Moments. Minutes. Hours. Months. Years. Pace. Linear, circular, looping. Dragging. Flying. Seasons. Beats — foot strikes, heart rate. Inside Outside On the Edge of. Too much. Too little. Before During After a mother’s death. Wasting. Lost in, out of. Ordinary and routine, extraordinary and eternal.
No Clocks
During the run I listened to the latest “Nobody Asked Us with Des and Kara.” They were talking about recent races, super shoes, fast times, and the future of track. Reflecting on how world records keep being broken Kara asked Des: “What do you think would happen if they took away the clock? Would the race still be exciting?” Des thought it could be, while my mind started wandering. First thinking about how I’ve been trying to forget the clock/watch and not care about pace — mostly, I’ve been successful. Second thinking about Clocks and how I’ve collected some lines (from poems and essays) about the clock, or what Mary Oliver calls it:
The clock! That twelve-figured moon skull, that white spider belly! How serenely the hands move with their filigree pointers, and how steadily! Twelve hours, and twelve hours, and begin again! Eat, speak, sleep, cross a street, wash a dish! The clock is still ticking. All its vistas are just so broad–are regular. (Notice that word.) Every day, twelve little bins in which to order disorderly life, and even more disorderly though. The town’s clock cries out, and the face on every wrist hums or shines; the world keeps pace with itself. Another day is passing, a regular and ordinary day. (Notice that word also.)Upstream/ Mary Oliver
Rate/Pace
pace definitions (from Merriam Webster)
- rate of movement, the runner’s pace, especially : an established rate of locomotionrate of progress
- specifically : parallel rate of growth or development, supplies kept pace with demand
- rate of performance or delivery : TEMPO, a steady pace, on pace to set a record, especially : SPEED
- rhythmic animation : FLUENCY
- a manner of walking : TREAD
- any of various units of distance based on the length of a human step
- GAIT, especially : a fast 2-beat gait (as of the horse) in which the legs move in lateral pairs and support the animal alternately on the right and left legs
- verb: paced; pacing — to walk with often slow or measured tread, to move along : PROCEED, to go at a pace —used especially of a horse
- to measure by pacing —often used with off: paced off a 10-yard penalty
- to cover at a walk — could hear him pacing the floor
- to establish a moderate or steady pace for (oneself)
- to keep pace with
my new pace: rhythm
I sink in
to a
rhythm: 3
then 2
First counting
foot strikes
then chanting
small prayers.
I beat out
meaning
until what’s
left are
syllables,
then sounds,
then something
new, or
old returned.
My rhythm for breathing, running, and writing. . .and for possessing favorite lines:
from “Practice”/ Ellen Bryant Voight
original:
at night in order to weep, to wait
for the whisker on the face of the clock
to twitch again, moving
the dumb day forward—
mine, in 3/2 rhythm:
wait for the
whisker
on the clock’s
face to
twitch again
to move
the dumb day
forward.
original:
if I came back as a bird
I’d remember that—
mine: 3/2
You — when I
come back
as a bird
will I
remember?
my new pace: a ghost, haunting the trails, inhabiting and possessing words and worlds
Capitalist Time
Was talking with two of the other clarinet players in band last night about the Calgon, take me away! commercial. Neither of them had heard of it; they’re Millennials. Does a Calgon, take me away, moment disrupt or resist or challenge capitalist time or reinforce it, or both?
Ross Gay and stopping capitalist time: from 29 march 2023
you, too, might’ve been praying for a way to stop the march of so-called time, and poems, sometimes, might do that. Poems are made of lines, which are actually breaths, and so the poem’s rhythms, its time, is at the scale and pace and tempo of the body, the tempo of our bodies lit with our dying. And poems are communicated, ultimately, body to body, voice to ear, heart to heart.9 Even if those hearts are not next to one another, in space or time. It makes them so. All of which is to say a poem might bring time back to its bodily, its earthly proportions. Poetry might make nothing happen. Inside of which anything can happen, maybe most dangerously, our actual fealties, our actual devotions and obligations, which is to the most rambunctious, mongrel, inconceivable assemblage of each other we could imagine.
Gay’s explicit connection to time and against capitalism resonates deeply for me. Stop those clocks, those planes, that machinery we’re using to destroy the planet, the future.
Hesitate/Stutter/Pause
ED’s new grammar of 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.My Emily Dickinson
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.
Hesitant
humble —
When the big clock at the train station stopped,
the leaves kept falling,
the trains kept running,
my mother’s hair kept growing longer and blacker,
and my father’s body kept filling up with time.
(Big Clock/ Li-Young Lee)
Relationships with Time
That loneliness is just an ongoing
Relationship with time.
(Lake of the Isles/ Anni Liu)
Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.
(Let it be Forgotten/ Sara Teasdale)
Time, Made Visible
Mosses, I think, are like time made visible. They create a kind of botanical forgetting. Shoot by tiny shoot, the past is obscured in green. That’s why we have stories, so we can remember.
The mosses remember that this is not the first time the glaciers have melted. If time is a line, as western thinking presumes, we might think this is a unique moment for which we have to devise a solution that enables that line to continue. If time is a circle, as the Indigenous worldview presumes, the knowledge we need is already within the circle; we just have to remember it to find it again and let it teach us. That’s where the storytellers come in.
(Ancient Green/ Robin Wall Kimmerer)
IN THE ANISHINAABE languages of Skywoman, our words for moss, aasaakamig and aasaakamek, carry the meaning “those ones who cover the earth.” Soft, moist, protective, they turn time into life, covering the transient and softening the transition to another state.
(Ancient Green/ Robin Wall Kimmerer)
cycles, seasons, loops
Time is a circle reminded me of the tracking of the “wheeling life” that I did while running last year. I was inspired by Forrest Gander’s poem “Circumambulation of Mount Tamalpas”:
maculas of light fallen weightless from
pores in the canopy our senses
part of the wheeling life around us and through
an undergrowth stoked with the unseen
go the reverberations of our steps
the wheeling life: 10 things
- car wheels, near the road — relentless, too fast, noisy
- car wheels, below, on the winchell trail — a gentle hum, quiet, distant
- bike wheels, approaching from behind very slowly — a little kid biking to school with his mom who had a carrier with another kid behind her seat
- bike wheels, nearby, another kid and adult on the way to school
- the wheel of life as a loop: a favorite route, running south, looping back north, first on edmund, then on the winchell trail
- the wheel of life as transformation: red leaves decorate a tree halfway to the river
- the wheel of life as cycles: not the end of the year, but the beginning — school time: kids at the elementary school
- the wheel of life as constant motion: on the trail, below the road and above the river, everything is active: birds calling, squirrels rustling, wheels traveling, river flowing, feet moving, leaves and lungs breathing
- the wheels of life as cycle: always in late september, hot and humid and too sunny
- the wheels of life as transformation: thinning leaves, falling acorns, a small view of the river