Snatches of Miller, 100 kilometers, nickel coffee (five movements on a theme)..

i.


miller's rosy cruxifiction is a perennial interest for me, an autumn ghost that rises from a memory-clock, but a ghost that dissipates within a few paragraphs of plexus or nexus.  that a craving is so quickly assuaged, fragile as light to a mirage, perplexes me. 
once i relished his rant-ramblings, his openings of woof! woof! and sex in the back of brooklyn cabs, the luxury of his leisurely hours wandering central park, bumming money from friends & acquaintances, the fall of snow on manhattan window sills, his speakeasy pantry of ham sandwiches and potato salad, pickles and beer. his rant against the american machine.  i was reading sexus 15 years ago, the cover stained with burnt coffee and ashes falling from the hand of a broken-souled young adult.  i was drunk & addled, hiding beneath poverty's skirt, believing in the artist's struggle- faithful to the chaos- subscribing to the myths of romantic naivete.  and here was an empathetic voice, a diatribe against all i had not gained or accomplished.   here was a voice that made sense: his writing conveyed the loyalty of hungry dogs.
but now miller (my response) lacks that voracious elan vital.  the language feels contrived, the scenes manipulated, the tone condescending. . . flippant rant, foam, amuse bouche, staccato shrieks that entertain in bursts like a raspy voice in a smokey hall.  pages of barking and hardons and hunger. gauguin's dogs, a form of begging.


ii.


i used to paint for a sense of lucidity, to link directly my thoughts to action. i painted for the cascades of ecstacy i could find in color and form and contour.  painting was a physical act from the beginning, a grand chasedown of a cumulative moment. an expressionist act.
now i run and the run is the current medium of my art.  it is nearly a daily act, it is a habit. and in my runs are falling bodies, fragments of language, color wheels, flashes of poetic understanding.  the effect of painting and the effect of running both contain the joy of a constant, language that is transcended by body.


iii.


i think of hungry ny painters in the cold of winter.  or the new york romps (via the subterraneans) of kerouac ginsburg & snyder, jazz haunts & slinky women bending into drinks and slow horn blows. i think of my nostalgia, of big city dreams, a Nickel Coffee sign, a window in a sepia photograph.  sinew, muscle, bone, and nickel coffee.  something to revitalize as autumn falls into winter.

iv.

weymouth woods 100k, a trail run totaling 62 miles across 14 loops.  mind is a rabid jaw working an anxious introspect, trying to swallow the many questions of the task.  physical manifestation is milling the miles, cycling & stretching, reading training plans & theories, writing mileage charts, inventories of nutrition. . . in the end, it is the mind and the legs, mainly the legs. 62 miles is intrepid effort and the hope of progress, pain like fissures of bone splintering into the leg muscle. insomnia and dulled senses. Preparation and Execution:  Work. Weymouth woods is the will to complete something personally astounding.  To surrender into the thing, whether paint, music, blankness, words, body. To surrender is the meaning and the result, the art and the artifact. surrender contains the whole process and it is the first step.  i am running a one hundred kilometer trail race.
100 kilometers like a native american sundance. . . the need to surmount one's self, to reinvent oneself, to triumph out of oneself.  The palpitating heart of the moment is how one responds when the shit falls apart, to endure entropy, to find rhythm in chaos, to surmount rot and exhaustion. to bear witness to a continuum elucidating & aligning towards a beginning, marking an unbroken trajectory of existence.  to be in that point of origin for a moment, if only a glance, and to be whole and transfixed. my training will revolve around that part of the run, the part where the shit falls apart, where i am a ghost. that part of my past i am always trying to heal and conceal will burn like gas through muscle and mouth and eyes.


to run 62 miles in fourteen fucking loops is, in essence of process, no different than de kooning painting his first woman.  it is drive, thrust, scrape, preservation, exorcism. 62 miles of earth in 14 loops of january.

iv.


henry miller is a way to revisit a ghost of my past self.  the RC trilogy is an opera of ghosts, a swell of dead voices that fugue and echo and fade into the busy Now.  in the barking dogs, in the hunger and hardons, in the rage against repressive elements of american life, the armageddon of the soul versus earthly fulfillment, i am wholly self-sufficient.  gauguin's dogs bark at my front door and i feed them bits of my organs, and they howl and fight and froth from the teeth and i wear a shock collar that rips into my neck when i bark.  i am arrogant enough to believe that everyone, at times, feels this way and that there is no hierarchy of suffering.


v.

This writing business is the externalization of an internal act. It's managing risk while moving towards an elemental cusp, mindful movement footstepped into private earth. The work is balancing Ferlinghetti's fool (the artist like a tightrope walker constantly risking absurdity) against Zarathustra's tightrope walker (fallen, the dispersing crowd, a spasm, a dead clown).  It is the delirium to try.  it is worth a cup of nickel coffee.

Self-belief fused with creative love, a guard against apathy or aporia. (aporia is the vertigo, the modern purgatory. common.) The trudge moves forward & the running essays continue. Sometimes words collapse like false motifs  (no image no gut no sound no rhythm).  Sometimes, the vacancy of an ocean, a cathedral's emptiness caging song, the haunt of a space, architecture of lotus.  Sometimes, iron filaments of silver-flecked language.

vi.


ghosts of aporia.  that is where this ends.  the ghosts of aporia and motionlessness, the need to move in lithe and quick pulses of meaning, the divulgement of space. i run now because i was still, arrested, for a long time.  i suffer because i have the guts to and i celebrate because i have the guts to. i choose not to bloat my mind with idolatry of another's path.  look, take, leave.  the exchange is the living synapses (whether dead artists, living friends, a child).  gauguin's dogs will lunge at my achilles and the hooks of a sundance will chew into my muscles but the art will be mine, the journey will be mine, the life will be a journey, an entire thing that i can claim.

an essai conveying the layers of a morning.

i

Chronicles of a (self/or\portrait) who fell out of painting into running. A drawing of parallels between the energy of painting/creative work and the freedom to move across a cut of earth on one's own power. Olson (the momentum of a verse if verse were a mile) or Burden (crawling barechested across 50' of broken glass; getting shot in the arm in a ny gallery: events, documented) or Serra's oilstick drawings & etchings (viewer's innate response to nonobjective images-- unconscious languages scrawled in primitive gashes. Early signifiers. Pushing the viewer's role into that of co-creator. Art is, as an evolved thing, a conspiracy of fashioning, a private propaganda.). Che & Castro moving from ideal to Act in armed rebellion (violent confrontation is the highest form of Idea-Expression besides sex, which is still a confrontational involvement. . . .natural progression from previous state of art-as-propaganda.).

Running is expressionistic- there are moods in the body's movement. Long miles are philosophically engaging, physically enpowering (unless drab and long and static).  Late miles can become absinthe, elation, delirium, synethesia, distillation. Movement conveys the projective energy of language infused with idea, paint vivid with elan vital. . . I appreciate the act of running as a physical-aesthetic process, a burning happening, a continuum of motion passing through a psycho-spectral Self.  Primal and elegant like music. A certain Slant rhyme.

ii

Home. Home is the work, home is the drive, home is the source of work. Home is a transient space, a moveable feast, a Present embraced. An infinite now. Anything else is a rut, a false space: Death of an individual. a habitation.

iii

mouth of smoke and tongue of cat, hand across chest (breast pushing breath), farm decaying beneath autumn sun. steinbeckian sex dream-- beginning of october. She wore a heavy sweater knitted with gray yarn and a heavy scarf of muted earthtones. the ridges of her sweater rolled like corduroy beneath work-hardened hands. We looked out across fields of corn drying to leathered barbs. . . a dismal field, morbid and limp. Dogs ran in and out of woods and an old car rusted behind us. There was a basket of peaked vegetables wrapped in pale cheese cloth.  Heavy bread smelled of burnt wood and hot stone. When sex was survival, you remained a goddess.

iv

And I was running the stonejut spine of massanutten mountain debating the notion of home while remembering derelict dens where mahler and mingus played, narcotic tirades quiet and internal like the rotting of teeth. Tobacco-stained canvases stacked against wall on stacks of books. Montaigne and jung and wittgenstein and whatever wordswords I was reading in the white house on the eigth block of nun street. . . hardwood floor obscured by pages of drawings smeared with linseed oil modeling paste coffee&ashes shopping lists. Letters painted over, smoked up behind soft graphite. Destruction of the evidence of destruction of the evidence of. . . a fruitful time of work. Creativity thrives in depravement.

Trails cut into earth through spills of rock that bruise arches as miles accrue with shirt absorbing rain and sweat and the mists of limestone and slate obscure the surrroundings but heighten the focus. . . a scale or a balance. A distant ridge is barely knifed out in the palest of bluegrays.  The charcoal diagonals of trees drag the sky like a twombly drawing.  (Home is where the familiar still captivates.)

The fog of a mountain trail six miles deep, the fog of broken mind and a body starved, the lack of something essential. . . mind builds the grandeur of spiritual lucidity, embodies the myth of soul when body (the craving is the soul's voice, not the condition of lucidity perhaps. Craving is more emphatic than satisfaction.). . . . broken body/mind craves an intact soul and a broken soul might crave an intact body/mind. Evidence of the destruction.  

Running the pink-blazed sidewinder trail across the ridges of a mountain is the pinnacle of my philosophies-- an act that is aesthetic, explorative, simultaneously refined and primitive, necessitating self knowledge and honesty while pushing the boundaries of that knowledge, expanding that knowledge, brutalizing and healing that self. It is a pure act, private and self-sufficient.  Volatile.  It is a prayer that does something and goes somewhere and still loves when it is done.

cartilage sinew muscle & bone ii (unfinished)

A meditation on the unrefined. . . the sublime & the vulgar. Autumn. Picasso. Trails. Rome. The richness of the raw material-- the infinite of the unfinished. The majesty of the mad space-- the cathedral and the mind, each extending to gather space, vacancy, fullness, layers. . . psalms.

fifteen miles into autumn & the run was the work of feet clocking packed clay beneath low clouds, a cool gray day. . . the trail was bulge and recess, scarred by storms and stones and raincuts. the sky was flat, wide and vacant like cotton duck, ancient and flecked with birds. Sepia. Air was push and pull, kneading into the vocabularies of language and image, the legwork of a runner or a painter. the holism of the exertion pushed into a quietude, an alignment. craved a neatness of thought: a combing of mind. a unity and continuum. a process intact.

Autumn embraces harvest & death, is kerouac's roman candle, is blake's tiger, it is rimbaud's afrique and van gogh's absinthe. It is a burning, cherished thing. the old trees of the southern landscape newly stripped and bare: burnt umber bones that thrust from the ground like a child's alphabet. The wet smells of jagged granite in the blue ridge burn the breath, lapsing into gray. Stone & bone. Primeval. Autumn is the lure of the rabid vixens of les desmoilles d'avignon. Autumn is curse & promise. Autumn is wiccan and voluptuous and fleshy and lushlife. Autumn is promise and betrayel and the slip of the spring's veil to smoke and ash. Autumn is paradox and threshold.  smoke, stone and bone.

picasso's bulls, his hooves of ink working into bark and pine needle and dirt, images spun from picasso's “bootblack” paris years onward into the war oeuvre. . . saltimbanques et les paysages cubistes, les guitars ou le journ. . . les assemblages. . . bathers and cassagemas and the shades of blue and the late miles evoked my early inspirations: degas, van gogh, duchamp, cezanne, miro, rothko, rembrandt, de kooning, but picasso was the mark and the centrifuge. . . an enigma of a man infinitely reworking himself. Picasso was deeply modern: horrified by failure, suicide, poverty, sex, cellibacy, communism, guernica, women, stature, compromise. contrasting the depth of his horrors was his degree of self-love, unbound. but whether a tyrant or a gracious soloist, he was nonetheless a canon of modern creativity. Picasso was the carnivale of libido, (the carnivore of libido?), a fact emphasized by his longevity.  picasso and his bulls.

(motherwell's elegy to spanish republic series, probably a direct diatribe or praise of picasso, declares "i am the bull.  i am the picasso.  i am the knife of oedipus.")

Autumn is the potential of the raw and the unrefined, the kinetic contained within the inchoate. gesture and underpainting and stain and brief pours of dead leaves. Its the way a landscape can burn, ravaged, blaze, beautifully, raptured. And I was thinking about meola versus rostropovich or even dvorak. . . cellos and their bellow. . . i was thinking how schnabel was the archetypal 80's painter, filled with rage & ego and greed and a need for space. schnabel's canvas dwarfed even motherwell's larger canvases. . . (equally large was richter, scully, rauschenberg, rosenberg.) but schnabel's canvases were colossal and scale was the grandeur of the 80s art scene (a throwback to renaissance frescoes).  schnabel might be the contemporary picasso, the american version.

michelanglo's nonfinito sculptures-- the slave series, what donatello called the sculpturi nonfinito, a term vasari later adopted. . . referencing the waking slave, atlas slave, st matthew, et cetera.  the slaves contain the points of drills & chisels, of hard sanding, cross-hatching, chunks of coarse marble hammered to show the pock-marred stone of carrera. michelangelo preserved his birthplace in the stone, preserved his process, made the act part of the art.  the documented process became a natural inclusion, a visual history. The postmoderns evolve from this point of the high renaissance, the inclusion of self and the neurosis of that self, the constant movement of the self. . . constant breakdown and recycling towards wholeness.

elaborating momentarily on soutine, i had guilt that my previous impressions were processed, though i gave no images but only language associations. soutine, schnabel, picasso. . . their images remain distinct.  to write about visual art is an irreconcilable thing, to remove the innate by funneling into words words words => Processing.
endurance is the grandeur of idea no matter the mode of expression.  idea and its energy must remain prime and lucid, honest.  To include the Process.  To refuse processing.  its the trick.

laying brick or paint, cooking or running a trail, undisturbed by the barbs of existence while strobbing on the unrefined and arrowed towards a nondestination. . . yogis or shamans or poets or roman janitors. . . every act can be a transcendent act.  anything can become sacred. but the question is always there: What is the prime state of expression?

brunswick nature park & chaim soutine.

the salomon shoes (still wearing last winter's mud), some classic punk, the smoke of leaves, the chocolate woodiness of hot coffee. a sub-70 degree run is as comforting as a fall hoodie.

a cool tuesday and an electric familiar pushes the body through brunswick nature park. . . an immersion of the sounds of pine growth, a deflated basketball of a turtle dragging his shell, heady smells of the damp earth, sweep of yellow necked thrushes, squirrels bouncing branches, sounds of shoes crunching the gravel road towards the kayak launch where the trail crosses perpendicular, cut left, following the creek's tarry bank along the oldest trail of the park before turning into the jerky undulations of the woods. an old paper trail. blood pushes into legs and eyes and core. the words “Cartilage sinew muscle & bone” chant behind nature's seminar of acoustics. A trail run is a burning meditation that engages all the senses.

coolness brings an atmospheric redemption, a body's willingness to move, an innate yearning to stomp out miles on earth's variegated surfaces and the mind bending serious to the hymn of movement. Its an instinct in the new coolness to move and to try to move lithely, to burn the muscles with joy, kicking across storm debris in narrow slices of trail by the black water of town creek which sleeps like midnight quartz.

it is the cadence of crickets and the still drift of white waterlilies and the pungent smells of decay as hurricane irene still lays tangled on the trail and the slopes. the catch of spider webs and their constant disregard. sun & mosquitoes on shoulders. at a corner I shock into two large deer, one darts out in perfect sine movement while the other pauses, her head posed and her eyes black as the creek behind, and she too turns to spring away.

an old man and his dachsund roam the trails and he laughs at me “well i can see you have plenty of energy!” the dachsund runs with me for a few meters and he licks the air and turns back. i pause. the man tells how he kayaks with his dog (jack) at carolina beach and he has the gentleness of the lonely and the aged as he mocks his 72 years. i am torn between the run and his story and i later feel a guilt of not being more present to the him.

Cartilage sinew muscle & bone. the body burns its own fuels of an abstract fire. soutine and his redred landscapes of soppy paint, of mud mingling against a hill's contour with mangled trees and limping architecture. i think of the pastry cook's melancholy. . . his butchery paintings, his trout, his rustic tables with sparse ingredients. Wirey-boned rabbits splayed for an oiled pan. The pigments of carcass, rawanimalpaint, gravy paint. (butcher's paper for his drawings?) the blur of periphery is where soutine resides, in the elusive catch of redemption, the vapid glory of renaissance, in the breakdown of muscle on bone and the depiction of such a thing. unjudged, unhaunting. the detachment with which turner depicted london like a nocturnal explosion. . . nero's firey violin bow or whateverthefuck he played while rome was devastated. Cartilage sinew muscle and bone and not much more to the whole thing, to this architecture of breath and idea and movement and infinity. layers of the aleph. soutine was poor as dirt as a man but his soul (and his soul's palette) was a cathedral. 

the cadence of legs becomes the momentum of mind, and the running season is returning with 15k at brunswick nature park and life is good with the tapping of typing after a trail run in september. Lungs gasp at psalms and miles and autumn may be the one true palette of the year. Like soutine, like a run, like a lunge of lust, a burn of things primed and respiring into winter.

Rain band run.

Friday at 11am. Hurricane Irene flails and flays her first wild arms. Bands arrive hours before the storm's central churn and the frenzy of late preparation hits Wilmington. (While the anticipation of a storm is an exciting thing, the arrival of a storm can be baffling.)

Across the coastal region, whips of gray clouds spiral & march like burdened forms, layer like waxed, heavy brushstrokes, build into impasto smears of sky. Somewhere the voice of a weather anchor proclaims massive winds and flooding in serious, baritone enunciation. The rains are cold, stinging and pushing against my torso, opposing my work before relenting to a drizzle. My shorts stick to my thighs, my shoes are heavy with rain, my watch is confused by the beading rain.  The air is electric but cool and it is with half-belief that I watch the storm enter from southeast until it fills the sky, a directionless mass of movement, a swatch. 

The friday mid-distance run. . . A morning without compass; an act of habit.

A long run seems an unlikely thing as the garmin beeps into effect. The second mile follows the slow churn of legs as blood-heat pushes into the fold of a quad muscle. I note the birdless sky, the occasional boarded home, the deepening payne's gray of the horizon, the empty lawns, the tilting sway of the rain. A chill in the air.  The fourth mile is marked on the garmin with wild numbers tracking an erratic pace (gps signals rat-romp through clouds and weather, an unsteady register, thus data is jumpy). . . 6:12, 7:38, 7:27, 8:24. The park is empty except for two ladies casually pushing a stroller. I run spongy trails to a turn-around where my tailwind becomes a headwind. The wind shifts again from the east.  The effect is like swimming against a current; there is a total body force, a complete exertion.   As the mantra says, “Think with the whole body,” and running in a storm is a sure way to mindfulness. The band passes with a few gusts, a clearing forms, the air relaxes. My body finds an easy pace for the next three miles, appreciating the familiar terrain of the neighborhood.  The run ends with a walk around the block and my eager dog smelling the air as leaves confetti the air.   

A storm is a fierce thing when filtered through heavy rain, anticipation, news casts, the true unpredictability of Nature. Like a run, sometimes, you just work your way through a storm until it exhausts itself.  And you do so because it just what we do as animals, as people, as those who are alive. The mind, the body, the communion of the two, works with the same dynamics as the atmosphere and the earth.  Maybe it is no communion at all, but a reactionary symbiosis. A series of catalysts kissing off the fuel with flame.  A necessary rage.

work, a run, and auerbach.

a cycle of complacent meandering has come to an end and i've got to begin the work again. bend the back to the field with rough hacks, dull blades, stareoff against empty grounds (paper, canvas, wood). Vast fields, easy to get lost in, the labor of idea/image. . . millet. . . . . . so I am reading levine who was just announced as the new poet laureate and his work takes me right into the detroit guts of winter, the forlorn winter daze, jaundice street lights, the unromantic life of the american (auto) worker, the grime of floors and hands and grease, horns, a life stamped in shifts, petroleum eyes.  get this line:  "his blanket of newspaper rises in the breeze, a giant butterfly mottled with slaps of rain."  a real recession writer-- empathy to the worker in his detroit-eroded language.  poems that breathe like an assembly line.

luxury of thought.  images that explode into smoke, flash, vapid. “one day i'll paint in an armani suit.” ridiculous. this i wrote in an old journal, scribbled nine years ago, a copy of a nude bending off the margin, bookmarked by an excerpted manila page where i've inked an orchid, two tables' orders alongside the drawing. Server-artist. Artist-server.  shit. there is no luxury of thought any longer- just catalyst and response. the fleas of modern america, the fleas of minutiae.  probably should be a meaning, a poetry of things, a music perhaps, something beyond stasis.  the luxury of a whirl of thriving pigment and vitality. but recently i'm looking towards the impulse, the gesture: van gogh ink drawings (pure nature, holy nature, “i am whole in nature” he said), the fauves, kline, the canvases of baselitz, giacometti, the works of frank auerbach. 

i was thinking about Frank Auerbach while kicking six miles in the neighborhood, thinking of his name, the hard german “k” of bach, a hacking abrasion of sound, a mouthchop, a sound that is found in his work were one to experience synthesesia. his berlin roots, a jewish boy born in the thirties who got out of germany before the train got him (already had his parents, suffocated them with work, with deplorable conditions in a camp), the boy went to london, art school, became a gutlevel rabidass painter with the surface of his grounds sagging in the weight of paint and much of his work was shown flat so the paint wouldn't cave in, fall like thick clay plates to the floor of the gallery. Monochromatic panels move in textures that carve out the image, a forest thrusts through mudpaint to emerge out of a dozen or so final brushstrokes. the head portraits, something like a forest fire with eyes, a melancholy salmon/leek terrine gazing in 3/4 profile, or a girlish face infernal and pouring elan vital, ganked from some base impulse of perception, an emotive glance, the subconscious impression (a much darker, a more subjective place than the french impressionists' viewpoint), a picture dragged through a mire of mixed complementary colours to primordial tones, browns far from neutral, a process seemingly immediate but sought deliberately across hours and hours of posed seating. . . auerbach fully inspires me, engages me, invigorates me that he remains a powerful paint handler.  it is a good life when someone can paint over sixty years, tirelessly working for new brushmarks, tirelessly working with Paint. 

just a note to say that i am out of commission due to a back sprain or jam, some back injury.  the randomness of the pain baffles me, but i refuse the doctor trip.  i woke up with a sore back and then beat a full spinal-tweak across a downslope of a trail, a mis-step and a heel bash response, which is when an ache became an acutely painful area.  and while the lumbar pain improves drastically during the course of the day, the morning promises the agony again.  or it doesn't.  one never knows. so i am swimming and living offa advil and gelato, watching old bike films on youtube and below is a good one to watch if you get the spare time. the film is entitled "a sunday in hell" and it documents the paris-roubaix race (also known as the Hell of the North, hence the title of the film). the vintage machines are functional sculpture and the athletes remind me of hemingway's matadors. it is an engaging film.  meanwhile, thank you for checking in.