gator trail 50k-- prelude and fugue, book one.

Haydn string quartet cycle, opus 33. sketching between pushups (with kyote climbing across my head) trying to keep ideas and images in pre-thought state, pure and instinctual, impulse-driven:  unjudged (unfiltered). but a simple act of expression seems an impossibility. . . judging the image-in-process is denying the image. moving on.

i've decided that tomorrow's ultra is like dropping acid: its going to be long, its going to be strange, and I may see some shit that isn't there. My body will ache and it will suddenly not ache. I will want to push and I will want to drop back. I will want it to be over. I will have little option but to finish. Interaction with others will be kept to a minimum afterwards to think things over. I may have to remind myself that this is not a permanent state, nor is it a natural state of being. And the mind may fold back on itself to reveal interesting things.

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trying to figure out how to eat a banana at mile ~18

Well the Gator Trail Run 50k slung me into the guts of Lake Waccamaw for five 6.2 mile loops, composed of four miles circulating into a two mile out-and-back, and it passed with strength and endurance. A pace of eight-fifty minute miles felt smooth and perpetual for a solid 4h 33 mins on the trail, landing the fifth position. I ran with a talented runner named Mark and he glided through the pace with wholesome encouragement. My body ran well, my mind juke boxed random excerpts of marley and velvet underground, and I had no poetic thoughts or spiritual insights other than driving forward, a purely physical event.

before as gathering gear.

I will write more later but now I must waddle into work.  

The starkness of a thing. . . doppler effect of mileage.

Running carolina beach state park with sugarloaf dune draped in saint-white sand and the new silk of spiders, the flitter-rustle of finches and the muffled footfalls of pineneedled trails at an unpushed pace of about nine minutes, easy & pleasant movement in the Spring sun while vicious cross-currents of the cape fear push against coast in quickspill sapphires and salt-foam. . . glassy black brine and the carpet of jade moss gives rise to dwarfed crags with thick fans of woody moss, the wicked arms of live oaks, the vertical launches of pine and long-leaf. . . the sum of the experience moves beyond roots and rocks, dredging sand, moves beyond the seven miles to the 31 miles in four days on similar terrain, and I am reminded of the difficulty of the goal and anxiety builds like doppler effect as the ultramarathon approaches, getting louder and overwhelming and then a pulse becomes a constant roar abruptly diminishing and dropping to a faint bass-pulse somewhere far away. . . but the run is sound, my fitness remains okay through gum surgery four weeks ago followed by intestinal poisoning, and a nine minute pace feels perpetual and pleasant for the moment. spoon's “everything hits at once” cycles with current image-ideas and the landscape of carolina beach puts me head-on into pollock's blue poles and I pause into the painting, relayer it as it was painted, seeing pollock's angst pouring paint on and throwing those rough-planed boards across the flat-laid canvas with barely a touch of rabbit skin glue and just starting in, thrusting against the deep pthalo blue house paint like a jazz artist would a new melody suddenly clear, seeing the rhythm and starting to jam, calligraphy in air above the canvas duck, earth and hay and stirsticks and fingers and bottle caps all building into a cohesive surface. . . blue poles, a fine image to get entangled in thoughts of leg-labors kicking the final kilometer, enjoying new spring growth & glad to be part of the fantastic world, glad to be running, grateful.

a literary run and a splash quite unnoticed.

brueghel's depiction of the fall of icarus is anonymous & tragic, nearly private and asinine.  wcw's poem launches from this image and it was his language which kept passing through my mind as I ran poplar grove plantation.  I was doubting my fitness for the 50k and thinking that my icarus may land in lake waccamaw and then began debating whether icarus's final descent occurred in an intercoastal salt marsh, a reservoir, a lake.  Of course icarus is everyman and the water-tomb is symbolic 'cause its a sad clown-fate that awaits all ambition but you just keep legging on and looking and thinking and trying to capture something lucid and glowing and bright, trying to abate the private clownface brutality, trying to ignore the tightrope absurdity ferlinghetti spoke of.  Another level of endurance we must constantly endure.

meanwhile spring brought a red-headed woodpecker of fair size with a white ring around his neck, a brilliant bluejay chasing a slightly dulled female, many cadmium red cardinals and huge squirrels.  turtles were crowding a log in the middle of the lake, basking easy.

rumi came to mind, his name laden with associations like cole barker and unc and the moment the book was given to me and the passions of poverty and the ascetic's joy.  there were no lyrics, only a moment of admiration for his ecstasy, his psalms, the idea of the poem-psalm, a holy song of the everyday.

pictures are winter light in january, a false representation of today.

A pause in the breath, a break in the stride...on second thought.

less than two weeks until the gator trail 50k.

Meanwhile the past week has been a physical disaster and my body remains slumped, choked, uncertain. It began with thai take-out, green curry with eggplant, bamboo, tofu, to be followed by 48 hours of misery, my body folded horrendously into itself, an internal meatmash out of a sinclair novel. . .the running rhythm collapsed and my 50 mile week decayed to a 17 mile week with my longest run being a struggling eight miler on Sunday (where I learned that I do not like body-warmed strawberry-banana gu gels). I am left with one more week-long cycle of running and a three day ween before my first 50k will spin its own organic experience, a free-form narrative finding its own pace and tone and extemporaneous momentum. . . the layers of self will be pulled back to some raw core where paint and language and trail and solitude and music will fall away into a pure act, an act perhaps approaching ascetic in its surrender for a brief moment. . . a passage of satori at mile 27 would be nice.

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completing any path of any distance is ultimately putting one foot in front of the other and breathing and having patience and the guts, pushing the mind-- pushing the legs...feet grinding out bones and blisters across the increments of space. Covering miles requires an actionable faith with multiple layers of belief and drive, the ability to push through physical burnouts, to endure the emotional upheavals, to fuel an engine of physical mantras. It's the drive to complete something no matter how anonymous and strange and personal. . . running a 31 mile circuit on a trail in the middle of the woods is an abstract art and few others will give any attention to this spiritual/physical/mental work; long-distance running is not a universal goal.  But this is my experience and its culmination, a distinct passage in my life fugue.  Running is my time of recreation, a time to reclaim, my time to Re-Create. Its a binge, its a purge, a tribal sundance, a sweat lodge.  A run as in Life. Putting one foot in front of the other and following through, into the nexus and the core, into a continuum, into an actionable faith and self-reliance.

Darren Mulvenna's Upcoming Show at Brunswick Community College.

Darren Mulvenna will be showing his recent paintings in the Dean's Gallery at Brunswick Community College.  The opening reception will be 5pm until 6pm on Wednesday March 16th.

Mulvenna's work embraces the patterns of Nature both in subject matter and in the development of his paintings.  Layers of paint and imagery emerge and recede, darken, glow from within, intensify, push and fade; the process searches out harmony in the environment, seeks to distill a rhythm in visual essence.  The paintings seem to exist comfortably in their frames, content & still, before pulsing back out with something new.  Environments are familiar despite the disconnect from common appearance, his surreal landscapes being slightly abstracted (maybe skewed is a better word), moving and dancing like dream-images following a hike in the woods.  One recognizes immediately the living scenes, a bather swimming in an ebbing aquatic light, a female torso rapt in a transcendent light, a classical dancer juxtaposed in a brackish chiaroscuro.  Mulvenna's saturation of life, his vivacity, is cathartic in the vibrant palette and the easy imagery, his figures flying playfully across lush fields and schools of fish languidly pushed in current through a diptych.

Mulvenna's work is life affirming.  One can see his own efforts in connecting to Nature, in finding his place within the complex weave of things, and then transcribing that marvel into these paintings.  His work honestly derives from an artist searching for something that is universal and relate-able, and it does so with glimpses of beauty that elevate the viewer for a fine moment.

the rhyme of contrasts. . . . an inchoate ramble, a run in sand.

The rhyme of contrasts, the balance of paradox. 

(random thoughts of Howard Finster, painter-preacher.)

nc museum of art, the grand glass doors framed by polished bars of steel, arriving with apprehensions against the funky-lego rigidity of the post-renovation building, now counteracted by a trail wrapping the rolling raleigh landscape, the massive sculpted coils on top of a hill, rodin's le penseur with clinched bronzed toes.  inside were the greco-roman statues, beat and aged, marble torsos of grandiosity. renaissance imagery, the usual ascending christs and compassionate marys and serene martyrs, interesting for a glance. . . the nineteenth century european painters, their street scenes and plein air peintures, still lives of meat markets and aristocratic patrons, their mythologies of body.  the american painters, o'keefe to wyeth with some damned fine american landscapes. . . the impressionists, the impressionists. . . into the modern now, what i consider the relate-able, giacometti, richter, a room full of mid-scale rodins (iris, burghers, balzac, ugolino, etc) and a garden with heroic-scale works (meditation, shades). . . . salle, scully, liu, motherwell, a perfect kline. . . a furious landscape by a nc painter gayle lowry. . . ultimately the nc museum of art hosts a damned fine art collection, is a good day trip, and after moving the mind you can move the body on the easy nature trail of the museum park.

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arrived stagnant, tired, but left with energy, momentum, craving a new image-repertoire, craving to push a new pictorial vocabulary into paint-heavy canvas.
looking, collecting image-scraps, extending my visual vocabulary beyond michelangelo, the ny painters, the post-war german painters (some of my personal favorites and thus aesthetic ruts). art realigns the paradigm, invigorates the psyche, inspires cross-referencing across time and geographic impossibility, denies cultural polarities, pursues a continuum in the annals of creative energy, scripts connections against disparateness, balances the paradox of things, conjoins the sacred and the vulgar.  this is my perpetual essay: the myth of synergy, of the ephemeral, of the holistic in creative work.  a nexus, a fusion of experience and expression, mind body spirit. art resides as an exacting and necessary presence in all layers of the collective unconsciousness, a core of the experience of the eternal mortality.
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kline motherwell mitchell de kooning pollock twombly and the postwar german painters, beuys and polke, kippenberger, baselitz, grosz, hesse, auerbach, richter. . . . freud and rauschenberg and bacon, schnabel.  rembrandt rubens carravaggio michelangelo titian. . . . the power of rodin, a room of rodin casts. . . . eternal brutal humanity, cut in clay, hatched in paint, craving.
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millet in mind while running sand, the toil of foot-falls as digging slow miles across carolina beach state park, running steep sand mountains beyond sugarloaf on unmarked trails and into sunny point perimeter where pulling back into trails barely marked by deer, dogs, squirrels. . . . the push of isolated miles on a saturday morning, wife and baby three hours northwest and full sun in march wonderland of easy time.  
millet and the honesty of work, of harvest, of seed.  my body reels easy breath across vast stretches of sand and i feel a clarity of mind, a soundness of belief, a push of body which is mine and strong.

Run for Ray Trail Half-Marathon, 2011.

February 28th, dernier jour du mois. . . . hoooowwweeee!

Line up before HM/10k. the strangeness of the trail runner.

Run for Ray 2011 passed in ideal weather Saturday morning at Brunswick Nature Park with 230 runners kicking across the optioned distances of 3m, 6m and 13m. Folks paced and sprinted the dirt roads beneath the full sun, dogs pushed paws into dirt, and families greeted arriving families.  A map showed two loops across the trail-system with two dirt road out-and-backs for the HM distance, 70% being on raw trails, coiled and switch-backing through woods alongside Town Creek on pine-needled single-track, fast footing interspersed with some rough & technical patches, a varied trail to work through, as well as some quad-bashing incline/decline areas.  Coffee and bananas, a timing mat for B-tagged number bibs, a fine payne's gray shirt with a print of Ray Underhill popping a backside air (complete with rail sliders), and friendly exchanges preceded the line-up horn. Serious runners with pioneer builds and appalachian beards in shirts reading Uwharrie 40 miler and Umstead trail marathon flashed smiles, were jovial and kind, a good field of local trail talent. Directions were given, the countdown, and the galloping beat down the dirt road.  The mad pace of the front runners jammed out as I boosted through the first out-and-back, before the single track, trying to buffer my midpack position, to be unforced in pace.  At the trail head we fell into the pines and followed the serpentine wind through about three miles of woods, crossed the road (by a nice kayak launch) where the trail is kinked and slower, about 1.5 miles and then a short dig to hit another entrance onto a new trail which ran 1.5 miles and then poured out against the second out-and-back.   My early push was punishing my legs, acidic cement in calves and quads and my calories were low, but the woods were wonderful and the volunteers were encouraging.  At one point I was head-singing (to the faint tune of an 80's song) “when the quad detaches from the bone.”  I passed through the first loop, saw ky and the wife, and kept up the effort for the repeated loop.

mid-point with finish chute to right.  My wife:  "you looked a little rougher than i would've expected."

The race was a fast one with a front pack battle driving the winner to a 6m 22s pace, 40 seconds faster than last year.  My time was 1h 43min, a 7m 48s min/mile, which beat last years time by about 30 secs/mile.  My position in the field of 47dropped to19th from last year's 17th. An encouraging improvement, though I could've done better with more patience in the opening sprint.  Ray Underhill decks were the trophies for top three finishers per race, and the organizers mingled and sought feedback for next year's run, throwing ideas for longer distances on these trails soon.  Very exciting prospects, and they get this race tightened down better every year.  My wife drove my wobbly body home and made pastas and coffee and let me move slowly with blisters like a fleshy mudslide on the balls of my forefeet before work at 3h30pm.

thoughts of twombly on trail. . .

twombly's paintings move like ancient graffiti, jungian scribble, the blurred collective unconscious to reference the historic ruins of rome, prague, chichen-itzy, jordan. . . to reference gardens, incinerated homes, auschwitz or sommes or pompei, glimpsing Socrates, sexual energies, entropy, earth. . . a nonlinear narrative told in spare forms and private marks, an enigmatic language of characters bearing embedded meaning, associations. . . twombly makes paint and the act of painting envelope a moment's essence, makes mark an embodiment of instinct, a physical impulse, and the energy of that mark is the signifier, the key, the universal register.  (See Turner, Pollock, Motherwell, Beuys.)  twombly is the erotic and the sacred and the faith within the painter's work.  Within the painter's work. . . the painter's Work. Faith.

i say twombly is the blur of the woods in a fast pace, mind reeling mosaic thought, st. paul & foucault & derrida, the multi-layered mindscape as pushing strides in miles, milling it out. . . poetry of movement & mind in rhythm with body, to find external awareness in internal struggle, clarity in imbroglio, finding language in noise. duchamp knew that the finest art was a chess game with a fabulously naked woman in a montparnesse cafe.  art is a nineteen mile run with s. sunday morning, down to dawn via airlie road & wrightsville beach, mind cycling the emptiness and fullness of the work, the alternating psyche that correlates to an act. . . transcendence, the freedom to exude and celebrate.  the faith to run or be still.

Art is the invigoration of perspective, art is the reminder to Look, art is the education and refinement of visual thought.