Run & Paint

Thursday, February 17, 2011

A bend in the form with caravaggio, bach, dizzy miles, sleeplessness, post surgery.

insomniac scribble interlaced with lucubration.

Brunswick Nature Park overlook just off trail.
I'd started an essay on carravaggio, his madness and rage and death and how that torment was the architecture for his high renaissance beauty, but promptly quit to Brunswick Nature Park for a run and the morning was spring-easy and bright, with an optimistic goal for the morning run of 24k (~ 15m). . . a gel, a clifbar, a quart of h20 and a pint of gatorade stashed in the civic after a breakfast of banana and coffee, yogurt folded with nut & pommegranite granola, and my energy felt full and lucid. Gulp of coffee at 8h40am, cut off marley's soul rebel, set the garmin, and began to loosen the legs toward the trail head.  I wanted to savor the run, to mill out a slow clip of 10min/m or so, feeling the weight of my movement on earth as earth pushed back, a strengthening pace, and as oral surgery haunted tomorrow morning, I just wanted to run until the leg-labors reduced me to meat and easy breath and then shower and bach's fugues worked against fluid drawings of a twisted dancer, look at some modigliani, more caravaggio or baselitz before the night's shift. . . rodin's black drawings, erotic and bruised, pungent of the oils of fingertips and sex, pushing the mixture of ink and charcoal into heavy-toothed pages, joan mitchell's canvases so poetic and profound, minimal like a visual haiku. . . . slowly the trail wound around the stubbed woods shouldering Town Creek, black and still with a reflection of the surrounding evergreens barely broken by a ripple along her long reach, smooth like a lady's arm. . . . smells off the brackish stew where the root-knobs rose from the shallows and a dragonfly jerked in flight. . . abruptly the run got blurred, eyes wincing as if in allergy or irritant, and slowly a dizziness crept up and stalled on me, and I found myself experiencing some degree of tunnel vision as if in full exertion approaching blackout, the shrinking frame of vision.  Slowing, I pulled the pace to a jog, short kicks along the side of the creek, stretching the various ropes in my legs, reeling long drags of the fermented wood and freshly upturned earth, and I finished the trail to turn back towards the car, to jog back to point A, blaming dehydration or progressive fatigue. . . beating myself for a failing run, knowing runs would be restricted for several days, blaming the long work week with valentines rolling through our tables like a barrage, wearing me down perhaps more than I suspected. . . . drank half-water, half-gatorade, and hung around.  I walked to the picnic area, quiet and serene now, a cool breeze against mud-splashed legs, and began to really enjoy my presence, a sanctuary.  between thoughts, I got my head and heart anchored, and back into the woods I went, this time enjoying foot-play and the flittering birds shocking me back into it, back into the air, then thinking of picasso and his savage thanatost, his brutal beauty, monet's wonderment and pleasure in his giverny gardens, contemplated the kindred love of a plein air painter and someone running the woods, wondered if saint francis or basho would blame me for wanting to just run in this, gulping it in under legs and the senses peeled back raw beneath effort, or would they tell me to slow it down brother, be still. . . . dharma bums & desolation angels. . . but running, exertion, its an exorcism, its the struggle  the push  the suffering, and it brings the Core back into focus, reads clearly the private language in the Landscape, the private calligraphy of long runs alone in God's land, and yet as I write this, re-experiencing the deep stomach horrors of hunger and narcotics, post-surgery blues at 4h43am, bloody gums adding ferric bite to my strongest coffee, the tastes of decay, and the narcotics back in the system is unpleasant even if temporary, to eat a pill first thing this insomniac pre-dawn, crawling out of the twisted bed, self-medicating, its all very depressing.  a moment of despair, of tears, probably the result of the narcotics themselves, and no sleep all night, laying beside my wife, who sleeps well and deeply while kyote coughs and I am trying to think interesting thoughts, trying to be okay, to let my body relax into sleep, to ignore the bloody belches, the headache, the medicine tastes behind the sour-iron breath, and i've had many days such as this, but not in a long time, not in years, and I wish I could run, reclaim this mess of a body, so quickly lost. The bend in the thing is purely temporary, and I reflect back to the run where my goal of fifteen miles distengrated into seven miles and struggle not to read it as some metaphysical layer, some metaphor, a horrible prophecy. caravaggio.