finding delight
This has not exactly gone well. Twenty-two modest essays posted in just over seven months, one in the past six weeks, more or less, and it is a reach to call some of them essays. I go at it, with pen and paper at my desk, with my journal in coffee shops, at the computer, but not much happens. A pack of half-baked, vague notions float around, tentative beginnings with tentative titles such as “The Fetishization of the Center,” “Running and Psychobabble,” “The Intellectual and Income,” yet to attain coherence and too often failing to rise above the level of pedestrian drivel.
Vain enough to hope for better from myself, I continue to hack away. There was a time when I could take an opening like the one here and just run with it. Where I ended up might be no great shakes, and maybe that is part of what is going on now. I am less willing to settle for what is no great shakes. Mon dieu, I have standards, perhaps even ambition, and the consequence is a kind of paralysis, a profound sense of inadequacy, when those standards can never be lived up to and the ambition is beyond reach.
As often, I think of Dylan, this time “tryin’ to get to heaven / before they close the door.” I am trying to paint my masterpiece before the time runs out, before the rivers run dry, a canvas spread against night sky dusted with stars, beyond reach, beyond grasp, far from me as as time or love. I am realistic enough to acknowledge that age likely has something to do with this state of affairs. The capacity to go at the vision with focus and intensity for extended periods is diminished, to say the least, from whatever physiological and mind-bent causes.
The barrenness of the last several winters is the source of much distress. My work cycles are based on the school year. Summer has never been a productive season. I look to late September and early October for renewal of the spark, as the light softens and days grow a little shorter, the evenings cooler, and here in Portland on into October as the rainy season sets in. Last winter’s Brontë project was fruitful and rewarding, but even that was dug out in fits and starts and stands in bleak isolation. In the aftermath summer’s lethargy is more than little annoying.
I must grant that this summer much focus and energy is devoted to training to take a crack at the San Antonio Marathon with Big T in November. However much I relish running at a level that I have not known in years, it comes at the expense of the scholarly and creative work. The trade-off bugs me to the extent that it prolongs an already extended period of discontent with an aspect of life that is at the heart of what is best in me. Is it good or bad that running myself to near exhaustion is my primary means of satisfaction these days?
Some may think it kind of nutty for a fellow approaching advanced middle age to be taking a crack at his first marathon, and maybe it is. On the other hand, it is fairly amazing what those of us fortunate to be in reasonably good health at an age older than dirt can do. Arthur Webb at 67 (maybe 68 by now) has run 12 consecutive (maybe 13 by now) Badwater Ultramarathons. The Badwater is a 135 mile race through Death Valley for which Webb prepares by, among other things, running 15 miles in too-small shoes to loosen the nails on his big toes so he can yank them out with pliers because they tend to crack and bleed as the toes swell during the race. (Chris Ballard, Defying Death Valley, Sports Illustrated, 31 August 2009). Okay, so we are not necessarily talking about good sense here. Take the case of legendary grappler Abdullah the Butcher, who at 73, or maybe 69, still hoists his considerable girth, some 400 pounds, into the squared circle to wreak mayhem and stab opponents with his signature dinner fork, which after the match he offers to sell for ten dollars. (Mike Tierney, Still the Butcher After All These Years, New York Times, 26 July 2010). I do not know that it speaks all that well of me, but I find something kind of cool in this.
At one end of a spectrum there is William Wordsworth, who wrote his best poetry by his mid-thirties. He continued to write poems for the remainder of his life, and much of what he wrote on the back end of quite a long life was not very good. At the other stands Picasso. “In the main, Picasso only got better. That’s the take-away from the staggering exhibition of Picasso’s late paintings and prints at the Gagosian Gallery.” (Roberta Smith, Going All Out, Right to the End, New York Times, 16 April 2009, a review of a show featuring paintings from the last decade of Picasso’s life). Smith’s take is that the Gagosian Gallery show proves that “Picasso didn’t skitter irretrievably into an abyss of kitsch, incoherence or irrelevance after this or that high-water mark.” Rather, he “painted, as usual, for his life.”
When I come to the end of an essay such as this one, I must ask if this is anything more than narcissistic whining? Is it, maybe, honest self-appraisal, legitimate criticism from which something of value might be derived? Perhaps in the end you never know, no more than you know if a poem you have written is really good or not. In the end I come down on the side of the latter, that there is something of worth here, fully aware that this may just be a lot of wishful thinking.
The marathon course in San Antonio is billed as flat and fast, a good one to try for a PR or to qualify for Boston. Big T will be looking for a fast time. I will be looking to find the finish line. From where I stand now, I can conceive doing it. The image that torches my heart, the one that reaches into my spirit, is of Picasso painting for his life right up to the end. I can conceive that too, putting brush to canvas stroke after stroke, putting one foot in front of the other, putting one word down on the page after the other, mile after mile, page after page, and finding delight there.
David :: Jul.27.2010 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: 1 Comment »