The project continues; it’s going to take some time, reading these journals accumulated from the past years. I had made a decision and an effort not to document or talk about my running in the notebooks, as I’d, after all, kept some other records when I was in training for, say, a particular race or marathon. But when have I ever been able to compartmentalize successfully? Right. Never. So the running creeps in. I talk about in a journal Sunday, Feb. 24, 1997, living at the beach then, training for a marathon (that I never made it to: I never successfully trained for a marathon, too crazy, too extreme, for example, winding up in a cast even once from running in the dark (in which I couldn’t see) and fracturing my ankle running over/off an uneven raised lip of concrete along the drainage side of a street); I talk about how as I was running, in fatigue mode, just charging forward, a driver, obviously late for services, turned into a church parking lot, cutting me off. At that point in the running, it is near impossible to just stop dead. I was bothered enough to write about it later, recording some rather humorous stuff along the lines of what would the lord think of you, crushing this woman under your wheels in a hurry to get to this service for which you’re already late, etc and so on. (The entry does turn into something more, a musing over structures that takes its starting point as the structures of religion and services [”we” have created] imposed on Sundays and why it might be felt as necessary to have ritual and impositions on what otherwise might be too loose-ended [for others, of course, not me, never me, just to be clear.])
I so much have the drive sometimes still to run, despite an MRI showing degenerative spine disease and experts pronouncing I should not ever run again. Still the urge doesn’t leave me. Reading the interview with Haruki Murakimi stirred this all up again, again, i.e.:
Murakami: I will go on running for as long as I can walk. You know what I would like to be written on my tombstone?
SPIEGEL: Tell us.
Murakami: “At least he never walked.”
So, I was talking about this a little with C, driving back from downtown at lunch today, where we’d gone together to lobby Senator Sherrod Brown as part of Amnesty International’s 2008 Darfur lobby week, for which C is this area’s delegation leader. (Aside: Are you in Cincinnati? Do you want to participate? There’s the rest of this week - contact me, if you’re interested.) The meeting in the Senator’s office went well. As we were in there, the snow began (again) to fall; I sat watching it drop thickly on the other side of the plate glass. I tried to feel sorry for myself so that I could feel a bit ashamed if I could manage it, self-sympathy, in the face of what was/is/goes on every second, of the dropping snowflakes, in Darfur.
Driving home, the thick snow falling showed its propensity to stick and it was then that I was thinking about how hard it must be to run here, run anywhere where’s there snow and ice obscured beneath it. I never had that to contend with, though there was a year in which I visited Boston in February (I always seem to go visiting in northern extremes, it turns out, from reading my journals, in February, at least as would seem like, determined from living in Florida and in South Carolina coastal areas: Boston, Montreal, and Ann Arbor just a week or so ago) and it was a year in which I was in top fanatical form about running. I got a Gore-tex suit and all kinds of stuff just in order to able to run along the Charles, where I understood that the path underfoot would be cleared enough for running. You can’t run with short, stilted steps, defensive against falling. Driving home, I was talking to C about how in our neighborhood there were sidewalks, and streets, that still held bumpy solid patches of ice not good for running over that now would be covered by snow. How do people here run, I wondered, real runners?
But, so, Murakami is having a book come out about his running. The interview is a good one. I would suggest reading it.
He talks about how it is to have the drive for a certain story. I think I will always love to read or hear about how other writers feel or describe this need for a story to be told. This is what Murakami says; I’ve added the emphases.
SPIEGEL: Are you a better writer because you run?
Murakami: Definitely. The stronger my muscles got, the clearer my mind became. I am convinced that artists who lead an unhealthy life burn out more quickly. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin were the heroes of my youth — all of them died young, even though they didn’t deserve to. Only geniuses like Mozart or Pushkin deserve an early death. Jimi Hendrix was good, but not so smart because he took drugs. Working artistically is unhealthy; an artist should lead a healthy life to make up for it. Finding a story is a dangerous thing for an author; running helps me to avert that danger.
SPIEGEL: Could you explain that?
Murakami: When a writer develops a story, he is confronted with a poison that is inside him. If you don’t have that poison, your story will be boring and uninspired. It’s like fugu: The flesh of the pufferfish is extremely tasty, but the roe, the liver, the heart can be lethally toxic. My stories are located in a dark, dangerous part of my consciousness, I feel the poison in my mind, but I can fend off a high dose of it because I have a strong body. When you are young, you are strong; so you can usually conquer the poison even without being in training. But beyond the age of 40 your strength wanes, you can no longer cope with the poison if you lead an unhealthy life.
SPIEGEL: J.D. Salinger wrote his only novel, “Catcher in the Rye” when he was 32. Was he too weak for his poison?
Murakami: I translated the book into Japanese. It is quite good, but incomplete. The story becomes darker and darker, and the protagonist, Holden Caulfield, doesn’t find his way out of the dark world. I think Salinger himself didn’t find it either. Would sport have saved him too? I don’t know.
SPIEGEL: Does running give you the inspiration for stories?
Murakami: No, because I‘m not the kind of writer who reaches the source of a story playfully. I have to dig for the source. I have to dig very deep to reach the dark places in my soul where the story lies hidden. For that, too, you have to be physically strong. Since I started running, I have been able to concentrate for longer, and I have to concentrate for hours on my way into the darkness. On the way there you find everything: the images, the characters, the metaphors. If you are physically too weak, you miss them; you lack the strength to hold on to them and bring them back up to the surface of your consciousness. When you are writing, the main thing isn’t digging down to the source, but the way back out of the darkness. It’s the same with running. There is a finishing line that you have to cross, whatever the cost may be.
6 Comments
He sounds like Orpheus coming out of the underworld. What a fascinating man. Loved the interview. Thanks for posting it.
Thank you for sharing these excerpts from Murakami’s interview! I went and read the article and found it very interesting. I have never heard a writer talk so candidly about one’s physical capacity to write. I think Murakami is right though about how important it is to be healthy physically in order to complete one’s work.
Yes, thanks for the interview with such a deep diver of a guy. I had a professor that used to say, “Art is an intimate experience of life that will not kill you.” Maybe true for the viewer, true for the reader; but art kills artists all the time. There is something self-destructive about the creative process. In no way does it resemble therapy. It begs for therapy. The line between creation and destruction may as well not exist. If running works for this guy, more distance to him. I’m not sure that it is enough.
The list of artists that circled the drain because of their art is a long one: Ambrose Bierce, Van Gogh, Seurat, Proust, Virginia Woolf, Diane Arbus, Randall Jarrell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Jerzy Kozinski, Hemingway, Faulkner, James Dickey, and Rothko. All of them went into the dark in their own way, and didn’t come back.
A friend of mine was interviewing a Holocaust survivor and artist the other day. She said, “There is one thing I have never understood. As we get older and gain more experience, why don’t we become wiser? It has only been in the last few years that I have begun to understand.”
I said to my friend, “This is just a guess, but I think we are wired to do, but not to understand. It is only in the latter years of our life when the wiring gets frayed that we can begin to understand who we are, what we have done, and why we did it.”
A passionate inwardness is not conducive to good self-esteem.
It is a great thing to be passionately inward and to be able to write a sentence about it; but it’s like performing surgery on yourself. We may need to be physically and psychologically strong to defeat a bad sentence. I tend to see writing as closer to martial arts. I strike out words. I throw out sentences. I cut paragraphs. It is a contest of pinning words to paper, of cornering words on a page. At my age understanding is just something I stumble upon in that process.
I don’t think that physical or psychological strength is enough to survive as an artist. Optimism is helpful but research shows that denial is the principal defense mechanism of the happy few. The primary defense mechanism of pessimism is self-deception. Happy people tend to overestimate their worth: they think they are better writers than they are. They may write more and publish more. Research shows that unhappy people come closer to the truth. They manage their painful truths by self-deception, and thus are able to do. (At one psychological conference, the participants decided that happiness was such a rare state that it was almost pathological. They suggested a new diagnosis to be used in psychiatry: Major Affective Disorder, Pleasant Type.)
Understanding is an impediment to evolution. It is better not to know and just do to survive than to understand and not be able to do. When we get old, evolution rules out and we can finally understand. We’ve no need to do anymore. The genetic imperative is fulfilled. We are now free to understand.
The artists that survive pessimism and going into the dark must have the ability to tolerate distress. That is no easy task. Even worse, they must tolerate it alone. It is an existential corridor with many doors of escape but only one key. The artists have to deceive themselves into believing that there is no key, and tolerate that corridor.
I don’t want to interpret that writer’s reality, but running is akin to REM sleep, and that has nothing to with being physically strong. Running is the act of throwing out what will drag you under. It is practicing physical and psychological distress tolerance. It gives you a chance to get lucky along the way and stumble on the truth. It may just let you live long enough to start understanding.
I am an artist and runner. I really enjoyed this article. I never considered that running compensates for the unhealthy artistic lifestyle! Another motivation to keep running.
Thanks
Ken
People! Glad you found the article evocative, too. Thanks for sharing your ideas about it.
The end of labor is to gain leisure.
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