’t ignore or deny that fact. It’s much easier for people with “normal” vision to imagine, with their sharp vision and their ability to focus fast, that they are seeing exactly what is there. They’re not. Even if I wanted to, I can’t pretend that that is true. I’m reminded all of the time of how tenuous converting electrical impulses into images is and what the brain does for us to make those images intelligible.

log entry from 3 may 2023

2 — walls

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
(Vermeer/ Tramströmer)

I wandered all along the street that hugs the walls,
a needle floating
on its cloth. Once
I shut my eyes and felt my way
along the stone. Outside
is the cash crop, sunflowers, as far as one can see. Listen,
the wind rattles in them,
a loose worship
seeking an object
an interruption. Sara,
the walls are beautiful. They block the view.
And it feels rich to be
inside their grasp.
(To a Friend Going Blind/ Jorie Graham)

Here I’m thinking about inner and outer and the interior walls of a house and the limestone and sandstone and concrete walls of the falls and lock and dams and the gorge.

3 — blind

What Would You Give Up?/ Dorianne Laux    

Not the nose on my face, but the spite, the grindstone.
Not an arm or a leg, but the money.
Not the length of the arm, but the lie, the shot, the list, the twist.
Not the ear, but the lending, the boxing, the out on.
Not the eye, but the naked, the catching, in the blink of, 
the keeping it peeled, the turning a blind.
Not the elbow but the grease, the room.
Not the leg, but the pulling.
Not the back, but the shirt on, the breaking of, the scratch, the
     stab, 
the turning, the water off a duck’s.
Not the neck, but the sticking it out, the in-shit-up-to. 
Not the throat, but the jump down, the frog in.
Not the feet, but the ground, the dragging, the cold.
Not the heel, but the down at, the under.
Not the fingers, but the light, the butter.
Not the thumb, but the green, the sore, the twiddle. 
Not the tongue, but the slip.
Not the tooth, but the nail, the long in, the sweet.
Not the brain, but the drain, the picking of, the all brawn and no.
Not the breast, but the beating. 
Not the body, but the temple.
The bird in the hand, the foot in the grave.

This poem is one of five published in the Cortland Review in the spring of 2009. As an aside, the spring of 2009 was when I started my first blog, TROUBLE, which transformed my life, and also when my mom was in the final stage of pancreatic cancer; she died in the fall of 2009.

Not the eye, but the naked, the catching, in the blink of, 
the keeping it peeled, the turning a blind.

Yes, let’s give up these expressions. I am reminded of Naomi Cohn and her listing of expressions using blind:

Entries from the Braille Encyclopedia (excerpt) / Naomi Cohn

Blind

Blind alley a dead end.
Blind pig an illegal saloon.
Blind drunk what you get there.
Blind staggers a disease of horses.
Blind story floor of a building without windows.
Blind spot where the car lurks in the next lane.

Looking for this writing, I discovered that Cohn’s book, Braille, is finally out! How did I miss that it was published this past October? Oh, I know — I was worried about the election and dealing with the mental health crises of my two kids! I immediately ordered Cohn’s book at my local awesome book store, Moon Palace! Pick up later today. Hooray!

Didn’t Georgina Kleege do a riff on “blind” in her book, Sight Unseen? Just checked, yes!

The word blind has always meant more than merely the inability to see. The Anglo-Saxon translators of the Gospels make the metaphoric leap from literal sightlessness to spiritual or cognitive incapacity. Of course they were only following an ancient lead. Throughout the history of the language and in common usage today, the word connotes a lack of understanding or discernment, a willful disregard or obliviousness, a thing meant to conceal or deceive. In fact, when you stop to listen, the word is far more commonly used in its figurative than its literal sense. And it comes up so often: blind faith, blind devotion, blind luck, blind lust, blind trust, blind chance, blind rage, blind alley, blind curve, blind-nail flooring, blind date (more dangerous than you think), duck blind, window blind, micro-mini blind (when open, they’re hard to see), blind taste test, double-blind study, flying blind, following blind, blind leading the blind, blind landing, color blind, blind submission, blind side, blind spot, blindfold, blindman’s bluff, three blind mice (have you ever seen such a sight in your life?).

Sight Unseen/ Georgian Kleege

memories

Writing about walls and the inner and outer, I started thinking about Severance and innies and outies and the relationship between them. Scott and I are listening to the Scott/Stiller podcast recapping the first season and watching all of the episodes, before screening season 2. Anyway, I remembered Helly R’s consent speech:

My name is Helly R. I’m making this video roughly two hours before it will be shown to me. I have, of my own free accord, elected to undergo the procedure colloquially known as severance. I give consent for my perceptual chronologies to be surgically split, separating my memories between my work life and my personal life. I acknowledge that, henceforth, my access to my memories will be spatially dictated. I will be unable to access outside recollections whilst on Lumon’s severed basement floor, nor retain work memories upon my ascent. I am aware that this alteration is comprehensive and irreversible. I make these statements freely.

What does the severing process do to the brain? Is it all about dividing inner and outer memories? What is the role of memory and remembering in the forming/understanding/experience of selfhood? Irving gives a little speech about how our sense of self is shaped by our memories/stories/history to Helly in episode 3:

It’s an unnatural state for a person to have. No history. History makes us someone. It gives us a context, a shape.

jan 26/RUN

5.25 miles
bottom of franklin hill
22 degrees / feels like 12
wind gusts: 29 mph

Sunny but windy. Shadows and shaking leaves. Like most of my runs lately, it felt hard. I briefly thought about stopping at the trestle, but then I kept going instead. As I ran down the franklin hill I remembered that I’d get to check out the frozen river. It did not disappoint! The coolest thing about the surface ice was the noises it made as cars drove by on the river road — that strange, echoey boom, almost like whales communicating, that happens when ice is disturbed — I have a link to this sound somewhere on the blog, but I couldn’t find it quickly. I’ll keep searching for it.

Listened to the wind, voices, and geese as I ran north. Put in mood: energy on the way back — “Baba O’Reily”; “My Sharona”; “Renegade”; “It’s Tricky”; “Cult of Personality”; “New Attitude”. Favorite line was from “Cult of Personality” — When a mirror speaks/the reflection lies. Also thought about “New Attitude” and the line, I’m feeling good from my head to my shoes — why not, good from my hat to my shoes?

10 Things

  1. bright blue, cloudless sky
  2. my shadow, sharp, running in front of me
  3. 2 geese honking high in the sky — I stopped running and craned my neck to watch them fly by
  4. empty benches
  5. ice on the path — a dirty brown, then almost amber when the light hit it just right
  6. voices from somewhere below, cheering somebody
  7. the river, covered in thick ice
  8. a person with a fancy camera stopped by the railing, taking pictures
  9. someone walking by in the flats, having an animated conversation with someone else over the phone
  10. a strong smell of weed — did it come from the car that just drove by or the walker with 2 dogs?

G.C. Waldrep

During my “on this day” practice, I came across a line from the poet G.C. Waldrep:

I write about “the eye” because you will not accept “faith” or “the soul.” 

The Earliest Witnesses

I had posted it on 26 jan 2021 because I had just encountered it on twitter and in the context of a discussion of the soul. Today I read it and wanted to know more about what Waldrep meant. I searched “G.C. Waldrep, The Earliest Witnesses” and found a post on the poet (and father of Jenny Slate) Ron Slate’s site, On the Seawall: On The Earliest Witnesses.

In the eighth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus performs one of his most perplexing miracles. The narrator tells us that, after a blind man is “brought” to him, Jesus “put saliva on his eyes and laid his hands on him.” But the miracle doesn’t seem to take. For after Jesus asks the man whether he can see, the man replies, “I can see people, but they look like trees, walking.” In response, Jesus lays his hands on the blind man’s eyes once more—a kind of second go at it—after which, we are told, “his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.”

This story comes to mind, unbidden, in the reading of G.C. Waldrep’s The Earliest Witnesses — the poet’s seventh collection — not only because the book speaks candidly about the deterioration of sight (among other bodily maladies) but also because Waldrep’s poetry mirrors the slow and partial revelation of sight that we find in this miracle. These poems both obscure and disclose: in some lines they show us “everything clearly” — in others, “trees, walking.”

“I strode into the woods in a brute faith,” reads the first line of the first poem, “certain the forest / would give me what I needed.” Then, in a characteristic move of obfuscation, the speaker withdraws into occluded seclusion, as if from fear of speaking too plainly. “If there was a mathematics / I was all for it, math being hunger’s distaff cousin.” Here we find that tension between clear vision and partial sight that marks both our opening miracle story and so much of The Earliest Witnesses; however, in this instance, we begin with sight, only to have it dimmed immediately.

On The Earliest Witnesses

I want to read this collection!

I was immediately struck by the line in the post, I see people but they look like trees walking. That’s not quite how it works for me, but, with my vision, I can imagine seeing people that way, like trees walking. I want to read the bible verse the author is referencing and think about that some more.

Searching some more for Waldrep, I found an interview with him and this great discussion:

A second key might be “eavesdropping.” As it happens I have deficient eyesight and hearing, not enough to impair my regular function but enough that I can, as my colleague Karla Kelsey puts it, “squint,” either with the eye or the ear, without difficulty. Some of my best lines—especially the generative lines, the bits of poetic grist from which poems develop—come from phrases I’ve misheard in conversation or (at least initially) misread as text. I guess you could say I “own” such material—I make a lyric and creative claim to it—by mishearing or misreading it.

An Inheritance Reassembled

Squinting! Mishearing or misreading or mis-seeing! The squinting makes me think of a poem by Linda Pastan or a line (I think, I’ll have to check later) from Arthur Sze. The mishearing reminds me of something I encountered during my annual review (22 july 2024) a few days ago:

the Ten Muses of Poetry — from the writer, Andrei Codescru, in his book, The Poetry Lesson. I’ve never heard of Codescru — he’s great. I found the chapter his Ten Muses are inand read it. Funny and strange and great. I wonder, would I enjoy taking a class from him? Probably.

The Ten Muses of Poetry

  1. Mishearing
  2. Misunderstanding
  3. Mistranslating
  4. Mismanaging
  5. Mislaying
  6. Misreading
  7. Misappropriating cliches
  8. Misplacing objects belonging to roommates or lovers
  9. Misguided thoughts at inappropriate times, funerals, etc.
  10. Mississippi (the river) 

jan 24/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls
20 degrees / feels like 8

Above 0, but still felt cold. It was the wind, swirling softly in all directions, that did it. Ran south to the falls. Wasn’t sure if I’d make it all the way there — it felt difficult — but I did! The creek and the falls were almost all frozen, only a small stream buried under the ice. Looking at the falls from my favorite spot, across the way, it looked like a giant column of ice, which it was.

10 Things

  1. a strong smell of cigarette smoke near the parking lot
  2. thin patches of ice on the cobblestone at the park
  3. kids’ laughter coming from across the road, at the school playground
  4. my favorite bench, above the edge of the world, was not empty today
  5. near the bench, the snow where someone had written “DAVIDSON” had melted
  6. the mottled walking trail at the park — mostly white snow, with grayish asphalt splotching through
  7. a lone black glove, dropped on the trail
  8. a dark gray chunk of snow, upright, looking like a squirrel waiting to cross the road
  9. a few runners, a few walkers, no bikers
  10. glanced down at the big sledding hill at the park — not much snow and no one sledding down it

I had wanted to thinking about stillness (inspired by an entry from 21 aug 2024) or to chant triple berries but mostly I forgot. I put in a mood playlist: energy at the halfway point and focused on the music, including Britney Spears’ “Work Bitch.” Wow.

before the run

This month, I’ve been reviewing all my entries from 2024 and giving attention to remembering and forgetting and then getting in too deep with thinking and theorizing and organizing ideas around themes. Past Sara — Dr. Sara who is too enamored with theories and ideas and being clever — wants to return. Present Sara needs to figure out some ways to prevent that from happening! Yesterday I decided to take out my scrabble tiles and make anagrams out “remember forget” and “I remember to forget.”

remember forget
bee or germ fret [m]
more bereft germ
beet form merger
forge meter [brm]
frog meter berm
beef rot merger [m]

I Remember to Forget
Got more meter fiber
Orbit form tree gem
bee form griot meter

What anti-theorizing thing can I do today?

A line remembered during my “on this day” practice:

Tell me, how do I steady my gaze
when everything I want is motion?
(Saccadic Masking/ Paige Lewis)

Everything I see is motion or in motion or never not in motion.

Last night we watched a Voyager’s episode in which the crew was experiencing strange symptoms — Captain Janeway had terrible headaches and couldn’t sleep; Chakotay was aging way too fast; Nelix was transforming into another species; and another red shirt went into shock then died. After 7 of 9 shifts into a different phase, she is able to witness what is happening: there are tons of people (human looking) on the ship hovering around the crew members and injecting them with needles. They are experimenting on them in the name of “medical research.” Yikes. Janeway’s headaches are not due to working too hard and not getting enough sleep or exercise, but because they are injecting her with dopamine. They keep increasing the dose to see how much she can take. I said to Scott, can you imagine if our headaches were caused by imaginary creatures messing with us? Then I started to imagine that this was the case. I also started to think about all the things we can’t see that live with us, like mites and bacteria and more. Surprisingly this didn’t freak me out.

Here is a poem I discovered yesterday. I love that first line and what it does as it follows from the title! I found it before I watched the Star Trek Voyager episode, but it is interesting to put them together to think about who/what we live with that we don’t see, or refuse to see:

The Houseguest / Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

Forgiveness was sitting in your kitchen when you got home, and now rests elbows on the table to watch you reach for a knife. You scrape the papery skin from a ginger root and slice it into thin coins. You think too hard about which mugs to pull from your cupboard: you might reveal too much; should you offer the one with the uncomfortable handle? Water boils. You divide the ginger evenly into both cups and pour. Spoonful of honey. You stir slowly, eyes down as though you might be able to forget. You stir too long. Forgiveness coughs politely, so you turn, place both mugs on the table, sit. Forgiveness leans forward. You lean back. You have forgotten what it is like to live with someone who eats all your cut watermelon, picks clean the skeletal vine of red grapes, shakes water spots onto your bathroom mirror without wiping them away. What thresholds of welcome have you crossed and recrossed? Most mornings, you listen for the body to move through your house and out the door before leaving your bedroom. Most nights, you ghost around each other without speaking. But now, as the rain drizzles into gloaming, you settle into your chairs, inevitable, a cupful of hesitation finally beginning to loosen your tongues.

And here’s part of a poem I encountered this morning that seems to fit or could be interesting to put beside “The Houseguest” and the Voyager episode:

If/ Imtiaz Dharker

If we could pray. If
we could say we have come here
together, to grow into a tree,
if we could see our blue hands
holding up the moon, and hear
how small the sound is
when it slips through
our fingers into water,
when the meaning of words melts
away and sugarcane speaks
in fields more clearly
than our tongues

That small sound, those blue hands, when words melt away! To give attention, to pray!

Continuing to review past august entries, past Sara wrote this for me, January 2025 Sara:

In January and February, I’ll remember the first orange buoy looking like the moon in an afternoon sky or the glow of orange when the light hits the buoy just right or the gentle rocking of the waves or that satisfied feeling after 90 minutes in the water.

log entry 22 aug 2024

I remember the faintness of that buoy, like the moon in the afternoon visible mostly by my belief that it was there. I also remember swimming that stretch, trying to avoid other swimmers and the ghost vines growing up from the bottom of the lake, seeming extra tall this summer. I’ll remember finally reaching that buoy and rounding it for the start of another loop, unable to see the far shore of a lifeguard or the other 2 orange buoys.

I remember the way the water glowed orange from the reflection of the buoy, or the quick flash of the smallest whisper of an orange dot, or the orange appearing only as a feeling of some disruption in the shoreline scenery — not really seen with my eyes, but registered by my brain — the idea that something was looming ahead.

I don’t remember gentle rocking, but I remember the wild ride of rounding the far green buoy and being pushed around by the water, or how the water seemed so hard to stroke in sometimes.

jan 19/BIKERUN

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.

One-line poems, and/or poem starters:

Edgar Allen Poe,
exercise enthusiast.

Sara doing Sara things.

A shadow
crosses.

The tree outside
my window.

jan 14/BIKERUN

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.

jan 10/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
21 degrees
100% snow-covered

Today the winter I want: big flurries, everything covered in a thin layer of snow, not too much wind, warmer, not slick — especially with my with Yaktrax on. Nothing was quite easy, but everything wasn’t as hard as my last run on Wednesday.

10 Things

  1. a white sky
  2. the contrast between shoveled and un-shoveled sidewalks — both still white, but the shovelled ones had a tint of gray or brown peeking through
  3. the clacking jawbone of a bird’s beak — a blue jay?
  4. the river was all white — if you didn’t know better, you could believe it was a field or a meadow
  5. approaching from above, hearing the falls rushing over the limestone
  6. kids yelling and laughing at the playground, one loud, high-pitched sound — was it a kid screaming or a whistle?
  7. amongst the kid voices, a deeper, more knowing laugh — was that from a teacher?
  8. the contrast on the creek surface: white snow with blackish-gray water
  9. every so often, a flash of orange — not always sure what it was, just a voice whispering, orange — a snow fence? a construction cone? a sign?
  10. bright headlights cutting through the sky, which was both bright — everything white! — and heavy

Listened to my “Remember to Forget” playlist on the way back. The first song up, Do You Remember Walter? by The Kinks. Two different bits stuck with me:

one: Walter, you are just an echo of a world I knew so long ago.
two: Yes, people often change./ But memories of people can remain.

This second bit got me thinking about how I can’t always (can I ever?) see faces clearly. When the face is too dark and shadowed, I just ignore it altogether. But when there’s some light and I can sort of see them, I often re-construct the features I can’t see with memories of their face from before I lost most of my cone cells. I’m not remembering their face, but creating it. After thinking that the idea of remembering as re-memembering — putting a body back together — popped into my head. Yes! I take my image of face, only as fragments — the curve of a nose or a chin, a bit of eye — and turn it into something whole.

As I kept running, I thought more about remembering and memories and my vision and how I rely on past experience and habits to navigate. And now as I write this, I’m thinking about how everyone’s vision — not just mine — relies on a building up of past experiences (memories?) with things to be able to see them. Here I’m remembering something that I read in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss:

the sensation of sudden visual awareness is produced in part by the formation of a “search image” in the brain. In a complex visual landscape, the brain initially registers all the incoming data, without critical evaluation. Five orange arms in a starlike pattern, smooth black rock, light and shadow. All this is input, but the brain does not immediately interpret the data and convey their meaning to the conscious mind. Not until the pattern is repeated, with feedback from the conscious mind, do we know what we are seeing.

Learning to See in Gathering Moss/ Robin Wall Kimmerer

I’m continuing to read JJJJJerome Ellis’ Aster of Ceremonies. Wow!

Prayer to My Stutter #2/ JJJJJerome Ellis

You restore
a living
shoreline
between word
and silence

This beautiful prayer moves right into the next offering, Octagon of Water, Movement 3, which was titled by its first line when it was published in Poetry:

excerpts from The name of that Silence is These Grasses in the Wind/ JJJJJerome Ellis

1

The name of that silence is these grasses in this wind, and the name of these grasses in this wind is that other place on the other side of this instant. This instant is divided by curtains of water and the sound of shuddering time. A sunflower reeling with sun, six hands stretched in offering. This unsearchable, uncancellable instant wraps the shoulders of the grasses like a shawl stilled by the stoppage. 

How is/isn’t the instant similar to Marie Howe’s moment? If you listen to the recording on Poetry, you can hear the stretched silence as Ellis’ voice stops before pronouncing certain words.

2

This morning come shyly or boldly into the fertile field, however you are, come, come and stay in the rearrangement, the pressure of thumb on fescue blade, a year wheeling within a day, two round moments of warm mouth, finally at peace. The psalm is a key if only we can find the door. Do not swallow your dysfluent voice. Let it erupt in its volcanic flowering. Stoppage thence passage, aporia, poppy bursting with fragrant seed. 

What a beautiful description and reclaiming of a stuttering voice on the other side of the stoppage! The erupting bursting flowering dysfluent voice.

I’m inspired by how Ellis takes his stutter and turns it into this beautiful instant between silence and word. For them, the stoppage is a/the key aspect of the stuttering. What are the most important elements of my strange vision?

jan 8/RUN

4.5 miles
minnehaha falls and back
12 degrees

Another sunny, sharp shadow day. Ran south to the falls and listened to cars, birds, kids on the playground, and some guy coughing too loudly. Stopped at my favorite spot to admire the falls, then put in my “Remember to Forget” playlist. Sometimes I felt strong, and sometimes I felt tired. My legs wanted us to stop. I did a few times, including at the bench above “the edge of the world.” I took two pictures. One had a clearer view of the ice on the river, but I picked the other one, with its branches and shadows and white sun:

Most of the image is of dark, bare branches and their shadows on a snow-less ground. Through the trees is an iced river and the sun.
above the edge of the world / 8 jan 2024

10 Things

  1. chirping birds
  2. my shadow, clear and strong
  3. shadows of trees in the park, soft and fuzzy
  4. a shadow of the lamp post, sharp and menacing
  5. someone who looked like Dave the Daily Walker from behind — a tucked shirt and not jacket, tucked into dark track pants — but wasn’t
  6. the creek — bright white snowy surface mixed with fast, flowing water
  7. the falls were gushing through the ice columns
  8. a man with a bad cough near the overlook
  9. a cold wind on my ears when I put my hood down
  10. the shadow of a tree sprawled across the trail that dips below the road, looking like an actual branch that might hit me as I ran by

For a moment, I thought I had completely forgot running the stretch down to, then over, the bridge that crosses above the falls, but then I remembered it: what the creek looked like, seeing some people (one of them, the man with the cough) as I crossed, but then not seeing them, and then seeing them again near the closed gate.

before the run

Last night, I started reading JJJJJerome’s Aster of Ceremonies, which I bought in october of 2023 and hadn’t read yet. Wow! Here’s a bit I’d like to take with me on my run:

What is the wound
reopening during the stutter?
How does it relate
to Morrison’s flooding? When
the Mississippi returns
to its former contours,
does the suture
we created by straightening
it open?
(Octagon of Water, Movement 2/JJJJJerome Ellis)

Last week, I was just writing about how the natural shape of the Mississippi River in the gorge is long gone, reshaped by the city and the Army Corps. After my run, I’ll read Toni Morrison’s essay to which Ellis refers.

added a few hours later: I tracked down the quotation that Ellis puts in a footnote for this poem from Toni Morrison in The Site of Memory (1995, 99):

You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory – what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.” Along with personal recollection, the matrix of the work I do is the wish to extend, fill in and complement slave autobiographical narratives. But only the matrix. What comes of all that is dictated by other concerns, not least among them the novel’s own integrity. Still, like water, I remember where I was before I was “straightened out.”

The Site of Memory/ Toni Morrison

So good! I’m excited to think about these ideas some more and figure out my relationship to flooding and being straightened out and rivers before and after Minneapolis and the Army Corps of Engineers “fixed” them.

Thinking about Ellis’ stutter in relation to my vision problems. In some ways, I have a visual stutter — there’s a long pause between looking at something and actually seeing it. I need time for things to make sense. Also, images stutter, shake, fizz, are always moving, never still or sharp or clear.

remember/forget

1 — will

the differences between what we notice and try to remember and what we ignore or try to forget (16 april 2024)

2 — memory

When I heard the line, Seems like we’re livin’ in a memory, I thought about how I mostly can’t see people’s faces clearly and that I’ve either learned to tune it out and speak/look into the void, or I just fill in the smudge with the memory of their face. I’m used to it, and often forget I’m doing it until suddenly I wonder as I stare at the blob, am I looking in the right place, into their eyes, or am I staring at their chin? I don’t care, but I imagine the other person might, so I try to find their eyes again (9 may 2024).

In jan of 2024, I’m thinking about the daily, mundane bodily functions that we forget we’re doing, or don’t notice — what’s the difference between not noticing and forgetting here? I’m also thinking about this idea of memory and its relationship to the real. When is remembering “only a memory” and when can the act of remembering keep something real? Can we understand remembering as more than thinking about things from the past? What about remembering what is present, here still, real, connected to us?

3 — pay attention, be astonished, tell about it

Thinking more about the difference between noticing and remembering, I’m thinking about the different acts involved here. Yes, it is inspired by Mary Oliver’s instructions for living a life! First, we notice, then we are open to feeling something about what we noticed, then we put that noticing and our feelings into words. For my practice, I don’t try to remember to notice or to be astonished, they just happen — at least, that’s the goal. Remembering comes in when I try to put my attention and astonishment into words. So, the connection between writing and remembering.

4 — writing to remember

I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.

Field Notes slogan

Many different directions I could go with this idea of remembering and writing, but I like this idea of the act of writing about something as the remembering. I rarely look back at my (Field Notes brand) Plague Notebooks when I’m finished with them; it’s the act of writing in them that helps me remember what I noticed or was thinking about. This method is approximate and doesn’t work all of the time. In my practice, I use the act of making a list on my log of 10 things I noticed as the moment of remembering what I didn’t even realize I noticed. But, unlike my plague notebooks, I do return to my log to read past entries and remember what I wrote before — in at least 3 ways: my monthly challenge pages in which I review and summarize what I did in relation to my theme each month; my “on this day” morning reviews, in which I reread past entries from that day in different years; and my annual summary, month-by-month of my log entries.

5 — forget the body

I like my body when I’m in the woods
and I forget my body. I forget that arms,
that legs, that nose. I forget that waist,

that nerve, that skin. And I aspen. I mountain.
I river. I stone. I leaf. I path. I flower.
(Yes, That’s When/Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer)

dec 8/RUN

6.1 miles
hidden falls loop
36 degrees

Wow, what a great morning for a run! All the snow has melted so the paths were clear and I don’t remember much wind. I felt strong and relaxed and grateful to be outside when everything is bare and brown and open. And that river! Half frozen with a thin layer of ice, half open with shiny, dark water. I stopped at the overlook on the ford bridge and stared down at it, admiring the variations of gray and the feeling of air and nothingness — barren, vast, other-worldly.

10 Things

  1. the sound of a kid either laughing when his voice bounced as he went over something bumpy or crying so hard that his voice was breaking — heard, not seen
  2. several runners in bright yellow shirts
  3. two runners in white jackets
  4. some kids laughing and yelling near the skate park just past the ford bridge, again heard, not seen
  5. the view of the valley between ford and hidden falls — bare tree branches, then endless air, then the other side
  6. a blue port-a-potty with the door ajar
  7. the sound of water rushing over concrete at the locks and dam no. 1
  8. a lone goose honking somewhere near the oak savanna
  9. the contrast of wispy, dark branches against the light gray sky
  10. the river — no color, some shiny, some dulled by ice

an attempt to track my train of thought

I’m working on another section of my Haunts poem (which might need a different name as I stray away from ghosts). Before my run, I was thinking about being tender and erosion and H.W.S Cleveland (Horace William Shaler) as envisioning the grand rounds and the gorge as art. Before I headed out, I gave myself a task for during the run: to think about and look for examples of erosion and how it fits in with my idea that art is about making us feel things deeply (feeling tender). This task was inspired by this section in my poem:

his pitch for parkways
was about making space
for beauty and for
feeling things deeply —
he wanted to turn
this place into art.
Grass and benches and
trees to frame open
sky and the stone that
holds a river and
all who seek it. But
up here exposed on
the bluff, it is not
only the view that
makes the girl tender.
Wind, sun, frigid air,
the effort it takes
to keep moving, a
slow wearing down of
cone cells, smooth out her
edges, peel away
her layers, create
cracks that start small then
spread.

During my run, I stopped to record three ideas into my phone:

One: I thought about the cracks and the idea of being split open and how this splitting open was not a wound that needed to be patched but something else.

Two: I can’t quite remember how I continued to think about this idea of the wound and breaking open but I do remember suddenly thinking about eroding shorelines and bluffs and how cracks and a wearing away can be harmful. At first I wanted to make a clear distinction between the erosion I was writing about, and the tenderness it allowed for, but then I realized, just before reaching the ford bridge on my way back from hidden falls, that tenderness and feeling things deeply and art as inspiring this is both wound and that something else I can’t quite name. I spoke into my phone:

Beauty as not always pretty, sometimes ugly. Art as wonder and amazement, terror and pain.

I think I was remembering some lines from a podcast episode for Off the Shelf with Dorothy Lasky, as I mentioned terror.

I don’t think beautiful things are innocent, I guess, sadly. I mean, I don’t know what “innocent” means also, but yeah, I think beautiful things are holy, and I think that those things can be awful. I guess it’s like the sublime, and those things which we have awe about is what beauty is. And I don’t think it’s always kind, sadly. You know, I wish it were. It can be, but I don’t think that’s what is really there. It overwhelms. So, it is terrifying by its nature. Like, real beauty should make you terrified.

Good for the World

Three: By the time I had crossed the ford bridge, I had another thought about erosion and my diseased eyes:

My cone cells eroding is this slow softening, but at some point, most likely, there’s going to be a break — an abrupt break [when the few remaining cone cells in my central vision die, when I won’t be able to read or rely on my central vision at all]. And that is how the gorge works. It’s the slow softening of sandstone until limestone breaks off.

Yes! This is a helpful way for me to connect the gorge with my vision. I’m not sure that this third thing fits into this section of the poem, but I will use it somewhere!

posted an hour later: I can’t believe it, but after searching through the archive of this log, I realized that I have never posted this beautiful, tender poem by Mary Oliver:

Lead/ Mary Oliver

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing.,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.