The Logic of Long Distance

It's fashionable to say we are post-truth, but falsity and unreason have always lived alongside fact and inquiry -- and not just as their opposites.  As folks like Nietzsche and Freud have shown, the capacity for truth and reason is often built out of processes of violence, rejection, and resentment. Anyone who has been to school understands this tension. So must anyone who has reckoned with the history of America, beacon both of slavery and of freedom, of both equality and of racism, that most arbitrary and ugly form of inequality. We are, after all, not minds, but animals. Human animals operate largely outside of processes reason or even self-interest. These are late-arriving achievements, hard won and fragile.  Yes, we can maintain ourselves in a space of reason; we are capable of operating purely economically, but anyone who has interacted with another human animal intimately knows that all of us also need spaces of irreason and even violence, where we can e...

A few quick notes after reading the first two volumes of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard.  Why it works: even though My Struggle is personal and autobiographical, it is not confessional. It's personal narrative without guilt or its close brother: aspiration. The other reason it works is that the writing is full of detail, description, not just of inner life, but also of objects and ideas and landscapes. Knausgaard gives us a full picture of experience. His writing is neither subjective nor objective; or maybe better put, Knausgaard's writing makes that distinction irrelevant. While the content of the book is personal: family life, adolescence, work, play, etc., these things are also universal to human experience.  More than that, Knausgaard's resurrection of the person is also a crushing criticism of the way in which 21st century life has destroyed the personal as a source of meaning. It's done this in two ways: 1) through the culture of sameness, in which...

Disclaimer: this post is not about running -- it's been over a year since I've run! But it was motivated by a perfect evening for running, as the Tennessee summer somewhat incredibly loosened its grip, letting the crisp of fall in through the cracks in the clear sky. * * * It's come to me slowly and over time that almost all of my literary/philosophical heroes have been depressives. The three philosophers I've spent the most time with -- James, Emerson, and Nietzsche -- all struggled with and at moments succumbed to depression. There's a way in which their depression is a key to their writing, particularly Nietzsche's writing. Much of his work on human motivation -- the will to power -- could be seen as motivated by the depressive's question: how can I will myself to will? James' philosophy as well so often rotates around questions of what makes experience flow and run. Depression is like a large and stagnant body of water, and we see James throug...

Over the last few months, I have become less and less a runner. None of this was an act of will or a decision. Things have conspired -- family, body, job. I know this is true because when I go for a run now there is an absence of fluidity. The identity is not natural; it's artificial. The causes of this change are not so relevant, and understanding them would bring little understanding to the fact of change itself. This is the thing about change: in the raw core of its newness its origins can't be traced. Things do come into this world out of nothing, putting the lie to the the logic of causality. The philosopher decrees:  ex nihilo fit nihil . And yet -- each morning novelty covers the grass of the world like fresh dew. Some changes, of course, run deeper than others, and we use the language of identity to talk about those deep changes. We say: I am this, as if the words am, is are, be  were incantations that take a moment in time and lock it up in a case. John Dewey, fol...

I had been on a good run of posts -- a couple years I really hit my goal of writing weekly, but for the last month I have just not really been feeling it in terms of the old blogaroo. I think there's a lot of good content on the blog, so I hope you will keep browsing through, maybe re-read a piece or two. I make no future promises about the blog for now: I hope to return posting more frequently. Here's a quick one for the road. *  *  * "In the writings of a hermit one always hears something of the echo of desolate regions, something of the whispered tones and furtive look of solitude; in his strongest words, even in his cry, there still vibrates a new and dangerous kind of silence -- of burying something in silence. When a man has been sitting alone with his soul in confidential discord and discourse, year in and year out, day and night; when in his cave -- it may be a labyrinth or gold mine -- he has become a cave bear or a treasure digger or a treasure guard or ...

“We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge - and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves - how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves?" So begins Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals . I happen to be teaching this book now, so I am re-reading it for perhaps the fourth time, and like all great books, it deepens and expands with each re-reading. Nietzsche has many targets of criticism in the Genealogy , but the one that he mentions first is our relationship with knowledge. One of the fundamental goals of philosophical reflection (or maybe we should just say plain old thinking ) is the old Socratic dictum: "Know thyself." Self-knowledge is a key to good living. In order to achieve what makes us happy in life, we need to know at least at some basic level what makes us happy. Ouch! But the self turns out not to be so easy to know. There are any number of impediments to self-knowledge, and you don't need a PhD in philosophy to know the p...

"He who lives as children live -- who does not struggle for his bread and does not believe that his actions possess any ultimate significance -- remains childlike. " F. Nietzsche, "Daybreak" "The beast in me is caged by frail and fragile bars." -- J. Cash Back when I was in graduate school, one of my professors (a Freudian psychoanalyst whose primary mode of pedagogy was delicately nudging and spinning thoughts as, perhaps, a mineral collector does late at night, hopeful that an old crystal lit from just the right angle might gleam with a new shade of light) told me something that stuck with me. He said quite matter-of-factly after one of us had made some sort of comment about childhood: "Remember that childhood is an adult concept." This professor's point was the relatively simple but often unthought truth that children have no need for the concept of childhood. Childhood is a concept constructed in response to adult life which th...

One of the most difficult things in running is coming to terms with yourself. Indeed, part of the reason we run is to avoid this task: how much easier it is to change ourselves, than to live with ourselves! The truly uplifting stories that are passed around in running mostly have to do with leaving old selves behind, whether that old self was a couch potato, overweight, slower, a slave to the tv or computer, etc. While it is true that these stories inspire, I think that perhaps the elation we feel when we hear these stories might also be a feeling of relief. In addition to wowing us, don't these stories also whisper to us a little lie: "You don't have to live with yourself. You can become someone else." We do have to live with ourselves. So, on behalf of this truth, I want to shift this lens of running as a practice of self-transformation a little. If running is about changing the self, making it better, it is also about coming to terms with the self, learning t...

"Consider the herd grazing before you. These animals do not know what yesterday and today are but leap about, eat, rest, digest, and leap again; and so from morning to night and from day to day, only briefly concerned with their pleasure and displeasure, enthralled by the moment and for that reason neither melancholy nor bored. It is hard for a man to see this, for he is proud of being human and not an animal and yet regards its happiness with envy because he wants nothing other than to live like the animal, neither bored nor in pain, yet wants it in vain because he does not want it like the animal. Man may well ask the animal: why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only look at me? The animal does want to answer and say: because I always immediately forget what I wanted to say--but then it already forgot this answer and remained silent: so man could only wonder." --F. Nietzsche "On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life" In this lovely pa...

We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live - by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody could now endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error. --Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 121 This moustache is even better than Nietzsche's. This morning I ran with two friends of mine. We've got a good eclectic group of runners here in Nashville from a variety of backgrounds. Our conversations are always winding and interesting, full of provocations and insights, rarely conclusive of anything. The running mind seems to skim from topic to topic rather than burrow in. One subject that we skimmed over today was my last blog post . One of my running partners, who happens to have a PhD in physiology, reminded me that I had finally cured my four-year battle with chronic achilles tendinitis by finding the right shoe (in this cas...

"You must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star." -- F. Nietzsche "Looking back now, I think I had a lot on my mind and was pretty nervous, but as soon as I started I forgot about it all. The only thing I thought was, 'Who cares, let's go!' I'm not the type of guy who runs behind someone else. I was going to run up front no matter what the pace was." --Wanjiru on his Olympic record gold medal run in Beijing, fall, 2008 (from Japan Running News ) The running community has been shocked by the death of Sammy Wanjiru. You can read about Wanjiru's accomplishments in this Letsrun obituary ; it calls him the greatest marathon ever to live. He was 24 years old, just about to enter his running prime. The details of his death are still emerging, but Wanjiru had been hanging out with a tough crowd and had recently been arrested and not charged for a domestic disturbance. He was a troubled soul, and his death is sad. Our sport has an i...

It's the end of the semester, and it's time to reflect on the work that one does as a teacher. My running has suffered a bit this spring, but it's because I've been working a lot on my other passion, which is philosophy. Though I know that most of the folks who read this blog are runners, I thought that some reflections on teaching wouldn't be inappropriate, as connections can be drawn between the sort of intelligence that it takes to train well and the sort of intelligence it takes to teach well. Both are difficult and vague tasks, they require listening as much or more than knowing . Both also take a sort of faith that things really are working. The material that the teacher works with is much like the body--dark, resistant to intelligent control, possessed of wild and diverse instincts. Just like students, our bodies have minds of their own, our relationship with them has to be as receptive and open as it is controlling and directive, and the best training dep...

"...it's inevitable that we look at our worthiest goals and hopes with a seriousness which is difficult to maintain, [but] ... Another ideal runs before us, a peculiar, seductive, dangerous ideal to which we wouldn't want to persuade anyone: ... the ideal of a spirit that plays naively, i.e. not deliberately but from overflowing abundance and power, with everything that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine, ... it is only with this spirit that the great seriousness really emerges."                                                --Nietzsche, The Gay Science My buddy Mike wrote a nice piece on how he started running, and I've been meaning to link to it for a couple weeks now. His experience was much like mine. I think it pairs nicely with this Runner's World piece on the tenth a...

Talking about the weather is one of the things that human beings are wired to do. Weather has two features that make it great as a conversational piece. First, weather is shared, not personal--we live in it together. Second, the weather is nobody's fault. It's a guilt-free topic of conversation, one of the few left. In ancient times, almost every event was like the weather. It was seen outside of the frame of human responsibility. The gods controlled almost every aspect of life and we stumbled around here below, buffeted about by their arbitrary actions. While this way of framing the world seems perhaps naive and infantile to the contemporary mind, it was also liberating. People didn't have to choose sides. It wasn't BP's fault or Obama's fault or the Republican's fault or the media's fault. It was just fate, no guilt. The world's events--love, happiness, social harmony, war, death, sickness--were the result of complex and superhuman circumstances be...

"In the end, one loves one's desire and not what is desired." Nietzsche wrote this, and it is always important to remember that Nietzsche, famous as he is now, lived quite tragically in pain, depression, and quite unsure whether his books would be read or would survive. It is all too easy to go back to the authors who are now famous and believe that they believed in themselves as much as we now believe in them. But of course, this is a myth. The meaning of life is obvious to no one, and though the name "Nietzsche" now designates an entire body of thought that has been worked over by critics, academics, and students until a variety of meanings have been extracted rather cruelly and disseminated much more broadly than Nietzsche ever imagined and surely more broadly than he would have hoped, it is also possible to imagine Friedrich alone in his study at night scribbling onto paper not out of the pursuit of profound philosophical meaning but because he was lonely an...

"The art of the great rhythm..." --Nietzsche I am resting now. This is the hardest part of training, something I've always struggled to do. You work yourself into a cruel fitness, the sense that you can run forever. You have these new capacities at your fingertips. The eight mile runs, the ten mile runs, the twelve mile runs, even the long runs do not leave your weary. The workouts reveal strength behind strength, and speed where there was only acid before and empty effort. It's at that very moment that the runner has to be careful. Having pulled the bow taught, the feeling of that tension, that power, is so great and pleasureable that the temptation is to fritter it away in small releases, in the joys of the tireless state and the effortless 6 minute miles. We want to luxuriate in this power. To squander that shape in those private moments, on the private joy of training fast, of working out. But this is not the point, no. Having built a heart that is ready to pump ...

A typically morbid being cannot become healthy, much less make itself healthy. For a typically healthy person, conversely, being sick can even become an energetic stimulus for life, for living more. This, in fact, is how that long period of sickness appears to me now: as it were, I discovered life anew, including myself; I tasted all good and even little things, as others cannot easily taste them--I turned my will to health, to life , into a philosophy. --F. Nietzsch e In this short passage from his philosophical autobiography Ecce Homo , the last book he wrote before succumbing to insanity, Nietzsche gives us the story of how his philosophical vision was born. It is the product of a convalescence, the remainder of a battle for survival against the depression and physical pain that Nietzsche battled his entire adult life. He turned his will to health, to life , into a philosophy.  Indeed, Nietzsche is often proclaimed as a great philosopher of life, of power, of overco...