I was awake from 6:30 AM to 11:30 PM yesterday, and of those 17 hours, fewer than five were spent on my dissertation. The rest of the time was spent waking children, making them breakfast and lunch, driving them to school, walking them home from school, shopping for gluten-free cookie mix with them, making dinner for them, playing soccer with them, wrestling them into the shower, reminding them to use floss for the 1,000th fucking time, and reading them bedtime stories.
I barely had time to shower and feed myself, let alone delve into the archive of 18th-century agricultural writings. I did manage 60 minutes of yoga, but only because I desperately needed a momentary respite of mindfulness.
When I berate myself about how long it's taking me to finish this dissertation, I should probably remember days like yesterday and give myself a break.
When I lament that my training has been so wildly inconsistent, I should probably recall that Abbey was just chosen for the gifted and talented program at her school and that Katie has blossomed after many, many hours of occupational, speech, and behavioral therapy.
Maintaining any balance is damn-near impossible sometimes. But giving up either the writing or riding would lead to disaster. So it all goes slowly.
The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus value and consequently to exploit labor power to the greatest possible extent. As the number of cooperating laborers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and with it, the necessity for capital to overcome this resistance by counterpressure. The control exercised by the capitalist is not only a special function due to the nature of the social labor process and peculiar to that process, but it is at the same time a function of the exploitation of a social labor process, and is consequently rooted in the unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the living and laboring raw material he exploits.
Hang your collar up inside
Hang your dollar on me
Listen to the water still
Listen to the cause where you are
Fed and educated,
Primitive and wild
Welcome to the occupation
Here we stand and here we fight
All your fallen heroes
Held and dyed and skinned alive
Listen to the Congress fire
Offering the educated
primitive and loyal
Welcome to the occupation
Hang your collar up inside
Hang your freedom higher
Listen to the buyer still
Listen to the Congress
Where we propagate confusion
Primitive and wild
Fire on the hemisphere below
Sugar cane and coffee cup
Copper, steel and cattle
An annotated history
The forest for the fire
Where we open up the floodgates
Freedom reigns supreme
Fire on the hemisphere below
Listen to me
I just drove from Omaha to Toledo, Toledo to Philly, and Philly to DC. I spent a day packing Thomas into a pickup and UHaul trailer, and then we drove back from DC to Chicago and Chicago to Omaha.
I got to see Gin, Micheal and Ann, Thomas, and Timmy Moore. that was all great. But the driving? The imprisonment in a motor vehicle for five days?
I'm going to Philly, DC, and Chicago in the next few days. When I return, I'll have a new roommate, at least for a short while:
Brad, Thomas, and EOB together in one town for at least a year. Carnage.
I love Fall. While I'm excited about racing my first season of Midwestern 'cross, my anticipation of Autumn stems from one thing. No matter how much California changed me, one constant remains:
Redemske pulled me up and over quite a few of the Ponca Hills yesterday. We rode about 35 miles and climbed over 1500 feet. For once, August relented; when we rode under the Mormon Bridge at 10:00, the temperature hovered around 70 degrees, and it stayed under 80 throughout the ride.
Because the summers here in Nebraska are so humid and the winters so cold, spring and fall are pretty sacred. Yesterday was glorious preview of what's to come next month. We spun through old-growth elm forest, horse pastures, and terraced grain fields. I even tackled some of the famous gravel beloved of so many riders here.
I told Bryan I'd forgotten how green Nebraska can be in August. And it was a rumpled, big sky green:
photo by Bryan Redemske
These kinds of rides are helping me reconnect with everything I love about Nebraska. I can't wait for fall.
I also felt integrated with the countryside. Getting away from the desk and smelling the earth helps my project, because it reminds me of why I chose to spend three years of my life writing about local agriculture and its origins in Wordsworth:
Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings, and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.
"Essential passions of the heart." Pretty good reasons to do pretty much anything.
Tomorrow there are three races around Omaha: a stage race in Sioux Falls, a crit in Des Moines, and Gravel Worlds in Lincoln. I'm missing them all in order to see my daughter's first soccer game. She played last season with a team of 3rd-4th graders who had all played together the year before. They simply annihilated teams, and since they finished undefeated, Abbey's never lost a sporting event.
But this season they're moving up to play against 5th and 6th-graders. Most of her team's that old, but Abbey's still only in 4th grade. She's big, fast, and pretty brave on defense, but many of these girls will be two years older than she is. The days of crushing other teams are over.
I can relate. I raced pretty well as a 4 and got killed when I made the jump to race Master's 1/2/3 with Rocknasium.
I'm going to ride hard in the morning before the game. I'm going to find the headwind and punish myself by attacking straight into it, over and over again. Maybe grappling with the wind will finally help me grasp the metaphor I've always rationally understood but never truly believed.
Fitness is slippery: sometimes you can touch it, but you can never hold it. You have to go slow before you can go fast, and sometimes you have to get weaker in order to get stronger. And no matter how tough you think you are, the legs, lungs, and heart will sometimes fail. Form comes and goes, and trying to hold on too long causes disaster. But I can't seem to stop trying.
"Poets talk about 'spots of time,' but it is really fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone. I shall remember that son of a bitch forever."
So writes Norman Maclean in "A River Runs Through it." I think a lot about Maclean every time I head toward the mountains. His relationships with his father and brother are the sort I always wished I'd had when I was a boy.
But what I find most compelling about his work are its attempts to use his passion for fly-fishing as a metaphor for the nature of his own existence. That's a recurring strain within Romanticism: poets (and their critics) try to figure the interplay between ourselves and our surroundings as a union of the self and the other. Meditating upon an object like a Grecian urn, a meteorological phenomenon like the west wind, or the shelter created by the shade of a linden tree becomes an act of self-disclosure and unification with the world. If the phenomenon that we call the world is wholly contained within the imagination of the individual, then things like urns--or activities like fly-fishing--can join with the person and break down the isolation that so many of us feel when we're faced with an apathetic world. We flow out of ourselves and violate the boundaries of our own existence, becoming one with nature or another person through the merest observation and contemplation.
So sometimes, time stops, and if we're lucky and attentive, we can feel the enormity of life contained in one crystallized moment. More importantly, we experience this sense of the sublime not as an isolating and self-destroying aesthetic, but rather as something which expands our sense of self in order to encompass everything we see. The world stops being elsewhere and becomes a part of us, just as we become a part of it.
That's why I ride. I've written here before about the ways in which pedaling through an environment makes me feel like I'm immersed in it rather than "floating dully along." But when I've been pedaling for so long and hard that I start to lose the ability to define myself, I sometimes become hyper-attenuated to the world. In those moments, life takes on a grace and an artistry that it seems to be lacking most of the time. I don't really care whether or not this perception shows me life as it is or life as I dearly wish it to be. I just know that in those moments, "there is life and food for future years."
Here's Maclean again:
Life every now and then becomes literature--not for long, of course, but long enough to be what we best remember, and often enough so that what we eventually come to mean by life are those moments when life, instead of going sideways, backwards, forward, or nowhere at all, lines out straight, tense and inevitable, with a complication, climax, and, given some luck, a purgation, as if life had been made and not happened.
Riding the bike on Trail 401 in Crested Butte felt like writing the story of riding the bike. There was poetry in the world as I bombed down the trail: a lyric about myself, my friend, and mountains.
But Wordsworth knew--as does Maclean, as do I--that only in poetry can such moments endure, that "life is not a work of art, and that the moment could not last:"
Why is it that all wonderful things seem so fleeting, yet the pain of their passing endures?
