Ontological Marathon

A few months ago, a beloved former student offered to get me a bib for the New York marathon. I last ran it in 2017. It is my favorite race. Now, brace yourself because this will be shocking: I can get obsessive, scarily competitive when I train for and run a marathon. I think I once wrote here about falling pretty spectacularly in the pouring rain and pitch black at 430 in the morning training for another marathon; finishing my workout, before coming home to realize I’d lost a good portion of the skin on both my thumbs and my left elbow, the palms of both my hands.

I go stretches, often years, not wearing a watch, trying very hard not to think too much about how much or little I run each week, to keep it a space where I feel pleasure, let my mind wander. I try very hard not to make it a space where I constantly take account, obsess. Sometimes small children are running in the park, and I have to sprint a bit more quickly just to show them I am faster. It’s a place where I feel strong and I like that feeling quite a lot.

But then that strong-feeling is, of course, one of the many reasons I love training. The effect is intense; the rewards gradual but real and felt. It hurts often. Sometimes you throw up. You’re in your body, feel its limits, strength, the ache of all that work. There is so much fizz and fuzz in daily life but sprinting, the fourth, for instance, of six one-mile sprints in 90-degree heat has an incredible ability to shut down whatever might be whirring, churning in your brain.

My student very kindly, generously offered to get me the bib but then I hadn’t heard from her. It was such a kind offer. She’s a busy grownup. I didn’t want to overreach. But time was passing, and I needed to start training. Without reaching out to her I downloaded a new running app, started amping up my miles and my speed. Are you signed up for the marathon or not, my husband said, when I came home from a particularly brutal 12 miles.

I like to run, I said, maybe I’ll just train indefinitely.

It’s my ontological marathon, I said to my friend the next day on the phone.

I often think of the ways running is a metaphor for everything, but maybe a better way to say that is the practice of running, a practice I’ve engaged in, thought about, wrestled with and been compulsively addicted to for coming up on thirty years, is almost always instructive, it essentializes in its clarity and structure something that in the rest of our lives can feel murky, elastic, much less clear.

Last summer I had two notebooks, one was titled The Small Book and one was titled The Big Book. I had this idea that I wanted to see, in The Small Book, what the smallest possible amount of time and space could show me about what life might be—think, maybe, Giacometti, getting rid of the tree to see the leaf, the body to see the head, etc.,; Woolf said there was nothing Cézanne couldn’t say with an apple; and also, I was thinking, in The Big Book, about scope and scale—what you had to cover large swathes of time to see and understand—think Joan Mitchell triptychs and quadriptychs, walking up close to them, stepping back, then closer, on and on.

I was interested in ambition, a word about which I’ve always felt profoundly complicated, how maybe I, how maybe lots of us, have focused on the small not only because I love it (I do love it) but because the world has taught me it’s all I’m capable of. I was interested in breaking out of whatever had come to feel like was my and my work’s place (an indeterminate idea but that’s what it felt like in my head).

I’ve spent most of this year working on what I had vaguely thought of as The Big Book. (it got a title a long time ago; now, calling it The Big Book, feels ridiculous, but there we are). But then, I had a long talk with my friend this week and realized The Big Book might also have The Small Book inside it, that in returning to everything I’ve thought and learned about the granular, the domestic, interpersonal, I might find the bits I need to get it to the end.

I realized too one of the things that was impeding my seeing through to what the book needed was something that I’ve said a thousand times to students, that it’s still only a book, that all books are so much smaller than the life we’re trying to fit in. This is also, of course, how you finally make it better, to focus fully your attention on the book it is, instead of all the other books you at various points thought it might be. It shifts what might have felt a long time like a bunch of sketches into the rich and layered space of paint.

The idea of training for a marathon indefinitely is thrilling to me in about a thousand different ways and also it’s absurd. Bodies age and do, in fact, have limits (even typing that makes me a little bit insane). I once had all sorts of grand delusions about what I might accomplish running, but, even with my watch turned back on, training started, I’m still middle-aged. One of my favorite things about running now as opposed to running when I started is that the thing that I loved most used to be winning. Now my favorite part is by myself and quiet, sweating, no one talking to me, that emptied brain and worn out body feeling that comes from working hard.

I finally last week reached out to my student, and, again, kind and lovely, got confirmation this week that I get to run the race. I felt elated, obviously, also a little scared. What if I get hurt and don’t do it? What if I do it and its terrible, my slowest yet? Where is the danger, risk, I wrote this morning while the kids were sleeping in my little novel notebook. Books need reach and push, ambition, but you should also feel, in moments, a more granular and terrifying thrum of yearning, ache inside your belly and your brain. It should feel risky, high stakes, even as—partially because—it’s also likely smaller than you hoped.

Raking Sand

Over a few months my sophomore year of college, I spent a good amount of time in the office of a dean who was trying to kick me out. I remember almost nothing of this person or our conversations. My grades were fine, was the problem. My attendance: almost none. I had been reported to the University because I often did not leave my dorm room except for long walks in the middle of the night and my roommate was concerned. None of this is relevant besides to say I was not in a great spot. I was able to stay. I began to see a therapist who it is not overstating to say saved my life.

This dean, though, I have very little recollection of her. I might have spent months going to her office; it might have been days or weeks. I couldn’t tell you what she looked like, what she said to me in those meetings. I can see with near perfect clarity the distance between where my feet sat as we talked and the bottom of her desk. She had a large and lovely office. In retrospect, I should have paid closer attention. The other person who played a pretty major role in my not being in the state I was in then, was a Woolf professor who was a contingent hire—I would three times over the next ten years write letters arguing for her to get tenure but she would be denied—and her office was down a long hall and so cramped and small that I had to keep my feet tucked under my chair so as not to kick her or disrupt one of the stacks of books she had on the floor as we talked.

This dean’s office had great big windows, a couch along one wall, two large chairs in front of her desk and a small table between them. I can see the face of that Woolf professor perfectly. No doubt in part because she always had to sit so close to me when we met.

Anyway: on the table between the two chairs in front of that dean’s desk was a long flat object, three-ish inches deep, roughly a foot long, 6 inches across. Inside this container was sand, a small rake, two pleasingly cold smooth rocks.

I fidgeted a lot then. I am still restless almost all the time. When I came for our first meeting, this woman was not in her office and when her secretary first led me in, I lifted this container of sand and placed it on my lap. I struggled then with calibration and compulsions—I wanted, suddenly, to have that slab of sand on my lap; more than that, it felt possible it would help steady me as I talked, and so I picked it up. The slab was made of hard stone, cool to the touch, and though it was winter in New England, all the buildings were always overheated, and it felt good to feel the cold on my palms and fingers, through my jeans, as I sat.

The sand had a small rake laid out over it and I picked the rake up and ran it slowly through the sand. I held one of the rocks and then the other one. When the dean came in, I freaked out and began to set the thing down, but she let me keep it on my lap. The whole time we talked, I raked. Slow, methodical. Ritual, repetition—they are two of my favorite things on earth. The sand was such, the rake was such, that very little changed each time you raked except it looked slightly smoother; you could see the marks each time you raked, and the allocation of sand became more even. But it was enough sand that it never looked completely even. After a while, you raked because raking felt good.

Often, then, I did not show up for things I had agreed to. That dean was the person who found my therapist. She was the person who could have decided that the University send me home and I would have never met that Woolf professor, added an English major, on and on. I would likely have not gone back the next few times the University said I had to to that Dean’s office, except I had loved so much running that rake through sand that I did.

I have not written to you here because I have been raking. Because I have been, in a time of near constant world horrors, been so grateful, relieved, to get up early every morning, and slowly and methodically re-allocate endless bits of sand.

I went on a long drive with a friend last week and we somehow happened upon talk of college. I mentioned this stretch of time but didn’t talk about the dean or raking sand, except we were driving to Maine to write together for a few days, and, once we got there, once I got to working every morning, I began to think all the time about that cold stone on my lap. I haven’t wanted to write because when I’m deep in something I like not thinking too much about whether or not it will become something, I like the ritual, the repetition, I like the weight of it in my brain and body, computer often on my lap.

That same time in college, I wrote a friend and told her I’d decided I wanted to be a writer, Oh, Lynny, she said to me, your grammar is a mess. We did not go to a particularly good high school and I had never learned grammar. Nearly every book I’d read so far that I loved I’d happened upon randomly and on my own. But inside language, inside sentences was often the only place that I felt safe, alive, like sense might one day come. I bought a book and taught myself grammar. I went back into sentences but slightly more equipped. I still get nervous often, am embarrassed and ashamed, that I never learned it well or good enough.

Last night, at dinner, our younger kid asked me what the difference was between “good job” and “well done.” I told them “good job” was about the product, “well done” was about the quality of the work you did, the process. Well done is more important for me, I said. But even that feels like a stretch. What felt so thrilling to me, remembering that sand rake was that “well” wasn’t possible. It was just cold heavy stone on lap and hand tight on the rake’s medal handle, down and through and back then up then down and through and back.

For a long time, I think, that’s all writing should feel like, that its immense, extraordinary pleasure is in simple repetition; practice because nothing “good” ever came without an endless going back and through—head down, attention sharply, carefully attuned—and back and through and try again.