Run & Paint

Monday, April 11, 2011

the habit of movement, a sunday run, april 10th.

April 11th. Irascible monday but here: an essay drawn from y'day's tempo ten miler across my backyard.

Its been a monday horror-train since first light but yesterday's lit'ary run is the focus, the locus, the heart of this wolf-lunge of language. And sunday morning was late at 8am, my alarm deferred to kyote's mayhem then slow coffee then slow shoes and a slow start around the block beneath gray flat sky and air clasped skin like sedated anxiety and the mind was reeling on warhol's paintings, his illustrations done on a tiny kitchen table long before the factory, his window designs (like de kooning or oldenberg or rauschenberg: windows seem to be a gateway thing) and his psychotropic colours and electric linework and his piss paintings and the “models” brought from the street to down various beers resulting in various pigment-stains of urine and warhol watching like some demented conductor the cowboys and queens standing on the raw cotton duck and its personally a bewildering concern that they didnt stink up the gallery (did castelli show them?) but then I was chasing the miles ahead and was thinking that a run is a devouring thing with the long distance runner eating the distance or the distance eating the runner but a total wolf-down nonetheless, man vs. distance and what honor in either then warhol jetted with a final flash of sequence paintings, his repeated themes like faux film stills, a moment of fugazi and escher jumped in, images unclear & shaky like an epileptic slide projector but his bird-patterns were seizing on anaerobic displays and the pattern of pace and the designs of identity, the architecture of ideology, barthes and derrida and even sillitoe's antihero, the craving of revolt and simultaneous asceticism, my dream at age 22 of being handed an old burlap monk's robe, the nightmare that preceded it that I won't discuss now, but to work the body and kick from lungdepths to grind at the symmetry, to defy the symmetry to punish the familiar, to adore the epic ephemera but a hotspot on my right arch pulls me back into my body and its so difficult sometimes to be one's own body and gordon road motors on and the aleph of set theory while reading escher godel and bach (a badass book) and painting in salisbury charlotte boone & her ripping ten years of life drawings up into small squares and laying them beneath the table where I painted, those luscious/poverty mornings painting the foods that would soon be served as breakfast and then i'd paint empty bottles and origami figures and the landscape started fizzing out towards a rothko thing so I gasped deep, lung distance logs here, and kerouac was somewhere out there in the tribe of the tragic, the tribe of the transcendent, who declaimed the long life routine for his roman candle exit but then I stopped to consider the Doolittles, who one week before at that very time of the morning were struck by a total stranger who either was or was not in the fabric of the Universe and running is a philosophical/ spiritual thing but that answer would require a helluva lot more miles than one lifetime can bear and certainly more than either of them could have understood beforehand but at that realization I had to stop and breathe. A bend in the gravity, a flex of the archaic bulge, a soul's pyre lapping. My body flashed spinechills and ogden park was barely populated but for a few dogs and a metronome tennis volley put the legs back to work as I sped on the edge of my breath towards home, images of a monk robe embedded in my acts cause you see dope or writing or running or prayer, it is devoutness-- its all in the habits of movement and the need to be moved, a pentecostal thing, a bitter rejoice.