Tag: swimming

Moving to Write: A writer’s journey

When I was in grad school, one of my teachers told me that swimming (I was doing 3000-4000 yards, 3 times a week) benefited my writing. I understood why. Putting one’s head down and churning away for an hour compares well with writing. You pile up the painful laps the same way you pile up the words, and there is no immediate end. You just have to do it every (other) day.

Pool at the University of Iowa

Sometime in my thirties, I decided that I had worked out enough for the rest of my life, that all those miles had inoculated me against the exigencies of time. After all, I was averaging 24,000 meters a day at my peak. You might wonder, “What is 24,000 meters, really?” The fastest runner ran a mile in a bit under four minutes, and the fastest swimmer swam four hundred meters in just under four minutes, so 24,000 meters in the pool is a rough equivalent of sixty miles. 6-0. Six days a week. Even the piddling 3000-4000 yard workouts I managed later in life amounted to five to eight mile runs. All those miles earned me something besides shoulder and knee injuries. Whether this is what I learned from swimming or if something already inside me made all those laps possible, I cannot be sure. All I know was that afterward, I knuckled down to a world of tasks, whether unpacking a truckload of books, driving all night to a funeral in Maine, or doing the daily work of marriage.

But no matter how hard I worked, no matter how much thinking or interacting I did, eventually, my body let me know that the actual workouts had to start again. By my middle forties, I was back in the pool, gobbling down yards. After one knee surgery, another looming on the horizon, and rotator cuffs that kept me up at night, I decided to stick to dry land training (weights, elliptical). I’m still at it.

Maybe it’s no surprise that I struggled with writing when I stopped working out. There were a dozen other reasons for my hiatus, but the lack of steady physical movement played a part. When I furiously wrote and read in grad school, I swam, then ran, and always took long walks in the middle of the night. I never taught sitting at a desk but prowled in the classroom, even, at one point, doing the backstroke across the length of several tables to demonstrate the power of metaphor.

Writing requires resilience. You have to be able to face down the blank page and the open ended-ness of your project. Most of us do not write with a guarantee of publication (or adoration). We write, compelled to add word to word, stringing together sentences, scenes, and scraps of dialogue, until something like a novel accrues. Some writers don’t need the physical analog to bear them forward in their pursuit of words on the page. Their minds take flight and find their ways through the canyons of words without having to ride the rapids through them.

We think of the imagination as free of physical constraint, even when we write scenes replete with physical—sensed—detail. It’s pretty to think that this works. I can write a depiction of flight even if I can’t fly because I can imagine it. My mind is not bound by what I cannot do.

Yoda pinches the “crude matter”

I am reminded of a movie I saw ages ago. In The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda castigates Luke about the force. He grabs Luke’s arm with his claw-like hand and insists, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” And that’s the whole point: what’s inside you matters. Of course, this appealed to me when I was a sophomore in college. What does imagination—the expression of the soul—have to do with “crude matter”?

My belief in an inner self separate from bodily suffering—or ecstasy—was fundamental to my worldview. I wasn’t alone. Whether in theology or philosophy, the notion of something like a soul runs deep. Descartes’ cogito ergo sum (the first principle of his philosophy) locates being in the process of thinking—rigorous and effortful thinking, but thinking and certainly not feeling, and definitely not tasting, seeing, smelling, hearing, or touching. There is a longstanding division between the spiritual (the imagination included) and the physical. The mind is that “luminous being” within or around us. I learned to ignore the crude matter while I swam—playing songs in my mind while lactic acid built up in my muscles and my body cried out for oxygen. I was happy to engage in the separation of body and mind.

 Except they are not separated.

While neurobiologists distinguish between the brain—a profoundly physical, almost mechanical thing—and the mind, which arises (or descends) from the machinery, they see the connections between the brain/body and the mind. Caroline Williams’ recent book Move tracks current science about movement—whether dancing or walking or crawling about—and how it impacts our mind. Reading her book alongside Anil Seth’s Being You, Mark Solms’ The Hidden Spring, and Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary, I find it hard not to see our minds as a product of evolution—much in the same way that our brains and bodies evolved. We got opposable thumbs, eyes, and consciousness. Our thoughts—even the most abstract thoughts—are grounded in the dynamic range of physical existence. This thing we imagine as a brain-based entity is formed in concert with sensory signals from our bodies. We are made up of our smell, sight, taste, touch, and hearing. Our minds did not blossom while we sat at a desk and contemplated, but as we moved through and sensed the world.

Whatever else we are, we are sensory data collectors. Maybe the dog does a better job of sniffing or the bat of hearing. Our brains are tuned to the sensual world—it seeks and expects constant sensory stimuli. Mark Solms argues that our consciousness results from the perpetual influx of information coming into the brain. Our consciousness checks that flood of information against our brains’ equally endless sets of predictions. Whether we are regulating the temperature of our bodies or the emotional tenor of our workplaces, our brains and minds (I am using “mind” almost interchangeably with “consciousness”) govern unconscious and unspoken expectations. Stimuli that occur outside the narrow predictions trigger error messages, and our minds leap into action—defending the status quo with alacrity.

However, what happens when our minds expect smells, sounds, and sights (and the occasional taste and touch), and there are none? What happens when we remove the wealth of stimulation? I hypothesize that the lack of signals about the world creates an error message in our brains akin to the kinds of error messages about our temperature. Our body-brain-mind system adjusts for too much heat or too much cold, but it adjusts because it constantly surveying for information; the system expects information. Without that information, it must (I surmise) recalibrate the sensory array and how the information is processed. Our brains don’t atrophy—that’s what you would guess, yes?—but reach out in new overexaggerated ways.

However, I do not suggest stimulating children in expanded versions of Skinner boxes. Our body-brain-mind systems develop through self-directed use. We are designed to move through a world of sensation—to process on the fly and on foot. We learn to think, read, and imagine—we write—by moving through the world. Williams cites the work of Kyung Hee Kim on the value of movement. Kim states that “[c]reative thinking is stimulated by physical activity, whether walking, running or active playing”—all of which run counter to the dictum of “writing=ass in chair.”

And creative thinking does not contribute to just writing or sculpting; it’s a matter of finding solutions that don’t plop themselves down in front of your nose. Or just behind your nose in your prefrontal cortex—although this too is vital. Creative thinking must veer from the straight-ahead planning that our prefrontal cortices make so fabulously possible. Planning in a straight line—our preferred method—bound by the powerful predicting mechanisms in our minds does not always lead to the best outcomes. We discover solutions by getting lost, encountering (and embracing) the unexpected, then adapting. We have to trigger error messages in our brains and become comfortable with the inevitable mistakes. I think of my students who more and more routinely fight against reading because they “do not relate” to a particular text. What is “do not relate” other than a self-reflective (“It’s not me”; “It’s not something I already know”; “It’s not something I can easily predict”) error message?

Every Sunday, I rely on long walks through museums to help reset and reinvigorate my mind. I walk through space (about five miles) and time. I proceed on a well-worn route: garden to museum to garden to museum to lunch to museum, and within the museums, I travel from Neolithic China to Philadelphia in 1984. In one display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, objects displaying nearly identical winged protectors encompass fifteen hundred years. It’s a visual echo that resonates over millennia.

More than that—if that wasn’t enough—the walk takes me gradations of the unknown. We don’t know why the jade bi were sliced from jade. I return every week to them to revel in not-knowing—not ignorance per se, but engaged wonder. The bi remind me that some wonderful human-made things have no explanation. We can guess—we should guess—but our guesses should always be acknowledged as such. Precise and well-informed whenever possible. However, we must never let our desire to know ONE answer outstrip our willingness to learn as we go. Remember that you don’t know. I sit in front of a row of paintings by Monet, and I listen as someone explains how he had cataracts, which was why he painted like that. I do my best not to correct or alter the assumption, but it’s hard. Borofsky put the number “3277542 ” on his Man with Briefcase, and I may know how he numbered his work and why he said that he counted into the millions (these are documented facts), but as far as what motivated the artist, well, that’s an educated guess.

I constantly compile lists of things I know. People congregate in doorways. The left lane holds an uncanny attraction for slower drivers. Most people have not noticed that in Gallery 81 of the National Gallery of Art, the figures in the three paintings on the westward wall mirror those in the painting on the eastern wall. Children sometimes fall asleep in their parent’s laps. A man will ask, “Are you writing the great American novel?” (Answer, yes.) Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler sometimes looks strident, sometimes annoyed, but rarely befuddled. People take photographs of themselves that feature Mercury’s bottom, and I am sure that often this is an oversight. The people who work at the Courtyard Cafe will put aside the last napoleon for you. After that, mystery is certain. And necessary.

The writer and the fountain

To return to movement: swimming was always a venture into the known—the well-loved, effortful known. I swam with my head down and eyes focused on the line on the bottom of the lane, chasing yards and time, sure that neither would fundamentally change. Fifty yards is always fifty yards, and a minute is always a minute. Yes, I filled those minutes with more yards (or spent fewer minutes swimming more yards), And, most of all, pain is always pain. Variations in the depth and texture of pain were a cause for concern (the knees, the shoulders), but pain was always a given.

While writing requires sustained effort, one must also embrace the unknown. Moving helps.

I became a better reader (which helped me become a better writer) by moving between tables in various restaurant jobs. I wasn’t a bad reader in college, but that was because I could do the determined slog of three hundred pages between a Tuesday and Thursday class. I read with my committed swimmer’s mind. Whatever brilliance I glimpsed only came into full view after turning my head in seventeen directions and delivering service, hot food, and cold drinks, all in the proper order. And because I moved in a dozen other, unexpected ways. Words on the page became easier and more ecstatic. And no, I don’t think one needs to wait on tables to be a better reader (or thinker). However, learning to think on my feet and realizing that the persistent thrum of “I, me, mine” became more powerful when it moved through the music of “him, her, them,” helped me become a better reader and writer.

“I, me, mine” are necessary, especially when writing. You cannot hope to enchant some unknown “them” until you find a way to please yourself as you slog away hour after hour. And then you may fall into a rut. That’s not always the worst thing. There are plenty of creative and successful people who hew to the ditch they dig. Their neural pathways run straight and certain down deep gulleys. Helpful habits will keep you returning, chairbound, to the work.

And yet, stuck happens, and sometimes banging our heads in the mud only makes it worse. Seat of pants dully applied to seat of chair risks stagnation. And no amount of instruction (this is the structure of plot; this is the value of metaphor) and mental exercise (write a paragraph in another character’s voice; write a story about an animal) will return you to the light. Go for a walk, breathing through your nose so you can smell the world. Take out your headphones and listen to the world as you pass through it. Dance in a crowd. Break a sweat, and forget your brilliant, luminous mind. You don’t have to go to the woods, the mountains, or the ocean. You are a wild animal wherever you are if you just remember to be one.

There is a wildness to writing, and not just a wildness of mind, although, please, a wildness of mind. But our minds, we forget, are grounded in the crude animal matter of our bodies. The glorious, perfectly imperfect body will help us move the words, ounce by ounce, page by page, and pound by pound into the world. What happens next is a mystery, but by moving my body and mind, I have learned the value of mystery. It’s what comes next.

Process: Swimming and Writing (part one)

Every so often, Facebook reminds me of where I have been. I posted this a dozen years ago. I was still swimming, and this was the template for the 2500 meter swim I did that day. Not the most exciting workout, but after two or three hundred meters of warmup, I held hundreds at 1:15. Pretty fair for a non-competing 49-year-old swimmer. The swimmers out there will recognize that I was breathing bilaterally (on both sides) every five strokes; they will also acknowledge that I was taking 15 strokes each length. Again, pardon me for saying this, but that wasn’t bad for a 49-year-old. I trained myself to breathe bilaterally after I left college because my stroke had a hitch that breathing to each side helped eradicate. My right shoulder was happier.

A few things to note. First, I am virulently attentive to and oriented to process. Swimming was never a “zen” activity for me in which I transcended the effort to reach some peaceful state of mind. Instead, the effort focused me on the effort itself. I paid attention to where my hands entered the water, how they caught the water, how my body moved over my hands, and where my hands exited the water. I was aware of the position of my arms as they flew forward to grab the water again. And again. And again. In this case, I remember thinking, “1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (breathe)”—taking three breaths each length. Focusing on what I was doing helped fend off the building exhaustion.

I grew up swimming when there were no devices to pump music into wet ears to help keep the beat while you worked out. I developed an inner hortator who drummed out a rhythm to keep me on pace. It was similar to the inner voice that kept step following steps when I hiked 500 miles as a 12-year-old, but now more driven and more ecstatic.

“Ecstatic”? You might ask. Through my four years of high school, as I improved from a middling age group swimmer to what I eventually became, it seemed that every swim (in practices and meets) was faster than the last. Every set provided an opportunity for improvement. I may not have gone to the Olympic trials, but I swam faster, following the beat that my cruel inner taskmaster laid down. Swimming fast exhilarated me. The effort I made showed an immediate result. The sweeping second hand of the poolside clock never lied, never expressed an opinion. And I swam in the company of some of the fastest young men on the East Coast. Keeping up meant something. I never again swam without that goad in mind.

Throughout my life, swimming offered the solace of process, repetition, and speed. Tired and overworked? I swam. Heartbroken or happy, I swam. Sick? I swam. No matter the tumble of work and life, swimming was one thing I could control. It was years before I connected the bones of that daily practice with writing, drawing lines from “this” to “that.” While some people had told me that swimming and writing were twinned activities, I felt that writing required another kind of effort. I believed that creativity was antithetical to the dull repetition of physical exertion. Writing required audacious leaps. Even when I began to write, words ran like a flood, flowing from inspirations as varied as my life to what I read. And then, they didn’t.

When I lost the thread for writing, I poured my effort into teaching and, later, churchwork. I wrote everything an English teacher writes—class notes, assignments, student evaluations—and then curricula for Sunday school classes, children’s stories for worship services, and little else. I had a book in mind but no room in my day or brain. Work and family occupied my day—as they should. After years of being too busy to thrash about in the pool, as I approached 50, I answered the old call for 30-45 minutes in the pool. Everywhere else, I felt at someone else’s call.

So, I started swimming, and little by little started writing too. This post, with its repetition, was modeled on a kind of prose poem—a metapoetic “word word word word word punctuation ad infinitum.” I’m not claiming that it was a perfect prose poem. I have changed my mind about the value of writing when inspired. I have sung the praises of word counts in some of my blog posts. An accumulation of words will create its own gravity until it catches fire—almost the way the sun catches fire over and over again. Trust the process and write word after word after word. Don’t wait for inspiration—write yourself there.

My swimming post pointed me in a direction, and eventually, the fire took hold.

Swimming and Time

Every time I touched the wall, I looked up to check my time. The spinning red hand of the clock revealed how long it had taken since I began whatever swim I had started, however many seconds—or minutes—ago. We did two things at practice: we threw yards and meters at our bodies and practiced touching the wall. Whether it was a grueling set of 20×100 yard swims on a 65-second interval to wrap up a workout or the inane 3×1500 meter swims with 30 seconds between each as a warm-up (Imagine doing that at 6 o’clock in the morning on an already warm summer day, in a pool with only thin nylon ropes to separate the lanes), whenever you finished, you jammed into the wall. You lifted your head from the water to see the clock. How fast did I go? How much time until the next swim begins?

I was not a world-class swimmer. When I was little, I tended to sink rather than proceed at pace. I wore a Styrofoam bubble on my back.  There were lessons. My parents took me to Red Cross run classes in a lake near our home in Paoli. I flailed, resisting the head turn required for a proper crawl. Still, I loved the water and turned blue when my parents took us to Jones Beach when we visited their parents. Who would want to leave the churn and rush of waves? We joined local pools and passed our deep-end tests, treading water for an absurd amount of time under the watchful eye of a lifeguard. Once passed, my mother would drop us off while she shopped or played tennis at the Great Valley Country Club. Swim teams only started when I was 11.

In my sophomore year of high school, I was a fair Junior Varsity swimmer. The Hill School had a nationally ranked independent school team, and I was far from fast enough for that. I was only 4 years removed from goggle-less practices in the insidiously warm indoor pool at the Phoenixville Y. I came home bleary-eyed and teary. As far as other sports, I had been an indifferent Little League baseball player—more interested in the planes in the sky than balls hit in my direction. Because I was tall early, my father—a scholarship athlete at Niagara in the 40s—signed me up for basketball. It did not take. I enjoyed gymnastics: the rings and parallel bars carried me a little out of gravity’s grasp. You had to play a sport each afternoon, fall, winter, and spring at my high school. In my first year, I opted for soccer, swimming, and golf.

The 3500 yards that the JV team swam between 3-4 in the afternoon were as many yards as I had ever swum. Fred Borger was the JV coach and threw easily attainable sets at us: ten 100s at 1:45, then 1:30 as we improved. I started off swimming the 500 yard freestyle at meets. My early times were over seven minutes. I ended my first season at 5:55. My 100 breaststroke was north of 1:20, which rarely merited placement in one of the three lanes for meets. During my second year, after spending the fall playing water polo (a ploy to get fall training in for the varsity), my 500 time dropped to 5:20, and my 100 breast hovered at 1:15. I knew if I wanted to improve, I would need to change something.

As a sidebar, I was not happy at my school, an all-boys bastion against, what? a fear of falling? I spent the spring of my sophomore year stoned and looking for a new school for the following year. I crept out after curfew and brought pizza for my dorm mates. I never studied—my memory for most things kept my grades well above water. This was the year that ditched my longstanding boyhood aspiration: to attend the Naval Academy. I wanted a more diverse, less dick-driven environment. After all, how could you read Catcher in the Rye and not feel as if you wanted to turn away?

A friend on the Varsity swim team shared a flier from a swim camp/AAU team in Iowa. Glen Patton was building the program at the University of Iowa and was contacting good young swimmers like my friend as a way of recruitment. I applied to Swimming School and was delighted to be accepted. If I wasn’t going to go anywhere else, at least I could be a better swimmer.

At Iowa, we had three practices a day, totaling as many as seven hours in the pool. I had never swum more than one hour on any day and rarely more than 4000 yards. We swam between 20,000 and 28,000 meters every day. The general philosophy was “Get in. Keep up. Move inward.” Slower swimmers—I was one of them—populated the outside lanes. You shifted from lanes one and ten to two and nine, then three and eight, and so forth. The fastest swimmers—and there were Olympians on that team—swam in the center of the pool: lanes four and five. In the two summers I swam there, I never nosed into the center (not 4 and 5, not even 3 and 6), but I could see them. I chased and swam faster. 

When I swam in Iowa in 1976, we gathered in the evenings to watch the Montreal Olympics. The American men won every event except one (Britain’s David Wilkie took the 200 Breaststroke), and the men set world records in every event except the 100 Butterfly (Mark Spitz’s last record). The East German women had a similar performance, helped, as we know now, by PEDs. The revolution in training (all those miles) caused significant drops in times for those of us who did not use steroids. We were swimming fast, and we all could swim faster. We wore T-shirts emblazoned with the motto: SWIMMING IS MORE FUN WHEN YOU’RE IN SHAPE. And we got in shape by watching our times.

When I returned to my school, I leaped onto the varsity, still not the best, but game. I kept up in practice, By the fall, I was under five minutes in the 500, and my breaststroke time dropped over ten seconds. Raw and brutal repetition rewarded me. The two-hour practices we did at school were intense and competitive. If you weren’t the leader in your lane, you damn well chased the leader, and if you caught them, then you had to lead. Leading was a privilege, but your trailing feet became targets for the hungry swimmers behind you. We each had our strengths, each took the lead on various sets. I had a vicious breaststroke kick, which meniscus surgery 30 years later can attest to. I swam hard, and even later, when I swam just to stay fit, the habits continued. I checked my pulse. I looked at the clock.

 During the 2021 Olympic swimming coverage, I saw the swimmers stare at the clock (digital, not analog) in the distance. I saw the looks of joy and disappointment driven not by winning or losing but by their times.  Was that my best? Did I meet my goal? While the competition may drive many, after a while, the clock becomes the primary combatant. I may have been cognizant of where my teammates were in the pool (chase! chase!), but mostly I looked up and saw that red clock hand sweeping past a black hash mark. Watching the Olympics, if I yelled it once, I yelled it a dozen times, “Show the times!”

The next time you watch swimmers (or runners), notice where they look at the end of their races. If you want to know how they feel, know that they are keenly aware of the inexorable, implacable opponent of the clock. They have looked up thousands of times. And then they have put their heads back down. It is time to go again.

Shoulders And Work

Several months ago, my right shoulder started to hurt—not the dull pain of repeated effort, but a sharp bite. The trainer at my club diagnosed it as a rotator cuff injury. I was not surprised. Years ago, I tore at my shoulders when I swam miles and miles every day. Another trainer put a finer point on my struggles, telling me that backstroke (which had been a staple of my midlife training regimen) often drove swimmers out of the pool. And so, I tended my form, keeping my hands and grips in neutral positions while I pushed and pulled weight. Then I gave up the weights for a couple of months and added exercises to strengthen my rotator cuffs. Time has taught me to listen to my body more carefully. And taught me that old wounds can return decades later.

This past month, stuck inside during the pandemic, I started lifting again and welcomed the natural hurts that result from earnest work. It feels good to work and to bear with the pain. The endorphins from extended workouts help carry me through the barrage of news, which, much to my chagrin, I cannot ignore. Lift this. Watch the heart rate settle into the 170s. At least it makes sleep come more easily.

Not everything true for the body is true for the mind. Or the heart.
I also wrapped up a more extensive revision of one book while stewing over the next. The most recent update of Grammarly highlighted the more prolix passages of the old work, so even though images and scenes in the new book pile up, I felt the call to rewrite. Rewriting leads to re-visioning. The question, “How did I leave that out?” occurred more than I liked, and so I added connective tissue. I edited my more complicated impulses into simpler—and more direct?—chunks.

And revision, though inspired by some strange angels, does not require the same fiery vision as the initial draft. Without rooms of art to goad me (the DC museums have been closed since early March), it was easier to return to the old work. “Easier” is hardly the right word. The same way that I had to restart lifting below the peaks I had reached in December, I came back to the book with a diminished sense of it. In that diminishment, I found a new way in. I was no longer in love with the characters, or with myself as their creator. I was able to question my motives and choices in ways that I was unable six months ago when I made my first rattling revision.

Still, as much as I rediscovered and redirected in this recent edit, I felt as if I was betraying my new work. I have begun to dream about those characters. While others around me are infected with fever driven dreams of the pandemic, I have felt pulled to another vision—the anxiety churns a different sea. Just as I lift barbells in an otherwise empty gym—counting my reps out loud while Arthur Morey narrates Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct—this new work pushes me. It is familiar and different.

The ache in my shoulder is familiar and different. I know what to avoid and how to strengthen the weak places. The old wounds and old ways remind me of a past that I have lived, but there are new steps to take. My narrator welcomes me into her thoughts and reflections and challenges me to get out of my own way. A whole world opens ahead of me, dream-laden, and no longer bound to anything I have worked on before. There will be work.

The Music of Effort

I start paying attention after 17 minutes or so — the meter on the elliptical estimates that I am burning 24.3 calories every minute. I am about halfway through the current “run,” and I will burn through 720 calories in 30 minutes and well over 800 when I include the five minutes of cool-down time that the machine grants me at the end of the workout. I get pissed because the timer starts as soon as I start moving my feet, and the first 15 seconds are “slow.” I make up for it. After a five minute break, I jump on another machine that allows me to take longer strides, and run for 12 minutes, aiming for 7-minute miles. It’s a workout.

This is not about working out.

I listen to music while I work out. My playlist is a series of hard and fast (mostly) rock and roll songs. If you were in the gym with me, you would see me silently singing along. “Need a little time to wake up. Need a little time to wake up, wake up. Need a little time to rest your mind. You know you should, so I guess you might as well…” Or  “Save the strong, lose the weak—never turning the other cheek. Trust nobody, don’t be no fool. Whatever happened to the golden rule?” Or, “Touch me, take me to that other place. Reach me, I know I’m not a hopeless case. What you don’t have, you don’t need it now. What you don’t know, you can feel it somehow. What you have you don’t need it now, don’t need it now.” Or “We’re going boom, boom, boom, and that’s the way we live.” There are others.

This is not about the music I listen to while I work out.

When I was a swimmer—in high school, college, and after—there was no music in the pool—at least no music that wasn’t already in my head. I had a much shorter playlist then—just a four or five songs any given day that I played over and over again in my head while I churned through mile after mile. I had a little hortator pounding away, beat after beat, distracting me from the pain in my shoulders and knees, guiding me through the agony of hard work. When I took swimming back up, there was a waterproof mp3 player that took over that task, but by then, I felt swum out — besides, it’s hard to sing with your face in the water. Drowning.

Seriously, this is not about music and workouts.

Several years ago, I tipped my hat to loud music in a sermon that praised the virtues of Rock and Roll as a way to access the spiritual. I noted how Coldplay’s “Sky Full of Stars” worked up to and encouraged a communal moment of dance/rave. I pointed to U2’s “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” as a memoir about the discovery of the Ramones by someone “young, not dumb, and wishing to be blinded.”  It might as well be my memoir. Or yours. Rock and Roll has the power to blind us, the way a flash of lightning blinds us. There are times when we need to be blinded, when we need to erase all the sordid images of the day from our mind’s eye so that we can start fresh, and see with new eyes, hear with new ears, and feel with newly opened arms. Or something like that.

When I work out, I play music that beats back the exhaustion of the day, and that transports me into the steady hard effort that burns an extra few calories and raises my heartbeat to 170 beats a minute. I don’t want much—just a kind of blindness. And yet, I’m not blind to any of it. I feel all the effort—I love it—every ache, every heartbeat, every drop of sweat. The music helps me break through the “tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-lust of intentional indifference.” I sweat “with a decent happiness.”

I play music while I write. Listening to the same piece helps me reenter the dream with the same mood. Unlike Annie Dillard, who demands a Spartan silence while she works, I need the wall of sound. Maybe this is because I spent years with a sound in my head while I sped through the pool in repeated max-effort swims. I have an affinity for noise and the distraction of the world. After all, I am, always, writing about the world—how could it be a distraction? Yes, there are moments when the actual world fades, when the world made of words engulfs me, and when I get blinded, properly and completely blinded by the work.

I wish that experience for any and every writer. Whatever it takes to get you properly and completely consumed by the world that you strive to create, do it. If silence gets you there, find a quiet place. If noise and distraction get you into the state of mind that produces all the words, then find that noisy place and work it.

As I revised my novel, I discovered that my book needed a scene or two—how did I leave THAT out? (I know why. I wasn’t ready to write it, not yet.) And so, knowing that the magic of Gorecki’s Symphony Number 3 was not going to generate the energy that these scenes needed, I dug into the catalog and pulled out Led Zepplin’s “When The Levee Breaks,” because weeping and moaning were ahead. And, yes, that song is on the workout playlist. When it plays, I feel the story coming from the muscles in my arms and legs—not just my head. I breathe deep, my heart races, and the words flow like sweat. Fortunately, I like to sweat.

If it keeps on raining, levee’s goin’ to break. Let it break, I’m ready for the onslaught—bright and loud.

 

Hurt, Pain, and Agony (swimming and writing)

At the end of a day at work, I had a low grade fever on Monday, and so I had a choice to make—go home or go to the gym.

When I was in high school and college, I swam competitively. I was a good swimmer, not a great one, but I had made myself a better one and took pride in the effort. I enjoyed practice, in spite of the fact that practice hurt. The predominant swim coach of my youth was James “Doc” Counsilman. He prescribed—preached, really—the progression of hurt, pain, and agony as the single lane toward improvement. I gobbled up his Science of Swimming, and pushed myself into agony and better results. I never became an elite swimmer. I came to the sport too late and without the technical proficiency needed to excel beyond my willingness to work to the point of physical failure, but I did become a much better swimmer.

I hated to miss practice. I went when I had a fever. I went my my shoulders felt shredded. I went if I had the flu. I pushed my body hard enough to compromise my immune system, and plunged my body into a staph infection that ravaged me for a month. I kept at it.

I briefly considered quitting when I was in college. While Swarthmore was a place to be committed to study, most of the swimmers on the team joined to be fit, or to explore the sport. I was maniacal, and therefore, felt more often than not alone on the team. I missed the hard driven team of my high school. Also, I was not used to being out ahead of everyone else. This is not a boast, just the nature of the circumstance. There were other teams on which I would have not made the cut. I knew that.

I rejoined the team, refocused my effort, and pushed on.

So, I felt under the weather on a Monday. Let me put this into context. Nearly every day at my job, someone calls out sick; I have enough free time in my schedule that I am able to cover other people’s classes. I do not understand being sick and missing work. I know it happens—I have had migraines, back spasms, and bronchitis in the past fifteen years. I had knee surgery fifteen years ago (torn meniscus). I get it. Illness happens. I admit to being stupidly judgmental about this.

For many recent years, I worked seven day weeks. If I got sick, my body, as if on cue, waited until I had a break in the school year. And then, I somehow avoided being ill on Sunday; I worked for a church. It just happened that way. The little stuff—a headache, some intestinal discomfort, a low fever—was just part of the day. Buddha might have said that desire causes suffering, but it seemed to me that a small amount of suffering was simply part of life. Swimming had taught me that.

I claim that swimming taught me that lesson, but I am not so sure, because there were—are—aspects of my life that suffering has upended. While I could fight through a workout, or endure lengthy stretches of difficulty in a relationship or job (perhaps endure too willingly and for too long), when it came to my writing, I backed away from the agony. Agony for writers, I think, is a bit different from agony for swimmers. Muscle pain and, what? brain pain—I hesitate to call it heart pain—are different creatures. Physical pain ends—for most. Certainly the kind of agony I courted in the pool stayed mainly in the pool, at least until my knees needed surgery. Mental pain permeates the day—you can stop writing and still feel the agony of an unsuccessful scene—anything less than glowing prose. And when even the good writing does not find a reader, then the agony feels for naught.

Writing does not quantify the same way swimming does. More writing does not necessarily guarantee better writing (There is a correlation, but it’s more slippery) the way that more (more yards, more effort) swimming leads to faster times. Nor does it compare well with work, where improvement and accomplishment have monetary results. Does a higher salary indicate a job better done—or for that matter a more valuable job? I guess that depends on how you ascribe value.

Maybe because good writing—whatever that means—is dependent on the reader, if one seeks to write well, one either needs a fairly reliable ability to dissociate from the absolute creative process and read one’s own work as a stranger might, or have a reliable enough reader to sort through her—or his—work. But more than that, one has to engage the work almost without a thought for oneself. There is a second dissociation—and this is like swimming: one must be attuned to the pain and the pain cannot matter.

For instance—and this is an insight into my judgmental brain—I described a character whose skin turned browner while he worked for weeks and months outside as “brown as a berry.” This is an old cliche, and one that I first overheard in the British Virgin Islands while sitting at dinner. Some old man—I was 12 or 13, everyone was “old”—described me in his British accent as “brown as a berry.” I did not know then that it was a cliche, and the phrase stuck, because my experience of berries tended to berries of red and blue and possibly black—the blackberries that grew wild on bushes near my home. It felt foreign and I enjoyed that the phrase had some unexplained—for then—British origins. The phrase dropped into my work, and I knew it was hackneyed when I wrote it—a minor disaster, I suck as a writer—and when I revised, I took it out. I knew that I would. But I had to move on while I was writing, I could not spend five minutes, let alone twenty-five, figuring out some turn of phrase. In the end, I let it be simple: “his arms turned brown by the sun.”

Does that sound like agony? Sucking as a writer is agony. The realization that my work would not please everyone—and that I still had to do the work—was not easy to accept; secretly, I believe that the whole point of writing workshops is to learn to ignore critiques as much as to learn from them. How does one know when the work is “not good”? Or, for that matter, “good”? Rickie Nelson sang, “You can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself” (more hackneyed advice from my childhood). There is agony in those questions.

And so, on Monday, I headed to the gym. I shortened my workout, burning down 500 calories in 23 minutes. It was shorter, not less arduous. I was in various forms of discomfort through the first half of the week—my insides disagreed with something I ate. I kept at the gym anyway. And then—always and then—I read the first chapter of my novel out loud at an open reading on Friday, and sent off the first set of query letters to agents on Saturday. The book, for now, is done. I wrote this. And I started the next book.

I am prepared for the work, even if it hurts, even if I am in agony. I have trained for this all my life.

Writing: Sludge and Frustration

I spent the past 24 hours writing in what I described as “sludge”–not exactly “ten million pounds of sludge from New York and New Jersey,” but close. It happens. I admitted this to a friend, who asked, “You’re not feeling frustrated?” I answered, “Frustration is part of writing. One cannot write without it.” Let me explain.

First, as you will recognize from previous posts, I used to sail on the ocean, heading back and forth from the Chesapeake Bay to Bermuda with my father. Setting aside the variability of the weather (from windless and flat to howling and mountainous), I was sick nearly every time I took the trip: 24-36 hours of plain and pronounced discomfort. I eventually discovered that a vertigo medicine helped settle the sea for me, but up to then I kept at it, and accepted the retching as payment for the joy. So, I have that experience to draw on.

Second, I was a swimmer, and while I was not an Olympian, I practiced hard. Improvement came with pain, and I learned to adapt to the persistent ache in my shoulders, arms, and legs. During practices, the immediate feedback for how fast I was going came through either the proximity I had to faster swimmers, or, when I was one of the faster swimmers, from how much pain I felt. Pain—of a certain kind—equaled speed. There are, of course, other kinds of pain, such that denote injury and not improvement, and I was fortunate to avoid these until later in life.

Some days writing is just going to be like a bad day on the ocean, or a crap day in the pool. Some days my brain just does not connect to anything brilliant, or worse I think it’s brilliant, but I have done none of the necessary work of getting my characters in and out of rooms. I have left out simple gestures, and replaced action with explication.

Sometimes when sludge is all there is, I scrap large chunks. Sometimes it just takes connective tissue—so that the ideas get bound to motion. Sometimes, it is a signal that I am not being wild enough. Once I was told that a character was boring. Tough criticism, but, a sludge encrusted character needs to be set free—or buried.

So, frustration will happen. So will boredom, says the man who puts in 26-32 minutes on the elliptical six days a week. Raucous music keeps the heart rate over 160 bpm, and sometimes works for writing. And metaphoric raucous music too—add a crazy scene as needed. Even Dickens used spontaneous combustion to advance the plot.

But the frustration also comes when we get close to the sludge, and the sludge covers what we don’t want to engage. Sometimes we need to treat ourselves roughly when we write, and work what makes us, not just uncomfortable, but downright upset. The sludge can be like a makeshift bandage, covering some old hurt. Hey, you don’t have to own the hurt, but see it, and work it. Pain can clarify and properly unsettle the writer—and enliven the writing.

So, here’s to frustration. And writing through it.

Remaking the body; remaking the mind

I once had a “fitness trainer” who exhorted me, and those I worked with, to be as hard as the tip of the spear. I had spent years as a serious swimmer, and had a macho enough attitude to gobble this up. There were long sessions among Nautilus machines (the preferred hi-tech option of the early 80’s), blistering runs, and of course, time in the water. I enjoyed the hardness that was belied by my boyish exterior. The baby-faced bloom of youth did not dissipate until I was nearly 30 and grew a beard. I used my appearance to push me: “Do not mistake my youthful exterior for a lack of drive,” I thought. I drove hard.

Then I stopped. I left a life that promised not just physical hardness, but an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual severity. I dropped out and into the lost years of restaurant work, taking solace in uncommitted drift. In spite of the self-enforced sojourn, I kept swimming, which was more languid, even at a brisk pace. Two regular diners, Tom and Janet Flannigan, joked about all the “soft people” they saw in the pool—“You’ll never stay fit doing that,” they jested, lighting up cigarettes, and drinking themselves thin.

And I began writing, even while I worked 80 hour weeks at an Italian dive in Manayunk. The writing echoed the life I left and the ramifications of my decision. It feels as if everything I wrote was rooted in those moments. Of course, I was trying to write my life right.

I have often questioned my decision to become, if not “soft,”then decidedly less “hard” than the path that had been open to me. At least in the first several years after my decision, I think my friends saw aspects of that old self, but as best I could I burned it or buried it. We make choices in life, bending toward the light or dark—unlike phototropic plants that do so automatically. Or so we like to imagine. There are consequences to all our choices, to how we emphasize parts of our personalities or our essential selves. A choice away from or toward ripples into every other dimension of our lives.

This past winter, for the first time in over 30 years, I returned to weights. I bemoaned (and bemoan) the loss of strength—it isn’t innate, and must be tended. Jack, the owner of the gym I attend, says, “You’re in great shape.” I remember when, I think and do not gainsay. For now, I have taken on the task of shifting and strengthening the weight on my body. When I turned 50, I fought hard to get my body weight down to 200 pounds. This year, heading to 59, I flew lower with relative ease—I even have to eat more. I also feel harder, and delight in the body that has reemerged, as if it had been waiting all along (I knew you would be back). Although my strength is not what it was, it waxes again, along with some other aspects of that one time severity.

I court severity carefully. Maybe it took thirty years to give me distance from all that being the tip of the spear meant. Maybe the intervening years have buffered the fatal vision that guided my hand and mind. Or maybe those years changed me enough that I can take that dagger and wield it without the same moral repercussions that haunted me then, and that drove me to chose against it. Choosing against is never the same as choosing for; the choice to avoid a path is not the same as choosing a path. I have begun choosing for again, a bit rusty, but finding my way.

Not to my surprise, this change has come with a reinvigorated call to writing. I am a man whose mind and body work in concert. There was a reason I championed Susan Bordo’s and Richard Rorty’s philosophical repudiations of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. We are not just minds forged in cold thought but warm bodies that claim a presence in the world. I tried to make my mind and body softer, and there was a deeper cost. I felt that cost more powerfully as I passed through this year’s birthday. I choose this body now, and the mind that goes with it, and feel ready to press on.

Forward.

The Writer’s Character (and work)

I began graduate school in the fall of 1988. Writing was still new to me. I had written in high school then in college, but the daily life of writing was only a shadowy presence. I had begun a novel, and tended it during the free time of my six day weeks managing a small Italian restaurant in the Manayunk neighborhood of Philadelphia. Which is to say, that I had written enough to gain admission to a program, but not enough in any real kind of way.

Graduate school was a relief and a release—it was the thing all my friends and customers were hinting at when they asked, “What are you going to do?”—recognizing long before I did that there was something specific that I was going to do.

I had drifted after college. It was as if I wore an anti-gravity suit that kept me from becoming grounded. There were reasons. I had encountered “purpose” as a rationale for selfishness and intentional moral blindness. The latter I found incredibly troubling. I believed in an inherent goodness—found in man or god—in spite of my experiences in the world. And when I wrote, I explored that possibility.

When I arrived at Binghamton, I poured myself into the work, writing with avaricious fervor, and studying gleefully. I learned quickly that a “B” was an “F,” and after one failing grade on an essay, turned to successful outcomes. I earned a scholarship after my first year, and with it, the right to teach, which I welcomed with the zeal of the recently converted. I was hooked.

One of the hooks at Binghamton was the presence of John Gardner, the author of The Art of Fiction and several novels I had not yet read. I had read Grendel when I was much younger, drawn by the monster after my mother had read us some version of Beowulf as our bedtime entertainment. What attracted us, some of us at least, was the myth of John—driven, irascible, generous, and demanding. As often as not, when describing ourselves as writers, we focused on our characters-not the characters in what we wrote, but out own personal strengths and foibles, and how we matched up against this fabled presence. He had been dead for 6 years, but he hung around the program (his ex-wife became my dissertation director).

One of my teachers, I think it was Liz Rosenberg, introduced me to On Becoming a Novelist, in which Gardner laid out some characteristics of the novelist:

Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller’s is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency towards churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat’s; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. Not all writers have exactly the same virtues, of course. Occasionally one finds someone who is not abnormally improvident.

We looked inside ourselves to see whether we met the unholy criteria that John threw down—gauntlet-like—for us to match. It became a weird check list. There were dozens of weird checklists that we tested ourselves against: pre-work habits and rituals, kinds of writing implements, time that we wrote. I think that many of us were hoping to awaken a writing practice that could sustain us, and so looked for that one thing, the one trick that would allow the words to tumble out as effortlessly as possible.

Of course, we focused on how damnably hard writing was—and is. The metaphors we used to describe writing—like Virgilio Pinera’s man who decides to eat a mountain, one rocky mouthful after another—emphasized the difficulty, futility, and irreverent commitment. Perhaps the real solution was a correction to our character—some unbridling of our sinful writer manqué natures, and a resurrection into some more saintly (or demonic) deranger of the senses. If only we could rid ourselves of our flaws, and get to work.

I came to grad school, and to writing, after years of 60+ hour weeks. I rose early enough to get to the pool and down 3000 meters, then head across town to the restaurant. When I arrived in grad school, I found a job, and worked 3-4 nights a week in a high end restaurant. After I started teaching, I took a job in a bookstore ran by the husband of my mentor (he had been a student of Gardner’s as well). I swam, and then started running several days a week (I could listen to music while I ran!). Some of my classmates complained about the workload. I did not. Work was in me. Writing was not.

But it was. I wrote some inspired pieces, and won praise from mentors and classmates for my work. I didn’t know what to do with it—I had some things published, but what do a few stories and prose poems amount to in a world driven by novels? Besides, I confused inspiration with work. Work, that simple, boring, daily activity, with simple, boring, daily and measurable rewards. I was seeking star fire, supernovae, and earth-shaking prose. In order to do that I had to remake myself in the image of whom? John Gardner? Stephen King? Virginia Woolf? Some Norse God?

And what is the measure of good (let alone brilliant) writing? A great sentence doesn’t blaze as distinctly as the time on the clock when you touch the wall after one of ten 200 yard swims (That’s good; keep going). You write without a clear standard, and a novelist bangs out 60,000 to 100,000 words into the blind space of “who knows what will happen to all this?”.

So we focused on character, the one thing we could control or change. This, of course, is poppycock. There are good and bad people who write. Character is no Holy Grail, and no simple gateway or guarantee to writing. Work is. I wish we had simply talked more about work and habit and word count in grad school. How do you sneak in an extra 200 words? Have you done your work for today? Do you need a new pen? God only knows, make it work, let it be work, and demystify the process. It’s just work. It’s not about whether the muse is singing to you, or the dread siren, or anything or anyone. It’s just work, a job, a practice, and all you need to do, is to do it.

In the long run, Gardner’s description of the writer, and, once again, that sense that a purpose that led to blindness to everything other than IT, drove me away. After all, what was the lesson of nearly every novel, short story, or poem we read? Connect. Connect. And for the sake of everything that’s holy, or valuable, or worth saving: connect. The pursuit of art never matched the message. Picasso was a sonofabitch, but Guernica. Dickens philandered. Woolf suffered from limiting snobbery and mental illness. Joyce? Don’t even. Our contemporaries wandered into the forest of “immaturity and incivility” with a stridency that was matched only by ignorant blowhards and professional athletes.

I recognize that now, all of it, as a kind of armor. I know what it allowed, and what costs they incurred for strapping it on with such easy regularity. I saw it for a kind of blindness, and doubted. And in that doubt, returned to the anti-gravity armor that had supported me years before.

I turned, for years, to teaching and a kind of preaching. I tried to reach out, to convert the sensible—and others—to deeper understanding (reading) and brighter thought (writing). These are not fool’s errands, to be sure. But once you have tasted brilliance—and writing done well is brilliance—every other work other than the work that is the most brilliant, makes your tongue recoil. Even your dog would turn away from that feast. Not me. Not for years. And though I still fight with gravity, I feel the pull, and this is what binds us together—separate planets careening into each other with cataclysmic potential. I tried to resist, but, really, why?

So I’m left with these questions: How does one balance the work and the meaning of the work? How does one have purpose and character? Ah, as always, the trick of balance, and not in Gardner’s list of a writer’s characteristics. We will have to figure this out ourselves.

Of course, equanimity (balance) is not Gardner’s list, but the safety net is the work—stupid, dull-witted, and quotidian. Be an angel or a devil, but get to work. It comes back, and, if done well, connects us, once more, to the world, to each other, and to the gravity that holds us all.

Repetition, again.

Is it any surprise that repetition plays a significant role in my life? I came of age as an athlete knocking out sets of 30 200 yard freestyle swims. They were yardage eaters—a quick and dirty way to lay in 6000 yards of workout and buy time for rest of the yards that the coach had in mind. We finished them at intervals of 2:30, 2:20, and 2:10, which left 50 minutes for the rest of the practice—an easy pace for the two to four thousand yards to come. Pushing off the wall every two minutes and thirty seconds, there was time for conversation between swims. Leaving at every two minutes and ten seconds put a crimp on anything other than brief exchanges: “This sucks,” “Stop hitting my feet,” “I’m hungry.”

We did this day after day.

With my head down in the water, my eyes trained on the feet of the swimmer who left 5 seconds before me—chasing, always chasing. In high school I was far from the fastest swimmer on the team. I made myself a better swimmer. One summer I traveled to Iowa and a training regimen that increased the junior varsity’s load of 3500 yards in an afternoon’s hour long practice, to 22,000-28,000 yards spread over three practices every day. I lost whatever baby fat—and whatever other fat—that my 15 year old frame carried, crashed my immune system—catching a nasty staph infection that laid me up for days after I returned home—and sliced ten seconds off my hundred breaststroke time. No mean feat. I made the varsity team. Repetition was the way.

Years later, when I was a graduate student in English, I read books two and three times. I would attack most of the books for my classes in two weeks before the beginning of the semester, then again as we read them as a class. The initial reading with facile, getting the joys and traps of plot out of the way, allowing the words—and all the ideas in the words—to come to the fore when I read along with the class. If I wrote about a particular book, I read it again, and some passages, dozens of times.

Since I was in school to write, I wrote and rewrote some stories six or seven times. My classmates, colleagues, cow-writers, and teachers, shared the demanding mantra: “All writing is rewriting.” And we practiced what we preached.

As a teacher, I sometimes warn my students that this—and the years to come in college—are the best years, because of the preponderance of the new. Almost everything they learn is, will be, new. Each encounter with something new gives a new opportunity for mastery—another shot at sudden improvement and the giddy transformative moment of adding some unknown idea to the swirl of self.

I warn them because at some point there lives will bend toward repetition. Yes, the repetition may lead to a finer, hard-earned mastery. I think of all the miles that I put into the pool, and how it shaped and shapes my body (still). I think of the ways that great works give up new meanings after repeated shared readings, and how I became a more aware reader. And while I may not rewrite as much as I once did—obsessively, compulsively, debilitatingly—I know that writing begets writing—good, bad, or otherwise. The thing is to write, over and over, every day, without fear, even without hope. The words will bear you up. Push off. Go again.

Well do I know that repetition can suck the joy from the flower of life—making no honey, leaving all empty, colorless, scentless. I do not how how I managed all those laps in the pool, with nothing but the dull roar of water passing my ears, the steady ache and agony of my muscles, and the songs that played in my mind, setting an unimaginable pace. There was joy at the end of each 200 yards—“Good time!”—and these little victories provided enough of a goad to return to repeat success. Who determined what was a “good” time? I did, in concert with the clock—the cold but consistent arbiter of performance. Time, as opposed to opinion, never wavered. The clock was not making a comment because it had a good or a bad day. Go again.

I hope that my students will discover some place where they can demonstrate mastery, and change the long monotonous drone of repetition into a glorious repeated success. That they will find a way to insist, “Again, again,” holding on to that inner childlike joy. That in spite of how hard their task may be, that their arbiters are, if not cold, consistent and consistently challenging. I hope all this for myself as well.

The sweeping red hand of the clock on the wall flies past the black hashmarks: two minutes and one second; two minutes and two seconds, two minutes and three seconds. I breathe deep, and get ready. Here I go. Again.