Running for Your Life: Treetop Tips

Wisdom is a flighty mistress.

Never appears when you think she will.

Often wisdom comes upon you at night, alone with your thoughts, and eureka, there she is.

I find treetops to be a common space for wisdom to hover.

On the mornings that I walk T, our hound dog, by myself I’ll look up at treetops and often am surprised with how calm I feel.

More so leafy trees than needle ones, although in Brooklyn’s Park Slope and Prospect Park leafy trees dominate.

There’s as much of a chance of seeing a 50-foot pin as a diehard Republican.

With all the recent talk about the suicides of celebrities Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, a suicide prevention specialist was being interviewed on CNN.

She took pains to say that the urge to kill yourself can be blunted by spending more time in nature. Simple as that.

My advice? For every minute a day you stare at your phone, gaze up into treetops for a second.

Two hours a day of phone-staring = Two minutes a day of treetop-gazing.

Sound reasonable?

Next: Running for Your Life: Bay Ridge Redux

Running for Your Life: “Inadvertent” by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Some notes from the Why I Write series, a front pocket-sized paperback  called “Inadvertent” by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

“[Writing is] to lose sight of yourself, and yet to use yourself, or that part of yourself that was beyond the control of your ego. And then to see something foreign appear on the page in front of you. Thoughts you had never (my emphasis) had before, images you had never seen. It was the form that created them.”                                                             

This insight from KOK is a reflection on how new writing sprung after his reader love of Proust, “In Search of Lost Time.”

Remembrance as recovery – How in Proust each recovered memory serves to give shape to a promise – it is not Marcel who somehow stands astride humanity like some mythical colossus, rather that by honoring the humble observations of a life electrified by sensitivities, by doubt, by a kind of hard-won knowledge that come from sincere self-nourishing introspection, Proust has given us a literature that stands the test of time, that offers lessons to the better angels in all of us.

Harder still is to find the pure joy in that gift of literature. The starting point is always the same, though. To sit down. And read.

Next: Treetop Tips

Running for Your Life: Tree-dom

So after a hiatus from this blog, I’m running at home in Prospect Park during the last lap of a heat wave.

Leaves are falling. Little ones and medium-sized. There’s a wide variety of species in Prospect Park, and I’m thinking these slender ones, prematurely yellow and brittle from the days of scorching heat and high humidity, are from a black cherry tree.

That is what I feel myself as I catch one, the first leaf of 2018, got to be the earliest I’ve ever caught a leaf on the run, thrilled to have it but alarmed that leaves are falling so early in the year. Seasons heating, if you ask me, or anyone who doesn’t have an agenda.

The run is my second since we returned from an Italian holiday. Did my darndest to keep political news at bay but upon return am struck by how the silos of political opinion have hardened.

What can we agree on? Perhaps a leaf? Which by coincidence just happened to be the first note I made in a journal that I bought for this trip.

It was twilight (June 16) and a light breeze was blowing:

“Leaves dry and brittle, some

in constant motion, and

in the foreground the tufted

swath taking whatever

force the moving air gathers,

a gentle wind to driving

rainstorm, nothing but to

do their part and defend,

protect the whole.

Damn, how humans can learn from trees.

What seems ever more true

in hot, dry climates like this

one. Nature shows us the way,

leaves as people, ants and ant

societies. When we lose sight

of the big picture, trying to

forge solutions that will, at

best as we are to manage, support

life, pride and respect for those

born in our time, then what good

are we? Can we simply carve ourselves

a sliver of space and give succor

to only our friends and loved ones?

Or dig a hole and plant a tree.

Go home and walk a dog. We are nothing

compared to that. We unenlightened

weak-willed humans, who would

not do our part in the best way

and most noble intent to husband

with the strength and power of a just society,

are not deserving of being

seen as admirable as a single leaf.”

Next: “Inadvertent” by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Running for Your Life: Star of the Show

When I was 10 to 13 years old, I was tickled to perform (act goofy, sing, dance) in the living room at home in an innocent, upbeat fashion, having been seduced by the golden era of US broadcast TV, the comedians being my favorites – Bob Hope, Red Skelton, Tommy and Dick Smothers, Jimmy Durante, Groucho Marx, and most cherished, Jack Benny, his moon-faced self-deprecation whose humanity appealed to me most of all, he had me with his hand on his face, the bemused, melancholy expression. Piss my pants to think of that.

“Star of the show!” I’d shout. And Mother would smile, wipe her hands dry on her apron, give me no reason to think that my fantasy wasn’t as real as I wanted it to be.

Now, though, a half-century later, the fantasy is made hyperreal. “Parents” Larry, Jeff, Mark and Tim strike up the band of your very own comedy, drama, sports spectacle … Be the star of the show! Your show! Forget about the medieval worldview that the earth is the center the heavens that all revolves around God’s creation; forget about the modern scientific worldview that the earth revolves around the sun and fulfill yourself with the divine truth that all things – love, celestial bodies, gluten-free food – revolves around you. You! The center of the universe!

Next: Running for Your Life: Treetop Tips

Running for Your Life: High Cultural Pluralism – A Few Words

When it comes to writing and publishing, I recently dug out a terrific essay by author Elif Batuman in a September 2010 issue of London Review of Books about the state of the writing academy in the US, called “Get A Real Degree.”

Two gems:

The term to best describe current American literature – high cultural pluralism. (To which I would add, when it comes to high cultural pluralism as it relates to “literature,” the liberal mainstream celebrates the nihilistic hipster and the Upper West nostalgist to the exclusive of just about every else.)

And this, “There is a genuine problem when young people are taught to believe that they can be writers only in the presence of real or invented socio-political grievances.”

An essay that precipitated many letters, including this stirring one:

“[Donald Barthelme’s] fiction, with its multiple references and allusions to the histories of literature, art, philosophy, architecture and politics, certainly bears the traces of his own study of the history of everything, as a ‘melancholy recognition’ [my quotation marks] of how useful the study might ultimately prove to be; asked why he wrote the way he did, he liked to reply: “Because Samuel Beckett always writes the way he does.”

Alex Johnston, Nov. 4, 2010

Next: Running for Your Life: Treetop Tips