feb 25, 2017/ 5 miles / 34 degrees
Many of my entries mention running as a way to deal with difficult mornings — mostly trying to get my daughter to go to school. Such a hard time! Now that it’s better — mostly because she’s older and I’ve let her figure out how to handle her lateness on her own — I wonder how endured this time. I’m still recovering.
A nice, fast (er/ish) run of 4 miles. Felt good as a way to get rid of some frustration caused by my 10, almost 11, year old daughter.
feb 25, 2019 / 3.3 miles / 0 degrees, feels like -11
Every so often, when I reach the entrance to the river road trail at 35th, I think about this image:
Reached the river road and encountered something strange: the path, right at the entrance, was covered in black, smoky snow and jagged black ice–like something had made the snow quickly melt then reform. Must have been some sort of fire–what happened?
feb 25, 2020 / 3.3 miles / 40 degrees
Tick tock tick tock. People are already dying, but they don’t know why. We have heard of some strange sickness spreading in China. It’s coming. So strange to read these entries and know what is almost here.
Another cycle of melting in the afternoon, re-freezing at night, frozen in the morning, melting in the afternoon. This sort of ice, just barely frozen, is the slickest and most dangerous.
This cycle of freeze melt re-freeze often happens in this winter. Not in 2024 — hardly any snow this year. Less than a foot total? And by the time it did snow (6 inches), the ground was warm enough so it didn’t last.
This poem was a big inspiration for my mood ring poems:
And here’s something for more exploration. Maybe I should do a month on houses?
I’d like to put this poem (A Skull) and the idea of the skull as a house beside the two other poems with houses that I posted on feb 22.
feb 25, 2022 / 3.5 miles / 17 degrees / 100% snow-covered
Reviewing this answer I suddenly thought: I’d like to play around with this idea of the memory palace in terms of the gorge! Turn it into a poem? A series of poems? A reflection memory and remembering and not forgetting and learning to rely on visual memories when I can’t see the real thing. Lots potential, I think. Here’s a resource: How to Build a Memory Palace
I found a great article, “Running, Thinking, and Writing.” Here’s a question that was asked to some writers who run, and their answers:
Do you have trouble remembering your creative ideas after you have finished your workout? If so, any strategies?
Epstein: “I have a ton of trouble remembering the ideas I come up with while running. Sometimes I’ll tell myself, ‘I must remember this,’ and then five minutes later it’s totally gone. So I’ve taken to doing my own modified version of a memory palace where I make a little story that contains the cues that will remind me. Occasionally I’ve made notes in my phone’s memo app.”
feb 25, 2023/ 3.1 miles / ywca track
I want to remember and return to ED’s grammar of hesitation:
My Emily Dickinson, part two
a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation
Emily Dickinson took the scraps from the separate “higher” female education many bright women of her time were increasingly resenting, combined them with voracious and “unladylike” outside reading, and used the combination. She built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on inteIlectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse, backward through history into aboriginal anagogy. Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology from alien territory, a “sheltered” woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to stick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking. “He may pause but he must not hesitate”-Ruskin. Hesitation circled back and surrounded everyone in that confident age of aggressive industrial expansion and brutal Empire building. Hesitation and Separation. The Civil War had split American in two. He might pause, She hesitated. Sexual, racial, and geographical separation are at the heart of Definition.
Here’s something I wrote about this passage on March 17, 2021:
I really like this idea of hesitation and humility and aboriginal anagogy as a sharp contrast to progress, aggression, confidence/hubris, and time as always moving forwards (teleology). I tried to find a source that could explain exactly what Howe means by aboriginal anagogy but I couldn’t. I discovered that anagogy means mystical or a deeper religious sense and so, when I connect it to aboriginal, I’m thinking that she means that ED imbues pre-Industrial times (pre Progress!, where progress means trains and machines and cities and Empires and factories and plantations and the enslavement of groups of people and the increased mechanization of time and bodies and meaning and, importantly, grammar) with the sacred. Is that right? Is it clear what I’m saying?
A few paragraphs later, Howe writes this about ED’s grammar of “hesitation and humility”:
Naked sensibilities at the extremest periphery. Narrative expanding contracting dissolving. Nearer to know less before afterward schism in sum. No hierarchy, no notion of polarity. Perception of an object means loosing and losing it. …Trust absence, allegory, mystery–the setting not the rising sun is Beauty. No outside editor/”robber.” Conventional punctuation was abolished not to add “soigne stitchery” but to subtract arbitrary authority. Dashes drew liberty of interruption inside the structure of each poem. Hush of hesitation for breath and for breathing….only Mutability certain.
Some of this is starting to make sense. The periphery, the dashes as hesitation, mystery. I was curious about her take on sunsets over sunrises so I googled it and found this ED poem and helpful account from the Prowling Bee (love her!). She includes a list of ED’s sunset poems.
Howe ends Part One with one more description of ED’s hesitation and humility:
Forcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtraction, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, she pulled text from text (29).