Back at it. In the groove. Running, that is. (And twice-a-week blogging!) Feeling a touch of “What I Think About When I Think About Running” by Haruki Murakami, his groove being a daily hourlong run without fail, a baseline to ramp up in training, but I go Haruki half-better, an hourlong run on alternate days, alternate day at the gym, hamstring strengthening and ellipitcal machine, not just marking time in these forty-five minute workouts, and so far, so good. On track for Boston, folks. Here I go again.
Three months I’ll be doing this routine so that by mid-September I’ll be re-registering for the Boston Marathon 2012. This time I tell myself. Go slow. And still (Running for Your Life: Discovery of Stillness). During the worst of my hamstring tear (which now doesn’t register, not even a tightness or a long-day tenderness, knock on wood ...), I had no idea I’d be feeling this fine, a week less than three months today (June 22) since the injury. Taking it day by day, I tell myself, so that by April I’ll be ready. I’m not going to say that it will be my last Boston Marathon but it will be my first. Not many fifty-six year-olds can say the same, not that I’m in it for that, for the privilege to make that claim. Rather I’m doing it for myself. Four short years before turning sixty I want to be in that crowd in Boston, ten months from now. That’s the goal.
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A handsome man in dreads – orange shirt, blue jeans, red sneaks – waves me away from my intention to sit next to him on the subway, pointing to what looks like a sticky mess on the seat. Chocolate sauce or purple goo of some sort, the size of a baseball. I say thanks and instead sit next to an Hispanic family with a year-old boy in a stroller. His father opens a small plastic case, and offers a would-be sitter, a well-put-together African-American elderly woman, the family's last baby wipe so that the elegant stranger can clean up the mess and sit down. The woman smiles and gently declines, pulls from her purse a piece of paper, which she lays on top of the offensive spot while walking away to take a seat in another part of the subway car, saying in way of explanation, “I couldn’t take the baby’s wipe; that was so sweet.” The Hispanic family, at no point, shows any visible reaction.
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Just how do you begin to explain the wall paintings in “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” showing near-literal movement of beasts three times the size of the artist(s) upon uneven, concave and convex walls, how the results shown in the movie by Werner Herzog bring to mind what the best of the modern-day tattooists attempt when they put their work on the uneven flesh of people; the woman on the little balcony here at Root Hill coffee shop in Brooklyn doing her homework, a classical music score that is flat and lifeless but yet it could be so much more if the artist had have been imbued with whatever was the spirit of the life and times of the Chauvet artist(s).
Why tattoo if not to reject what is outside, the commercialization of space. Could it be our only public palette – not the walls like the Chauvet cave, the places where our human forebears gathered – is our back and legs and arms and belly, and yes, even our face. Tattooing may be the only thing we do to ourselves that shows that despite the dehumanizing of space wrought by commerce, people are still able to feel what it means to connect. Or perhaps more so to rebel. Consider the work of Oscar Kokoschka’s notorious play, “Murder, Hope of Women” (1909) whose two heavily tattooed main characters, according to the text of the current German Expressionist exhibit at MOMA, signified “primitivism, criminality and degeneracy.” http://bit.ly/dqJ840
Could it be we’ve come to feel that our bodies are the last frontiers, all else conquered by the bondholders (why does Lester Holt on the NBC evening news do an infomercial for Google [June 9] except to draw attention to the monolithic corporate entities, Google and Comcast, please tell me there is an owner more deserving of being tarred as a modern-day robber baron than the cable company manager, holder of the license to print money with government assent, at least GE builds nuclear reactors [goodie!], but Comcast, Lester’s boss, wouldn’t know a Chinese wall from a Chinese doll, so we need to be good friends with Google so that, let’s posit: NBC does the infomercial and the network rides higher than its rivals on Google search results, say, for “Weiner” and “sexting,” so bring it on, Lester, more Google bits, less hard news. Hey! How about a series on being unemployed in America; how Google News and HuffPo, say, by not paying for their news impoverish not only traditional media like newspapers and radio and broadcast reporting, but have drained hundreds and thousands of jobs from news businesses because that’s where people go to be informed, even Lester Holt!) and the political corporate elite.
If only tattooists could channel the spirit of the Chauvet cave, where on the never-flat walls of the cave the images are the very spirit of the animals taking flight; the walls being as essential to the full expression as the choice of the animal depicted. We modern humans are much lesser creatures than we were then because the Chauvet horses, the running, whinnying horses, are Picasso-like superior, even after thirty-two thousand years of the first appearance, than anything coming out of our tattoo parlors. Yet should they be any less amazing than what the world’s most able tattooist could do after studying the contours of an upper back, say, and painting wild horses there?
But we are no longer one with the animals. We don’t run with them. We can only dimly imagine what that animalistic, unconscious life was like.
(If I were to have a single score on my back it would have to be the original introduction to the “Hockey Night in Canada” theme song; that or the Piano Sonata in B Minor by Franz Liszt, please see Mary’s post on why at http://bit.ly/jZEoBL)
Next: Running for Your Life: Staying cool
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