Joggers and bloggers: some pretty dry reflections with stick figures



The jogger



and I suppose
any part of us that can only be seen by others
is a dark part (Frank O'Hara)

A simple rhyme (that accidentally popped into my head) has lately given rise to some thoughts about the two things I can honestly say give me the most enjoyment: blogging and jogging, and of the two jogging's still the preferred activity since I've been at it almost my entire adult life. But, as we know, enjoyment has a dark underside. In fact, what could've have easily veered off into odious comparisons between two rather dissimilar things becomes a reflection on 'desire'. Two types of exertion, physical and mental, have actually unleashed a third mysterious autre chose that is anything but liberating but without which exertion of any type instantly ceases. It is, as poet Frank O'Hara sagaciously puts it, "a dark part". It's the dark, elusively real object we're always chasing after.

Desire is, precisely to that extent, the showy gimcrack part of ourselves that makes us visible to the world. Running & blogging are a kind of display with the potential to keep the goal hopelessly out of reach. How exactly can something we pursue for its own sake do that? Firstly, by giving relief only intermittently, for relief from the pain of confounding inactivity is illusory though inactivity isn't, and anything achieved in spurts & starts (as blogging & running are) has a marked propensity, Zeno-style, to continually divide into more parts of itself—the farther we go, the more distant the prospects of achieving success appear— til the agent is seen moving in a perpetual mist, broken-spirited, alone. Anything in the world that actually produces good without the usual tiring, dispiriting intermediaries would, of course, only bring the whole rescue machinery to a grinding half. As Edison Peña knew.

Secondly, pleasurable activities can also damn us from the start by valorizing the work & unleashing some notion of fame or recognition in our heads. Activity gives us too much time with our thoughts. But if the blogger or runner doesn't try to go beyond this half-baked idea that fame essentially is (for most of us), determined to be even a bit stodgy about it, life would still remain unbearable without the next mile, the next line. This twofold desire for relief & fame is the paradox of all activity. A painless jouissance is, as the great Lacan said, life's greatest disappointment. To drive us to the goal and yet make us divert our course at the same time is the engine of the run & the next line: again, the engine of illusion itself. It's the semi-tragedy of life where the experience of human action lives.


The blogger

 And what can be darker, indeed, than the illusion of tying the idea of the good to human activity in general. (That mundane activities only form the limit of my desire, & not something like sex or drink, has the potential to be slanderous if used with force against me!) At the risk of sounding obtuse, I'll have it out with moralists anytime over this intrinsic goodness of the run (or sentence or anything) as opposed to the truer indeterminacy of a notion clearly entangled in its own surroundings. Nietzsche is right: man is "the beast with red cheeks" who tires himself [sic] out trying to place a value on things. Whether in writing or running redness in the face is tantamount to the laughable robustness of the warrior-prince who rides proudly behind the last man.

Is the blogger or jogger, then, saner than his desire to be one? The concreteness of the act is no guarantee of its own intrinsic desirability. That in delineating the outlines of the source of desire thought almost runs away with itself is pretty obvious, isn't it? To see how hilariously robust the idea in motion really is, trying adding (even in imagination) some redness to the stick figures in this post, or even to give a sense of the comicality of effort. Or try adding earth tones to the blogger's squash-sized head, even as he posts his next reply.