an early morning run & brief requiem-

abbey nature preserve was the trail and i beat the quads into a lactic-coma in just five miles and the smoke from northern fires still smells strong and mingles with the new and early humidity and together it makes for a tough cycle of breath.  while the mind was working the body and the smoke was working the throat/lungs, the run was burning the upper legs, a sort of lurching, hard pain in the thighs and hip flexors.  IT bands are taut and unwilling.  gmm is still freshly carved into bone and musclemass and the tears of 26 miles take some time to heal but i am impatient.  so i kept up the run, thinking of the derby 50k for the saturday following thanksgiving, my next big organized run, thinking of the bull run run 50 miler, mt mitchell challenge, trying to conjure goals that might keep pushing one foot in front of the other. . . . i thought of a painting, and did not want to paint.  i was thinking of the fugue of the run, the fact that i've been running forever, at least on some interpretive level. but really i was still reliving the grandfather mountain run, the running around the asu track, the holloway's mountain passage, the personal meaning of the run, the accomplishment of the trial by endurance, my mother's disbelief when i finished, my wife's pride, my own myriad of feelings, but i still did not conquer all of my regrets.  so i continue running such that i may one day outrun the angst.

otherwise i was thinking of twombly's recent death and his reclusive nature, his erratic launches of fresh canvas into international galleries and museums, his quiet studio work shaking the rigmarole and ridicule that makes for the artworld chatter and twombly made marks, read his ancient texts, hiked the hills of greece, bicycled rome with eyes tuned to the elusive ghosts of that geographic nexus, sought a refinement of a private language in a world obsessed with something more generic and PC.  he scratched philosophical passages of colour into the cakebatter painthandling of the 70's art scene, mocked the pastorales of other field painters, followed his own aesthetic from one series to the next.  dissed rauschenberg's more pop-oriented imagery with pre-graffiti psalms.  blooms of love.  the blackboard paintings.  the paper collages.  the rome paintings.  his paintings celebrate the delirium, the manic juggling of the modern psychology, a funneled, infinitely rich, infinitely nurtured, visual curiosity.  his scrawl is some of the most honest, some of the most purely modern work, reaching back through the ages via the collective unconscious, back into a wolfwomb of birth, back into the mire of nonlife, the choking horror of first breaths, the ideograms of new eyes and the cursive of sex-postures. twombly nailed it and i hope his heaven is a heaven indeed.

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.