Run & Paint

Monday, July 12, 2010

lung distance logs. . . .

I.  july 12th. monday, just before 9am and kyote is already napping. shostakovich’s sixth string quartet snakes from the workroom where the onkyo is situated. waking morning brought thoughts of the distant past, other lives passed really; working at la cava ristorante, serving the ornate, artful Christmas feasts, food so rich and gorgeous, spreads & banquets unlike anything I’d ever seen/ tasted before. . . . cooking at rookwood, painting in a garage studio, drinking and sexing and generally epicurean-bacchusilian mad for the essence of life. nauseous tequila pillows and brutal warmbeer dawns. . . . sleepless and tragic, narcotic and frenzied, delirious with Buddhist mindstorms, yet painting as hard as I could, painting voraciously in fact and with a practiced coordination now difficult to realize, impossible to replicate. chasing dope in empty sunday morning backstreets, decayed mind and oyster-shell eyes. books and beers; god and dope.  within my own religious beliefs, i was a devout, orthodox saint.

I recognize now the division of Self, the mental bifurcation of myself:

a. the field of ideas and images and Passions related to drugmad selfless (somehow pure) days of addled paint-pursuit. the raw anger and sorrow of being human and being young and somewhat intelligent and ambitious. the insatiable yearning to learn and know and capture, to be captivated by Anything, whether cantor’s aleph or rimbaud’s rotting winter, the Russian fields of dead soldiers and gulags, l. freud’s handling of paint and rothko’s weariness and motherwell’s aesthetic ideals, of de kooning’s impoverished thirties in nyc, basqiaut and sartre and stalin and de sade, of hunger and hunger, of algorithms in C language for mathematic functions, of salvation and the lives of various saints and the ascetic’s life paralleling that of many junkies and madmen and schiziophrenics. . . . . the intellectual, emotional, artistic, sexual craving to Experience.
et cetera.
(few things will burn one a need for salvation and redemption as a life of horror and infernal torment. there is no more refined propaganda for the next state of grace than the previous state of boschian terror. . . . illustration of the myth of the conversion of saul => paul.)



b. then there is the other aspect, the current paradigm, the more compartmentalized existence. parental foresight & protective awareness, measured responses, measured emotions. . . anarchy is replaced by gravity and composed environment. the destruction of the body becomes not admixtures of chemicals but long runs, pushing one’s endurance, the sleeplessness of parenthood, the burning eyes of study against sleep. the release of ecstasy is tender and sublime, cautious and savored, rather than explosive and rapacious and raging. . . . although elements of angst remain, one walks more Aware through the day, less guerilla encounters and private rebellions & revolutions than the yogi walking still-faced across embered coals. there is the quiet, gracious, equanimous suffering of the mature. beauty is subtle and almost private. and this existence is also pure and suffering, if deeper and more tender. grief and happiness; nurtured growth rather than looted gain?


riotous and raw. to be sober divorces me from the mindpursuits and harvests of those years in group a. no real crossover but music and torndown body. . . . not that one must manufacture inspiration and passion, but drugs & drink certainly cover the need to suffer that one craves salvation and highest Grace. to drink one’s self into sainthood, or at least into artistic creation, is really an ephemeral notion, while preserving the body with health and sanitary acts is as earthbound as a farm.

moving on. . . . reading now sillitoe’s saturday night and sunday morning. finished cat’s cradle, vonnegut. spain won in a brilliant final world cup game y’day. a suspended 120 minutes of work for those elite athletes.

runs are back in a zone. y’day was a strong six miler at the beach, a cooling breeze counteracted the direct sun as footfalls circled the coast and summer rest trail, uncrowded with few others out and about. the run’s focus was a strictly physical act, meditative in the sense of pilates being a meditation. not transcendental or whirling dervishes, but the patterns of muscular movement felt, breath in lungs sizzling out through burns in quads and calves and heels rolling onto the kick of toes and the eyes pushing into grass and sky and sand, hips roll rhythmic and the back poised and straight, and constant dropping of shoulders. . . . last weeks total was 22 miles, 24 m for the month of july, 630 miles for the year. the new week puts me in line for 25 miles, and a clearing of 650 miles. . . . no anton, but a proud effort and a necessary expenditure.

y'days mantra: lung distance logs. . . . a bit abstract.

II.
how we relive the furious energies of history—we are acculumations of earth’s narrative energies. . . . God’s transformative organic state. . . .