Run & Paint

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

swamp run, mindswamp, body as the sag of soaked fabric.

A fragmented fourteen began in mist-grayed morning before 7am to push outta our neighborhood towards wrightsville beach and a fast start felt strong and feet beat smooth at 7.2 minute miles and the empty streets were colorless in the fog-swallowing-the-sun flatness but the pace was strong and the lungs pushed the first four miles at 7m12secs, unforced & easy, then the sunheat started pouring on the shoulders, torso slumping beneath humid pulse, the wetheat starting in and by mile five I stalled at the dreaded intersection of eastwood/ military cutoff, heaved thick sauna-breath, but there was little traffic so I kicked off coughing, breathless, heavy but determined across the bridge, that green metal jawbone overlooking the painterly ICW, a fresh breeze beneath now blazing sun, but soon I felt the gravity of heat and exertion and I felt a succumbing apathy to the act of running, the weight of muscle dragging bone, so pulling into the WB park was none-too-soon of a thing. After a pit stop I joined the other joggers and walkers to the beach where I remembered how nice it was to live at the coast, a moment of gratitude before turning into the sun and starting back up the sand to mercer's pier where I would hit the turnaround point, push my body in snagged pacing and passages of walking and waterless dread through the unscenic church traffic to a joyful goal of Home. (Fourteen like a russian lyricist performing wagner.)

Friday, May 20, 2011

fracture, continuum and impulse withheld.

i.

Her eyes were wolflike, her eyes were aquamarine and howling, her eyes were blue sky behind smoke or fog. her eyes were wolfsex and wolflunge and brimming with crystals that had once pummeled someone toothless and bloody-mouthed. Her eyes were unsplintered rays, diamond light, were yesterday. Were blue like a false sea, a mountain collapsing, were never mine but as myth. Wolf moon with cadmium red figures poised and deliberate. 
Another series of faceless nudes, the sex of caryatids.  
Ink, charcoal, gesso.  On paper.

ii.

Grandfather mountain marathon and 26.2 miles ascending some 3000' called “america's toughest marathon.” that may, unfortunately, be true. More to come.  
Copperhead run on at poplar grove. Exceeded 700 miles for 2011.

iii.

Indistinct images.

on the side of the road is a dead fawn. with close scrutiny, the visual enigma decodes to twisted sheets of brown paper entangling fractured strips of wood. Dead deer averted. Next, old chair deteriorating above wooded shoulder trail becomes stormtwisted treetrunk. Tiredmind blurs & detaches object from reality. The senses, like the mind, like the self, needs distraction and satori and hallucination and lapse.

Monday, May 9, 2011

excerpts of thought.

April 27th. Morning of ny ing marathon lottery begins with six miles at 5h30am.  running in the early dark is an eerie thing, entirely different than running in late dark but still vulnerable and primitive and revitalizing.  raw. an interesting mantra cycle/ chorus of fragments: 
silver scythe cutting spring wheatsky.
Harvest a field of pthalo blue.
Kicks through an empty, echoless world.

May 3rd. Ran nine at brunswick nature park in slow/fast clips hurdling horse-scat and roots and eventually (felt it coming) broke a quick bend to the right as a black snake raced beneath feet off trail and swiftly ascended a net of branch and vine, his climbing form like a heavy black rope pulled in strange jerks through the tangle of growth. Unlike anything i'd ever seen before.

lotus blooms in marshland of bnp


trail shot on bnp with new growth in may.

May 6th. A dozen miles at carolina beach state park with the great punctuation- the pause, build and break of the momentum- being a large deer that surprised me on a bend in the sand-bermed turn. She jammed through the thick of trees as a quick-paced percussion of hoof, her form dissolving immediately behind pines and crag oaks. . . reminded me of running pennsylvania when a huge buck and two doe stood on a gravel farm road in early morning, within twenty feet, a shock of deer when a doe sprang sharply ahead and her hooves where eye-level in effortless power and ee cummings poem 'bout the lithe light deer the fleet flown deer but back to carolina beach on a hot friday morning when I kicked slow and meandering like a heavy thing falling down the trail to be mocked by nature's brutal if not ungentle wit.

Monday, May 2, 2011

on the occasion of the assassination of bin laden.

everyone seems obsessed and maybe a little haunted by bin laden and his death.  his assasination is no attrition or redemption or justice, it is no testament to america's power. it is the end of a cycle of propaganda. bin laden is  by now deified (to use a christian term), declared a righteous martyr, and replaced not by body but by a body of ideals dessminated across a huge sect, a following.  bin laden is a symbol, and a symbol is an abstract and ironic thing. a symbol is only as powerful as the energy asserted by others.  he is a cult of personality.  a plastic thing.  to some he is a folk hero: a trotsky (assasinated), che (assasinated), a siddhartha, a guthrie.  to others he is an embodiment of pure evil.  posters portray a face of terror, display horror and atrocity and murderous contempt.  they neglect his dimensionality as a prodigal son of saudi aristocracy. they neglect what al queda may have done to improve things (if anything, if nothing).  he is no longer a man, he is a Symbol.  and i say leave him a symbol, just a symbol.  a cycle of propaganda. . . an act of war, a brutality, a target. (the language of propaganda is the language of war.  rhetoric.  the war of language.)  the ideals and energy and symbolism of bin laden is a power-narrative pushed against a face now decaying beneath a massive news camp (perhaps it should be broadcast in latin like traditional catholic prayers, or hebrew like judiac readings, perhaps we should display images of schoolhouses destroyed by missiles).  in the end, there is only force and consequence and retalliation.    there is only the abstract notion of who is a terrorist and who is an avenger. and while i do not subscribe to al queda thought nor bin laden's philosophies and means, i am wholly unconvinced that this is a great day in history.  just the end of a cycle of propaganda on which another cycle will begin.  there is no spiritual principal at work here.  
the one good result may be that our military can return home.