Pheidippides Was A Real Man

Well, boys, I figured out over the weekend that I have to drop out of the marathon. The shin splints (that I think I was whining about when I was down at WWC graduation) haven’t gone away, and my acupuncturist/physical therapist said I need total rest until they don’t hurt at all anymore, which could be up to two weeks. Then I can start with one mile, and then I increase that by 10% every time I run. I did the math, and that does not get me to 26.2 by November 1.

I know we’ve talked ad naus. about sports, but indulge me for one more post.

This sucks, because the marathon was a big thing in my life. I don’t really have that many things: my cipher of a day job, my writing, my friends and family (but no family of my own), and the marathon. It was sort of a parallel goal with writing, you know? ‘Today I will complete one task with a very specific measure and one with no real measure at all.’ One made the other easier to bear.

But also it sucks because I feel like a coward. I could run the marathon. I could swim for a few weeks and then get up to ten miles, let’s say, and then try to fudge it. A couple of friends have fucked their legs up trying to do similar things, but the very high likelihood is that I’d be more or less fine. A real man would find a way, right? and other people overcome way way worse things than this to run it (e.g. missing limbs).

There are legitimate medical reasons to drop out, but there’s also a big part of me that doesn’t ever want to run the marathon. That part wants to have a sick day for the rest of its life and watch TV and eat mochi balls and drink crème de menthe. I’ve been training myself not to listen to that part when I’m running. So Mr. Crème de Menthe is loving the shin splint excuse.

And if I do follow the advice of my physical therapist, I’ll feel fine on race day. That’s the most galling thing. I won’t be on the sidelines on crutches, I just won’t be in good enough shape to finish.

I also committed to raising $2500 for a charity to get into the race. I not only have to let them down, but I also gave them my credit card as security against the money I don’t raise, and I don’t know if they’ll give me dispensation for an injury.

Anyway, part of me writing this on Heart Arcade is just to bitch to my friends, and I know in the grand scheme this is small potatoes: running races only happens in a life that doesn’t have any life-threatening threats. But I’m writing about it here also to wonder about discipline and structure with writing, too.

As I said above, running was a temporary structure for writing, but I just haven’t known what I’m doing with writing for a while. And I mean this less in an existential way and more in a practical way. Am I really trying to write a book of short stories, or am I just starting a thousand different things to distract myself from the hard work of digging into anything?

I have a novel idea that I’m not that fired up about, but am I not that fired up because I’m just too scared or lazy to get into something that involved? Pretty soon it’s going to be a year since I graduated, and it’s not like I have five polished stories up and ready to go. And just as the shin splints are a helpful excuse for Mr. Crème de Menthe, so is the well-known mysteriousness of the writing process.

It would be helpful to have a metric, is what I’m saying. ‘Getting a Novel Into the Western Canon’ is a little grandiose (and the Western Canon ain’t what it used to be); ‘Two Hours of Writing A Day’ is a little too local. ‘Making Work That Causes Readers I Respect to Laugh In Recognition of Truth’ is probably the closest thing, but I don’t know exactly what that looks like on a Tuesday when I’m tired and want to watch re-runs. ‘Three Finished Stories by the End of the Year’? ‘Always Have Two Stories in the Inboxes of Magazines, No Matter What’?

I guess dropping out of the marathon has made me take another look at exactly what I’m trying to do, and where the runway lights are.

I know I’m supposed to be the wise sage after living for six more months in The World than you guys have lived, but what lights are you flying by right now?

Rock the Rock

So at this point in the writing/sports conversation, if it's not getting too stupid and reductive for everybody, I feel like I should mention my burgeoning interests in 1) mainstream/slightly not mainstream American sportswriting, and 2) Late 20th century Black Mountain-style poetics.

The first is last-two-years new, but surprisingly bullish: for someone who NEVER watched, or really even played team sports as a kid, I've found myself digesting a surprising amount of articles, books, and podcasts about them. Puzzling, at first (especially to myself); though upon further reflection, I think I understand what's going on. Sportswriting - good sportswriting that is, or at least the kind that I've found myself gravitating towards - is not actually about sports. It's about storytelling. Fuck the universities: the purest, most refined, and most probing narratological analysis right now is going on smack in the middle of the national consciousness - and as a writer (read: someone interested in stories and how they're made) I've found it more than just a little fascinating to watch how this discussion frequently plays out, branches, and spirals back to ideas and forms that seem to directly effect and fertilize my own endeavors.

Sports (and here I'm talking, not just about the sports you play, but about the sports your watch, consume, enter and live in: sports media, in other words) is a language. As with most languages, the success or failure of initial willed acclimations is often beyond the knocker's control (witness my repeated, pig-headed, but still fanatical attempts to like jazz. I'm talking stacks of CDs, Ralph Ellison essays, constipated, cocktail-sipping concerts, not to mention hours upon hours spent trying to hear what ever the fuck it was I was listening to, and yet still it's no dice. I don't even not like jazz: I simply can't hear it, which is to say, I can't speak it. For me to pass judgment on it would be like an American tourist passing judgment on Swahili). But in cases rich and overwhelming (meaning, any case worth your time), I'm a big believer in the guide. A Virgil, a map: that person or entity who can take you by the hand and tell you what's good, what's bad, what you should be looking for/give you a level ground of understanding, which you can then keep or dismantle as your tastes develop.

So far, I've had two ridiculously predictable, and yet totally infallible, sports-related guides: Bill Simmons and freedarko. What I find in each is, essentially, what I find in both: entertaining writing that is simultaneously about both a fascinating and complicated "obvious" topic (sports, or to be more specific, professional basketball), AND a hidden, secret, gnostic undertopic (writing). And there's the rub - for in using the medium of language to get at the heart of something inherently non-linguistic, I find, these two writers (or more than two: freedarko is actually a collective) inevitably seem to end up talking about writing, stories, history, creation.

(I'll dispense, for brevity's sake and under the banner of Tolstoyan familiarity, with a long proof on this point. Read FD's post on Celtics point guard Rajon Rondo (which contains the sentence "I've long maintained that point guards are like writers, whose effectiveness is determined not by their own personal ability to put the ball in the basket but to turn the court into their own dark funhouse and make the opposing team see the game on the point guard's revised and ultimately manipulative terms"), and try and tell me it isn't all about the flow-state/staticity argument we've been having. Or listen to Bill SImmons's tete-a-tete with Chuck Klosterman and see if there isn't something there pertaining to narratology and the storymaking of popular culture)

Anyway, words, words, words: but isn't the fascinating thing about sports, and about thinking about writing as a sport, the way that it acknowledges and respects the strange, mysterious core of all performance, be it linguistic or otherwise, while at the same time acknowledging the importance learned technique/inherited ability play in the coddling, cradling, and execution of those performances?

TO wit: Charles Olson's poetry may be bland, idiosyncratic, and imagistically poor hippie-babble, but when it comes to announcing the poetic sport, I find him one of the most entertaining and insightful of near-contemporary color men. Reading his essays (which poets from all over the world map credit with opening up the poetic field, turning their understanding of literature as something about to something), I get the feeling that I'm not just watching literature, but somehow participating it; that the energy inherent in poetry is somehow being transmitted to me, like a signal or electric charge. The parallel difference here: watching basketball as a spectator (which I do), and watching basketball as someone who will then go down to the local court and pull some crazy cross-over move whatever (or at least, will practice it until he can do it in a pick-up game). This, for me, is one of the greatest parts about being a writer: when I read, I'm not just being entertained, I'm being taught. Something is teaching me how to make. But then, to push the idea a little further, isn't it possible that, given the right guides and a sharp enough inquisitiveness, attention paid to ANY creative endeavor will end up teaching us about our own? Watch basketball, read sportswriting, listen to someone's grandmother talk about how to make a pie, hear a hobbyist hold forth on the peculiar pleasures of Amazon frog-collecting: in each case, there is something there that will talk to you about your own art/life/rhythm. One of my/our previous blog obsessions was the way that writing needed to be a conduit into, rather than away from life, and I feel that repeating itself here - though maybe the many-roomed-house metaphor needs to be subtilized. Not rooms, but worlds, constellations, whose motions parallel one another, but which touch only through our own inhabitation of each of them. Any real act will teach you about all the others.

Olson as point guard: "It is unbearable what knowledge of the past has been allowed to become, what function of human memory has been dribbled out to in the hands of these learned monsters whom people are led to think 'know.' They know nothing in not knowing how to reify what they do know. What is worse, they do not know how to pass over to us the energy implicit in any high work of the past because they purposely destroy that energy as dangerous to the states for which they work - which it is, for any concrete thing is a danger to the rhetoricians and politicians, as dangerous as a hard coin is to a banker." (The Human Universe)

Now, leaving off the obsession with monetary value (typical of even the greatest village explainers), watch the way that quote unlocks the "high work of the past", turning it from monument to generator, something we plug into. Which is the mystery at stake here, right? How do we create? Or, how do we harness our own unique combinations of talent and history in a way that allows us to put that fucking rock in the hole? In my own personal experience this is tricky, not least because you must first find a way to discover/create your position on the literary team - but in the moments that you do it? In the moments that you fit your art or life or whatever as smoothly as a key fits a lock or a bat fits a ball or a puck fits the net or word fits the world?

Olson is in the Emersonian line of energy transmition - but then again, so is Simmons. So are we. America is obsessed with renaissances and rebirths and revivals: not for nothing have we had (by the most conservative of estimates) three Great Awakenings in this country. A blog, written by beginning artists, about writing and life, must necessarily be obsessed with creation. But then, isn't its own making the secret subject of every made thing the world over? And don't we knock to be admitted, if not now, then please God, someday?

Take a Shot in the Mouth

I've always played team sports. Hockey, baseball, soccer (as a goalie, for one game, until I picked the ball up at half court. You can't use your hands outside of the goalkeeper area). Team sports are still a performative act for the individual player, but you have a group of fellow comrades that provide you with fist bumps and warm cheers to help you out of these moments of choking. Here’s a moment: I once slashed a player during a 5 on 3 power play, and the coach just ripped into me during the intermission. He threw a bowling pin across the room. I didn't even take off my helmet. I felt such intense shame and disappointment, not only for myself, but for my teammates. I let the guys down. When we were ready to get back on the ice, the guys gave me these small words of encouragement, "Come on, bud. Don't worry about it." I was benched for the rest of the game. But knowing the fellas were there to fully share the experience, no matter how devastating or ecstatic, no matter if we won or lost, I learned the importance of connections. I am not alone. I learned this.

We have the furious work done alone, in the gym, in the kitchen to maximize the effects of the gym (Seth, the exactitude of my diet would make you proud, although the taste of the food would horrify you. Tuna and iceberg lettuce blended into a muddy pap.) You can feel your skating stride lengthening (stretching regiment) and your foot work exploding (plyometrics and weight training), and you can see this on the ice, but there's also a higher level development of mind and manners. During one of my first college games, while I was walking back to the locker room, a fan threw a hot dog wrapper at me, and I swung my stick at the bleachers, trying to disembowel him. I looked like an idiot and embarrassed my team. Having to rely on others, you understand that they also rely on you, and so you can't do things like swing your stick at fans. These correctives, as silly as they seem, helped me become a better teammate.

In that sense, I feel like writing exists somewhere in this continuum of public and private acts. I mean, like Josh said in his class, we write for someone, even if that someone is an amalgam figure. Like, right now, I'm writing to a three headed dragon who is informing the content of this very post. If you write to yourself, who the hell is listening? Well, that's tautological sloppiness, but I guess I'm trying to say that I've learned how the lessons in team sports has transferred into my writing. How much of writing is really done alone? How much of sport is performed alone? This can get messy, depending on the sport (golf vs basketball: solitary, collaborative), and the type of writing, but I'll just end it by saying that this blog, as well as the talks, walks, dances, car rides, drunken meanderings near the hog pens, have changed the way I perceive my life, which translates into richer writing. By listening, and participating in these bad-ass talks, I move closer to what Auden called "the authenticity of being," a noble, life long goal of becoming, a process that is deathly essential in my writing. So keep feeding me, suckas.

The Skid Boast

Teammates—

Thank god Josh took this in the direction of sports; now I have an excuse to drop all the volleyball and badminton and marathon analogies that drive my friends so crazy.

The act of writing (and art generally) does seem to have so much in common with athletics: you teach someone history or algebra but you coach them in writing (The hard science types will protest, and say the same is true of the improv of badass math). You learn the basics of basketball technique, memorize them, but then have to repeat them over and over until you forget them when you’re actually making the finger roll. The newer parts of your brain (learning things abstractly, grasping concepts via words), eventually give in to the old parts of your brain (reflexes, senses, habituation).

The muscle awareness overcomes the analyzing, judgment-making awareness. You’re absorbed, you’re in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s flow state, you can do no wrong, your ego drops away, the violin is playing you, etc. It is the super-bestest, and if you can get there often, you get very very good at whatever it is you’re doing.

Playing squash in college, and was very bad at getting into the flow state, especially when I was playing big matches. I had the same disco-rice mind that Josh had on the racing blocks, and what made it worse: I thought that you could get into the flow by trying to strangle the chatty, doubty, wordy mind. Get out of my head, internal monologue!

It really quickly devolved into this: “Oh my god, if I’m THINKING about whether or not I can get into the flow state, I am by definition NOT in the flow state, and, Jesus, my opponent over there with the Walkman on, it probably never even occurs to him that there is any other state than the flow state, and he’s probably some Ivan Drago machine/noble savage who has no reflective consciousness at all, and oh I am so cursed with consciousness, and you taught me language and my only profit is to curse…and now the match is over and I hate myself.” I basically pried the squash-court map off of my brain with the crowbar of thinking.

So with writing, I think the flow state is extra hard to get into, because I’m trying to get past the chatty verbal brain into the…um, un-chatty verbal brain? It’s a real bitch when you’re trying to get the brain's new part to behave like the old part: according to reflex, intuition, habituated certainty, and so on. That’s exactly what the frontal lobe is designed not to do. I’m trying to make something inspired with the same part of my brain that produces the words that are distracting me.

I think writers like to bitch and moan just because, but I really do think it’s harder than painting and music because we have to move into words instead of away from them.

But the payoff is so huge. When I read something that has really performed human experience with words, I think the edge between the animal and the intellectual gets blurred, and I get a shocking, clarified feeling for life. It’s an awareness of all the things that happen to me all day long that I can usually only half-sense.

But the work is really hard. It seems like we’re starting to talk a fair amount about passion vs. patience, and the passion part helps when you just have to say something and so fuck that verbal resistance.

But the rare instances of patience help me so much, too. After my competitive squash days, I started realizing how much the scared part of your brain loves being strangled. You try to shut it up and it gets louder and louder. But just keep hitting balls, letting the voice sit over there and do its thing, eventually it gets quieter. And with writing, the more I sit at my desk, the less time I spend worrying about whether or not I can do this, the quieter that voice gets, too, even though worry has its way with me most of the time. Writing is the opposite of waiting—ok, so Roberto said this whole post in three words.

Another thing that came as a shock in squash was: thinking helped! If I let my analysis mind concentrate on the weaknesses of the other guy’s game, it got occupied and couldn’t worry about whether or not I was in the zone. OK, I’m getting weary with this analogy, so I’ll just say I think that has a lot to do with editing.

How are you all doing getting past words to get to words?

All right, off to do some star drills.

(P.S. If I could figure out how to make post titles into links, you would have seen this video. After watching it you should be able to do it perfectly.)