Running is an excuse to write about animals. Particularly, the scene in my groundbreaking, forthcoming young adult novel where Maurice the Morose Badger surveys the ruined landscape before him, takes a pinch of snuff, kneels, rubs dark loamy soil into the pads of his paws, and weighs his own mortality heavy in his earthy, clouded mind.

“…and already the knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.”
–Rilke, from “Duino Elegies”

(pictured: The Face That Launched a Thousand Indie-Boy Ships.)

Here are, to the best of my recollection, all of the animals I have had the fortune to meet while running: various kinds of squirrels, chipmunks, ground squirrels, pika, rattlesnakes, mice, rats, black bears, moose, coyotes, tortoises, garter snakes, rubber boas, voles, elk, mule deer, antelopes, cottontails, hares, cows, horses, llamas, salamanders, newts, lizards (assorted), bighorn sheep, regular (admittedly less exciting) sheep, alpacas, black-tailed prairie dogs, raccoons eating trash out of various receptacles on the Boulder Creek Path, skunks (approached with extreme care), and an unsurprisingly capacious collection of neighborhood dogs and cats. I don’t even bring up birds or fish here because I don’t have much of a memory for anything but charismatic megafauna, anyway.

I have been pursued, often on the verge of six simultaneous heart attacks and at Kenenisa Bekele pace, by a surprisingly tenacious basset hound, two German Shepherds, a coyote, and a seriously irritated momma blue grouse (the lattermost while hiking near Granby, Colorado). Other than these times, I often find myself stopping my watch, even during a tempo or fartlek (giggle) run, to watch wildlife rummage through foliage (bear—see a logorrheic post from earlier this summer), yip ineffectually in warning (prairie dog), stare blandly back at me while chewing (moose), or perform erratic movements that language cannot help but fail before (the squirrels I witnessed mating—I think—in the wheel well of a parked Toyota Camry on CU’s campus in early summer, 2005).

Recently, while watching a bunch of jays noisily taking apart a half-loaf of bread near the Reno High School track and remembering my Coloradan housecat, Waffles, I started (unsurprisingly) thinking about home. Animals, I’ve begun to think, are in fact inextricably bound with the dull, unmistakable agony of nostalgia for many observers. Or at least, kind of.

As everyone’s favorite wizened, impossibly rumpled University of Colorado English Dept. fixture, Jeffrey Robinson, might tell you if you rub elbows with him the right way, nostalgia’s etymology is Greek, stemming from nostos (home) and algos (pain). A cognitive dissonance that arises from an awareness of the discrepancy between where one is and where one belongs. Which sucks mightily, but probably characterizes human experience more than anything else I’ve lived through—it’s at least up there with loss, wonder, and love.

Displacement and nostalgia show up often enough in literature and culture enough for me to start wondering if we should ask them politely to leave, honey, don’t you think, because it’s getting awfully late and didn’t we see tem yesterday at the grocery store, anyway, and why won’t they stop hanging around the cheese tray and hogging all the punch? For example, there’s: the pining for Eden in Judeo-Christian thought; Lacan’s symbolic order; The Odyssey (speaking of which, I can’t wait to totally wreck the lives of 40 college freshmen here in a week when they’re forced to read the entire saga in two weeks. So much for beer pong and looking for new filmy freshman sundresses that piss off my dearest Yam-Bear. Lolz!); Annie Dillard’s musings on the environment and self-consciousness; Bob Sagat’s recent resurgence in celebrity; Wordsworthian reflection in sheep-saturated meadows; saccharine-voiced Sedona crystal-worshipping white people; whiskey-soaked, late-night Hemingway-ish reflection involving old love letters and cold revolvers lying on coffee tables; LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends”; Americans’ collective identity centering around anything with an early- to mid-90s Disney stamp; any VH1 show prefixed by “I Love The…”; this very blog’s rosy take on anybody between 1972 and 1988 wearing Union Jack-emblazoned bun huggers and Onitsuka Tiger running flats; and, of course, Emerson’s contention that the role of the poet is to revive language itself from a debased state:

For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,–and re-attaching even artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight,–disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts. Readers of poetry see the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these. For these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive, or the spider’s geometrical web.

pheewwww. Congratulations on hacking through all those clauses. Charles Dickens would doubtlessly approve of the length of that list. I imagine his beard wagging delightfully as he claps on faintly from beyond the sorrow and suffering of this mortal sphere. (We can refer to him Darles Chickens, if we’re feeling especially irreverent.) Nevertheless, the verdict stands: We live, apparently, in a degraded, rust-covered age, far from our warm, imagined burrows where Things Were Always Better.

But nostalgia’s also kind of a drag. It’s selective amnesia. It can be more solipsistic than, say, driving past a schoolbus fire only to wonder if there’s a Jack in the Box nearby so you can get breakfast. It allows us to choose—somewhat hastily—what we want to see, in lieu of actually perceiving what we see (assuming we can even make a distinction between the two—thanks a lot, Kant, you shitbag). More generally, it monolithically assumes that the world should break and bend to the vision of how we would have it be. Which is why nostalgia drives people like Donna Haraway and anybody who’s a fan of the Futurists (except for the Fascist bits, that is) nuttier than a ground squirrel who’s just been declared CFO of Planters as a publicity stunt. And, to step softly onto the very, very thin cultural ice of Hallmark Original Movies: it’s true that you can never really go home again. (cf. Frodo Baggins.)

But I remain transfixed by animals. They exhibit a shocking integrity, a neat completeness, and an attunement to the slightest, soft murmurings of weather and other living things around them that I envy and imagine that we might have once maintained, but have long since lost. Instead, they speak in voices that resound in us both from within and without. A cuneiform that is indecipherable, but which we’ve read many years ago. So here’s another step in the dialectic of running: the run itself as a form that forces me to pay attention to what, exactly, I’m doing with my body at any given moment and how it feels (usually terrible), counterbalanced with an awareness that I am aware and am wracked by history, spirituality, memory, and all that other shit to which literature’s supposed to satisfactorily speak. But hey, maybe it’s a problem to talk about or for animals at all. And for that, I defer to my Cape Cod demigod, Henry Beston:

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by a complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge, seeing thereby a feather magnified, the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man.

In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.

They are not brethren. They are not underlings. They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: I’ve been more or less squatting at UNR’s new library (redact that: the new Knowledge Center, sorry. Blech.) the past week, supervising the crack team of Jolt Cola-sustained orangutans at work on my thesis prospectus and comps reading list. So today it was 5 miles on the treadmill at Lombardi, watching the gold medal womens volleyball match between the US and Brazil. *grrowwwwllll*

Workout/whether or not I vomir‘ed: Dailed the machine at 7:04 pace for the whole thing–stupid, really, considering tomorrow’s long run, but hey, someone’s got to impress the sorority chicks on the ellipticals behind the treadmills–and ended up dumping a lot of corrosive sweat all over the treadmill/Didn’t puke, for which I’m thankful.

How to get there if you’re in Reno: Lombardi’s just above the new student union up on the hill. But you’re going to have to cough up some cash if you’re not unfortunate enough to be a UNR student.

Total Mileage to Date: 374

Days remaining to Denver: 55