Cookie Monster
c/o Sesame Street Workshop
Kaufman Astoria Studios
34-12 36th Street,
Astoria, NY 11106
Dear Cookie Monster,
Much to my delight, I recently stumbled across a used VHS of the 1983 Sesame Street movie, Don’t Eat the Pictures: Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of childhood faves. Thank you, Cookie Monster, for not eating all the art in the Met. Thank you for reminding me–as I toil away on my Master’s thesis and prepare for the gnarliest of standardized tests this weekend–that I should occasionally go to the grocery store; that one cannot live on art alone, not even Cézanne’s pears.
Also thank you for your sly, searing critique of the image consumerism that is subconsciously encouraged by museums.
Yours,
C. Turner
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Days streaked: 11
Total Miles:44.4
Today’s contribution to my impending tinnitus while running: TV on the Radio
Herrrro long-patient tulips! A little over twenty-four hours ago, I shook the dust from my sandals and emerged like a bespectacled naked mole rat into the bright, painful sunlight of reality. Yes, chiles, my fetters are sprung! My face is towards the February sun and my hair is being playfully ruffled by the coy childfingers of an unexpected spring wind. The long, hibernatory exile of preparing for, and taking, my comprehensive exams came to a horrific, nerve-flaying close yesterday. I’d rather get gut-stabbed in downtown Reno’s post office than take another comps exam: an eight-hour orgy of vacuous academic posturing, run-on sentences, and impoverished exegesis of a number of books involving ape-men and Royal Bengal Tigers with British accents.
But I’m emancipated! Free to do whatever I want, whenever I want, to whomever I want, all of the time, everywhere, forever and ever! I’m going to watch Braveheart on VHS! I’m going to follow my stoic German roommate/landlord, Jens, around the house in ominous silence with a clipboard! I’m going to eat an entire jar of bean dip AND a whole muhfucking box of Mike ‘n Ikes! I’m going to learn how to blow glass! I’m going to continue to refuse to listen to Vampire Weekend, for good reasons. I’m going to thrifting for a french horn, and then I’m not even going to learn how to play it. I’m going to beat the green foresty snot out of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for the thirty billionth time. I’m going to build a HAM radio (possibly entirely out of ham). I’m going to photoshop Will Oldham’s mustache onto a photo of a cat’s butthole and print it out on two hundred fliers. And then I’ma mail them to Nevada’s governor, Jim Gibbons, to finally give that pasty drool factory at the helm of this great desert state a nasty piece of my mind about continuing to let Nevada’s higher education system commit seppuku. I’m going to carve “Turner + Middleton” in girly, i’s-dotted-with-lil’-hearts cursive into every piece of furniture in the house. Because I can finally, finally, FINALLY spend some quality time boring myself straight out of my skull.
And most of all, I’m going to get back to running. And pretending to write about running. I finally bit the bullet early last week and continued my ongoing contributions to Pearl Izumi’s coffers by purchasing (through a remarkably skeezy, possibly selling-pirated-shoes-from-a-mob-warehouse-in-some-Baltic-state, discount internet wholesaler) my third straight pair of Synchro Pace II trainers. The downer is they didn’t have the color I wanted: that retina-searing shade of pale, Phoenix Suns-ish-orange (think insane, dessicated pumpkin) of my first pair.
It is, in fact, wholly necessary that I now rechannel all available intellectual and physiological capacities into running. And also into finding pictures of sweaty, middle-aged marathoners in squirrel (“skwerl,” if you prefer) furry suits on Flickr to illuminate blog posts.
Why? Because G. and I are (most likely) running the 2009 Soroptimist International of Fort Bragg, California 25th Annual Whale Festival 10K Run and Walk in mid-March. And, powered by the seismic potency of distant whalesong and the intense oxygen concentration in that brisk, seaside California air, I’m going to AIM FOR AND ECLIPSE my father’s 10K personal record, a 36:35 set at a 1979 race in Lake Tahoe. Thus, the vaguely Freudian undercurrent that’s run silent and deadly under the Belfry’s placid surface will finally be stilled and grow cold.
With that athletic Telemachiad dutifuly concluded, however, I’m a little freaked that I won’t have anything to talk about here. What, if not petty filial anxiety, will prove to be the hot, tortured engine of my running?
Thoughts are also beginning to percolate about my next marathon. Including whether or not I actually want to subject my psyche and hip joints toanother marathon. If I do line one up, it’ll probably be Austin a year or so from now, since that’s where I’m moving to be with gwiggles in June. But I’d also really love to do Denver again. Hrrrrmmmmmmmfffg.
During my run earlier this evening, I was chewing on a couple of passages in tandem that I’ve come across lately in my reading, putting them in dialogue and basically confusing the delightful hell out of myself trying to reconcile them. One’s from the book I’ve been reading before passing out in recent nights, and the other’s from a book on corporeal feminist theory for my comps exam.
Running allows a positive view of something often considered frightening: aloneness. Many never accept it during their lives and are often depressed because of it. Such people surround themselves with other people and activities so they don’t have to acknowledge their aloneness. If they are constantly surrounded, they can deceive themselves into believing they are not alone. This is the cause of their almost inevitable depression . . . But it is true: we are born alone and we will die alone. Sure, along the way there are people to help us through individual situations and problems, to bring us joy and understanding, and to pull us along emotionally. But psychically, we are alone, and in our decisions we are alone . . .
Running is similar to Zen in that it can act as a form of meditation to quell these fears. The runner is alone; and this fact becomes clearer as he continues in the activity. He is alone while running, because his mind has no immediate problem on which to focus its attention. Therefore, it must occupy itself. The runner must accept aloneness . . .
When this process takes place, a cleansing results; the waste that is removed is confusion, doubt, and fear. It will be a realization that the person isn’t as closely tied to his responsibility, his work, as he perhaps supposed . . . Philip Kapleau wrote, in the book Zen Keys:
“Yet we live in a society where the object for so many is to do as little work as possible, where the work place, whether office or home, is looked upon as a place of drudgery and boredom, where work, rather than being a creative and fulfilling aspect of one’s life is seen as oppressive and unsatisfying. How different this is from Zen! In Zen, everything one does becomes a vehicle for self-realization, every act, every movement is done wholeheartedly, with nothing left over.”
-James Marlin, “Running and Zen,” in New Guide to Distance Running, 1983.
[Pictured: irony]
And:
What Descartes accomplished was not really the separation of mind from body (a separation which had already been long anticipated in Greek philosophy since the time of Plato) but the separation of soul from nature. Descartes distinguished two kinds of substances: a thinking substance (res cogitans, mind) from an extended substance (res extensa, body); only the latter, he believed, could be considered part of nature, governed by its physical laws and ontological exigencies. The body is a self-moving machine, a mechanical device, functioning according to causal laws and the laws of nature. The mind, the thinking substance, the soul, or consciousness, has no place in the natural world. This exclusion of the soul from nature, this evacuation of consciousness from the world, is the prerequisite for founding a knowledge, or better, a science, of the governing principles of nature, a science which excludes and is indifferent to considerations of the subject. Indeed, the impingements of subjectivity will, from Descartes’ time on, mitigate the status and value of scientific formulations . . . Descartes, in short, succeeded in linking the mind-body opposition to the foundations of knowledge itself, a link which places the mind in a position of hierarchical superiority over and above nature, including the nature of the body. From that time until the present, subject or consciousness is separated from and can reflect on the world of the body, objects, qualities.
-Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, 6
Putting these texts into a dialectic led me into some interesting terrains of thought: penises v. vaginas v. organs that are in-between (thinking more symbolically than biologically on this one), the postcolonial politics of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, ice cream birthday cakes, narcissism, those gross tumors that grow teeth and hair that they sometimes show on TLC, liturgical dance/Sufism, horror movies where hands gain sentience and attempt to kill their owners, whether or not I have margarine in the fridge, whether or not to confront Jens when he says horrifyingly misogynistic things with his German accent, and this one awesome ice dancing video on YouTube.
Anyway. So I was in the middle of trying to remember whether it was Brad Pitt or Kiefer Sutherland who starred in Seven Years in Tibet, sashaying through Chrissi McLaughlan Park at dusk around mile 7 or so of my run today, giving myself tinnitus with “Darker” by the Doves. My cogitations were cut abruptly and terrifyingly short, however, because of the dog.
A pony-sized, black-and-grey Great Dane came barreling out of the nether regions of the park, with blood in its eyes and its tongue lolling crazily out of one side of its mouth. I just about soiled my track pants as I frantically tried to remember what Simon did a few months ago when similarly confronted by a slavering beast. Especially since the dog’s owner, a portly septuagenarian in a Raiders windbreaker, shuffled into sight from behind a hill, screaming, “No, Bruce Willis, come back! Goddamnit! You goddamn dog! Dammit come back come back!”
I ended up opting to freeze in place and hope that the dog would spare my Achilles tendons and other vital running ligaments (“I can probably recover from a calf puncture wound within two weeks or so,” I remember thinking). Bruce Willis, however, skidded to a halt just as he was about to bowl me over and disembowel me. Watching a Great Dane put on the brakes after a full gallop, by the way, is a fantastic sight; think of a rocket-powered deer on ice skates trying to avoid sliding into a wall. Bruce Willis then proceeded to flop ecstatically over onto his back and look up at me with a wild, demanding, triumphant gaze. He wanted a belly rub.
Which brings me to today’s epiphany: Philosophy is no match for a playful Bruce Willis.
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Most recent run and atmospheric conditions: Frosty, cloudy, twilit. Long and slow from Idlewild out to the Last Bridge and back.
Workout: 8 miles
Total Mileage to Date: 681
Days remaining to Boston!!: 160
p.s. During the course of research for this post, I found out that Marmaduke was apparently (up until last Tuesday, anyway) putting together a 2008 presidential bid.
“…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.
