roche. snake. ramble.

April 15 2011

La Roche.  Basque word implying the loss of senses, a sort of derangement of the senses rimbaud and later the surrealists strove towards.  Early coastal heat begins the assault of the senses, a mile-marked delirium, intervals of mindsmoke.

observations on a friday morning trail run at carolina beach:

1. a field of dragonflies blurred my vision and obscured my feet as I ran across a rooty passage of trail; must've been 50+ dragonflies.  Dali may have appreciated the image-morphosis of feet becoming dragonflies.  what freudian symbolism would be attributed to dragonflies? (ants = anxiety.  Melting clocks = mortality and flesh-decay.  Giraffes = ?)

2. a lethargic snake baked on the trail by a sandy bend.  Sand and pine needles and the leaves of dwarfed oaks had pushed up against the roots of a tall pine; and he folded into the bed of debris.  he was an optical curiosity, a pattern in a patternless array.  startled by his presence and my near-miss of his body, I assumed his dangerous nature and determined him to be a water moccasin.  But that wasn't the case; he was a garter snake: harmless, common, basking. An unfortunate ignorance on my part, a (fortunate) total immersion in the moment.  fear-defined moment.

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.

A new april run followed by a memorial, a requiem.

Sunday at 6h40am I chugged a final dark coffee and crunched the gravel driveway towards the beach for a sixteen miler. a beautiful start to april while predawn-dark and cool and quiet, homes unlit and dogwood blooms pale but open and white in minimum light. Sunless flat trees began to fill out in form and I passed two folks walking dogs and smiling and the second mile ticks off as I run slowly and casually across market street, an impossibility any other time of the week, with barely a car north or south of my chuk-chuk-chuk of pace.
Gator trail has drained from my body, the recovery swift and impressive, but my footfalls remain flattened, unenergized, and I dread roadruns after such a carpeted trail run.  But my saddle gait is passed and my jaw muscles do not ache and I contemplate eagerly the next long run.  the umstead 100 passes this weekend (people are still finishing as I turn on Cardinal), with all the legs milling it out across eight loops of 12.5 miles and the bareballed guts of that distance, with the men and women driving forward from fourteen to thirty hours straight with headlamps and mudcaked legs and I am interested perhaps for next year, but I also know I don't want to ruin a longer running-life with one run of 100 miles; some never fully recover from such a thing. My skateboard and soccer knees may reject that distance, protesting quickly and finally, but the idea of a 100 miler is enticing and burns the mind a bit like a longshot high-yield bet.
A slight breeze cools me as I run the cross-city trail down Eastwood to veer out Rogersville past barking dogs and early porch lights.  Time-caught churchgoers push me deeper down the road's shoulder.  Up Wrightsville I watch a congregation gather outside the Presbyterian church, I admire the red jackets and decorated hats on the gregarious ladies, study the starched dark suits hanging from the thin, coat-hanger shoulders of an elderly man smiling to a man of thick build and big voice.
Debate mulls and fades to back of mind.  I mentally mask a canvas for the next layer of image-application and I make a mental note to do so. I remember a poem I wrote about a tree in California.  Quiet overcomes the Umsteads, the paintings and their secret images, the lifegoals, folds up the language-rambles and the clips of aesthetic-concerned essays.  Airlie horses watch me pass from perfect rolling landscapes of viridian greens, king oaks, grey spanish moss, red barns of white framing beneath the fresh sun.  Monet-moments pause by the Intracoastal Waterway with the crystalline reflections across mist-muted colors, the dry hiss of sea grasses. The ocean spills like tiny cups from a green-glass stillness, and the gratitude rises like prayer as I turn left at Mercer's pier, looking forward to being home with my wife and child.

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This is a moment to remember the father and son who were killed Sunday morning.  Trey Doolittle and his father Ronald David Doolittle II were triathletes pedaling out a training ride as they cycled River Road at 9h30am.  Behind them a fast car swerved wildly, running across grass and shoulder and 17 year old Trey and next his father.  The father was pronounced dead at the scene and Trey sustained injuries that he would not recover from, succumbing about 24 hours later.
The man had cocaine, an open container, and was intoxicated.  Personally the accident unleashes an anger, a rage so bleak and stark, so confusing.  A man of 63 years of age, on a binge, crushed to death two healthy, beautiful people. The brutal irony is overwhelming.
My wife's best friend was killed when she was struck by a vehicle, riding her bike home from Manhattan to Brooklyn, and this terrible thing thrusts the associated pain right back to her being.  Today I will run with thoughts of them, sending a white-light love to those who are also victims of this driver as they lose a friend, a partner, a brother, a father, an inspiration.

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.