Life & Death In the Company of Animals

My empathy for animals has somehow deepened.

I've enjoyed some pretty awe-inspiring moments in the company of animals. Remind me to tell you about the time that, near delirious at the end of a 22-mile run, I happened upon a cow giving birth in a field along a coast road in western Ireland; I wasn't even sure which anatomy I was spying through my sweat-soaked eyes. The cow seemed completely nonplussed—munching grass, studying me casually while a slimy bundle blossomed from her behind.

We have three dogs and a cat. The latter is almost never to be found, unless she's sure the dogs are in bed for the night. When the coast is clear she curls in the crook of my left arm (never the right) and throws her head back to look at me, as if to say, "I'm yours." But in this house dogs reign supreme. They command an enormous portion of our time and attention, and bleed us of tremendous stores of energy. And yet our mutual devotion is astonishingly deep and gratifying. They're maddening and delightful, pushy and sublime. We have three of them because I can't bear the thought of being without a buffer creature should one die. There have to be two around, always. There's no more sympathetic creature than a lonesome dog, especially when you once had two.

John Berger wrote a great essay entitled Why Look At Animals, from his collection called About Looking. It's a classic Berger study, obliquely, quietly revealing unspoken truths in everyday perceptual experience. It's worth a read if you have the time.

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Something happened to me a couple of days ago—something involving an animal—and it's leapt to the fore over and over in memory. I witnessed a profoundly pathetic and yet dignified moment of passage, the space between life and death. It happened to a squirrel. Before reflecting on this, I was unsure why it moved me so thoroughly. In retrospect, I think that—while I have encountered many a dead animal—I have only ever watched one other creature die. That was my poor, old, blind dachshund Heinz, whose pain-wracked face had been inches from mine as the vet put him down after being run over by our neighbor's car. I'd watched his eyes close as the poison took effect. I wept openly, my insides heaving from the grief, 13 years of knowing suddenly cascading down, out of nowhere.

This squirrel's death was first a puzzle, then a revelation. I was nearing the end of a run when a car which had slowly passed me from behind made a quick left turn into a gravel parking spot at the side of the lake near my house. As I ran a few feet further, I saw in the middle of the road the beautiful squirrel, its head close to the pavement. While it appeared perfectly normal in most ways—its body wasn't mangled, there didn't seem to be any blood—the squirrel seemed to be looking for something, to be asking a question with its entire body. It crept no more than 2 feet toward the side of the road, and then in less than five seconds it was dead. Its eyes closed suddenly and with gracious finality. Its face was beautiful and the dignity with which it confronted those last futile moments while trying its best to survive felt complete. It tried and lost, but in losing it surrendered none of its beauty. I let out an audible, sympathetic moan. The driver got out of his car with his fishing pole, completely oblivious to the squirrel. He glanced my way, turned to the lake which was teeming with fish, and went about the business of baiting his hook.

From terror to fear to myth.

I wrote this on 15 April, after the bombings at the Boston Marathon. 

Yesterday we hosted what has become a springtime tradition at the house. In April, as every austere and stoic soul in New England is hanging by the thinnest of threads, cursing the bitter north wind and praying for just a hint of earthly delight, we invite friends over for an exchange of green things. People bring hopeful plants to share with one another and the idea is to offer a sense of renewed optimism after the grayness of winter, instilling a faint vision of metaphorical rebirth by planting saplings, seeds or bulbs, even if doing so is weeks away. Spring and then summer in New England are unparalleled—absolutely perfect—so the wretched winters here are bearable with a couple of reminders that the chill will soon go into hiding.

A couple of friends didn't make the party because they were running the Boston Marathon today. I envied them, mostly because they're about my age and are still giving it a go, while I've put aside those grand aspirations in recent years, always with the hope that I'll be running in top form again any day now (cue laugh track). One of these friends contacted me to say that he needed the rest, having scored a number at the last minute. He's run the race since he was a teenager growing up in Brockton, far eclipsing my own Boston experiences, which number two races in unseasonable and viscious heat—both pretty humbling experiences after qualifying and convincing myself that I'd do just as well on that infamously tricky Boston course.

Today was horrific and for those of us who got the news remotely, it came upon us in nauseating waves, an all-too-familiar recognition, something sadly familiar and infuriating. John and I had just finished a five mile run on a hilly loop when we received simultaneous text messages asking if we were OK and begging assurance that we were nowhere near the race course. Back home, throughout the afternoon I checked confusing headlines and studied the same gory and chaotic photos online, turning over in my imagination the origins of something so vile, the filthy, small minds who devised the destruction.

The last stretch of the Boston Marathon, whether you finish strong or part of the zombie parade, is designed to be jubilant and for race qualifiers it's especially rewarding. If you're not running for charity or as a bandit, qualifying for Boston can be pretty challenging after months of obsessive training, earning an acceptable time in a previous marathon, and (more and more) a bit of fortunate timing when registration opens. Nevertheless, no matter how folks get there, with such an arduous process of self-discovery behind them, crossing the finish line concludes a journey much longer than 26.2 miles for many people. Reaching the end is a transformative moment, teeming with significance. So what more insidious, hateful way to upend that joy than to install ferocious bombs yards from the finish line—blowing the legs off spectators, mostly the families and friends of runners? As we listened to the confusing pieces of news and began to make sense of the event, I was immediately taken back to that beautiful, horrible day in 2001 when my kids (then all very young) came home one-by-one from school. With each, I tried to explain to them how a small group of perverse minds conspired with unfathomable loathing to crash four planes with the intention of killing 3000 people and forever scarring the lives of hundreds of millions more.

In all of this insanity I had a moment of clarity today. It came out of the blue, inexplicably. In the past several years I have seen many students with extraordinary gifts, complex minds and critical, creative perspectives invest a great deal of their talent in the rapidly expanding field of character design. In all honesty, the editorial illustrator in me finds this trend disheartening. In one portfolio after another young illustrators submit to the conventions of burgeoning industry, work which includes inventories of characters in costume and not much more. These are descriptive, objective studies, not images with individual perspective, circumstance or meaning beyond archetypal representation, and they feel empty—void of content or message—no matter how well they're drawn or painted, no matter how subtle the color palette. While I respect these endeavors, as I do any classification of applied illustration, these studies represent a significant disappointment after seeing such promise in these students in previous semesters. All along I've assumed that the students are merely pandering to a trending market. More than anything I hope for a more opinionated, vocal direction among our students, a return to the editorial voice which is more about chutzpa than costumes. 

Today I realized the origins of this fascination with heroic, mythic and fantastic characters in our nation's psyche and further indulged by students of art and design. In the same way that the Great Depression was the impetus for escapist cinema in the 1930s, terrorism has bred a desperate creative investment in superheroes, fairies and mythic dichotomies of good and evil. Today's young artist has known evil in ways my own generation never imagined. 

After a few years of frustration and (I'll admit it) a growing intolerance for escapist motives in young illustrators, today's realization is saddening.  A sympathetic, tragic chord has instead been struck. This generation of wonderfully creative people was raised in a culture of insidious fear, where no real life heroes can guarantee their safety, where economic collapse is at the whim of blustery, rogue financial institutions, and where bombs blow up people at one of the most celebrated, democratic sporting events in the world, turning the personal triumphs of hundreds of people into a nightmare, all over again. 

Be yourself.

I start my first class today after an all-too-brief summer. Most of June was consumed by the ICON7 conference we hosted at RISD, the alumni show we'd pulled together, and the ensuing post-event business. Before I knew it I was gearing up for another busy year. For about 20 years, I've tried to free myself up just before the start of school as a way to recharge and tap inspiration before giving it all I've got in class for 13 weeks.

In an effort to claim that vital sense of authority and calm, I spent last weekend in Manhattan. In addition to some great museums, theater, food and music—we did our customary run in the park on Sunday morning. This is always such a delight, because, unlike any other city I know, New York is so teeming with runners that the critical mass really energizes me. We entered the park in the southwest corner and trotted clockwise along the outer paths and roads, passing thousands of ambulatory souls—runners, cyclists, walkers, strollers—all traveling in the opposite direction.

Clearly, we were doing it wrong. While our unspoken recognition of this amused me, John later told me that we'd garnered plenty of dirty looks. I didn't notice that (and anyone who knows me will know that I am always on the lookout for disapproval) but I did feel alternately rebellious and sheepish that we were disrupting the flow of so many people's highly prized enjoyment of the outdoors in such a busy town. We were never physically in the way, no one seemed alarmed or inconvenienced by our mistake, but there must have been a sort of psychic frustration that we brought to such a galvanized, consensual group act that it was bound to be annoying. One enormous wave of collective energy was traveling counter clockwise, its bits and pieces all silently agreeing to move in one direction, at about the same speed, breathing rhythmically like a big locomotive, its energy concentrated several yards in the distance. And here we were, screwing it up, their accordance denied by a pair of guys who didn't know the rules. We didn't do this on purpose. It's just that by the time we'd concluded that we were definitely going the wrong direction, it was too late. I'm a full-circle kind of guy and doing an out and back run on a looping course seemed more wrong than traveling in the opposite direction of the throng.

At the end of the run we passed a family of tourists who may as well have stepped out of a cartoon. It was easy to see that they were visitors, but the most noticeable among them was a girl of about eleven. She was blond, with braids and thick-lensed glasses. She seemed too big to be carrying a doll, whose head and arms drooped limply over her left elbow while the legs hung loose at her waist. While her family squinted in the morning sun, their tired faces pivoting from sidewalk to rooftops, to horse drawn carriage to hot dog stand, the little girl seemed completely oblivious to her surroundings, in another place entirely. More than anything, I noticed her shirt. Her shirt was the juice. The words, "Be Yourself" consumed just about every inch of its surface, spelled out in rhinestones and glitter. She was smiling beatifically, her head tilting a bit, side-to-side. She appeared to be enjoying a little song or a snatch of imaginary dialogue.

I'm a terrible cynic. My immediate reaction was to scoff internally. "Silly, naive little girl with braids and a stupid t-shirt." But within seconds that cynicism softened. I was more taken by her apparent contentment, the weird bliss that seemed to carry her along, trailing behind her family. I felt pretty good about her confidence in wearing that pithy shirt. I wanted to tell her that I liked her message—all of it.

*   *   * 

I know what you're thinking. This sounds like it's going to wind up with an inevitable correlation between my own counter-clockwisedness and the mandate to "be myself," issued forth in glittery grandeur on an 11-year-old's T-shirt in Central Park. While that comparison may be convenient and even a little touching, I'm more interested in expressing my hope for my sophomore students, whom I'll meet today in class. This will be their foray into illustration. The product of loving homes, they will most certainly have been told to "be themselves" at some point in life. In their first year at RISD they'll have been coached to "find their voices." Illustration, both the field of study and the profession, will challenge them to do just that: to be original—to be themselves—but to do so by way of a common visual language. They'll need to be true to personal instinct while cognizant of shared knowledge and experience, to utter new truths which are founded in age-old vocabulary of complex cultural signs.  They'll have to enjoy the process or risk intense unhappiness, and the only way to do this is to attain a sense of self-fulfillment and authorship, not only in the acting of making, but in service to messages which are sometimes the product of others' imagination and cognition. The field will ask them to say things in a new way, but with a ring of familiarity that allows a reader to wholly own the content they are absorbing, to feel a sense of marvelous discovery shared with the illustrator. My message to them today: the best illustration exposes truths we didn't know we knew, and when we can manage that much we'll have attained some semblance of originality. The illustrator must be himself, but that self is a messenger with singular voice which reaches the consciousness of others. No mean feat.

Running update.

I don't write about running much any more, primarily because I haven't been serious about it for a few years. When I was in Rome I ran quite a lot but only raced three times in the two years that I lived there, so I did lose a lot of the psychological focus which I found so essential to racing well. I'm still struggling to get that back, especially with the other important developments that have transpired in my life in recent years.


I signed on for the Memphis Marathon a couple of weeks ago. It's been six years since my last long race in Richmond--where I was in the best shape of my life and hoping to run 3:05 or thereabouts, yet stumbled in with a disappointing 3:15. I came lumbering down the last hill nearly bent in half from fatigue and felt a lot of remorse, having run just a few seconds too fast for each of the first 17 miles. My poor old ma was pretty shaken up to see me in such cruddy shape.


While I don't think I'll come close to either of those times, I'm eager to see how things shake out, and I'm especially excited to see my old friends. I haven't been back to Memphis since 1998, I suppose, and I do miss the folks there---some of the best friends I have made in life. 


I started an 18 week training schedule last week and immediately found myself with a small setback. My right calf—nothing serious, and I do have many months to go before the race (it's December 4, so I guess I still have about 16-17 weeks to prepare). I suppose I'm lucky that it's only my second month of training, but it's maddeningly typical. Just as things begin to improve I invariably have to take a little break to heal from some muscular annoyance.


The orthopedist seems to think it began with my piriformis syndrome problem. The piriformis is a small muscle embedded deep behind the gluteus maximus. The muscle often becomes inflamed in runners and ultimately causes terrific pain when it presses on the sciatic nerve. . I have a tough time driving for even five minutes due to sciatica—a literal pain in the ass. But my piriformis problem seems to have waned over the past few days and it's been replaced by a nagging pain in my right calf when I run as little as 1/4 mile. I tried heading out tonight for a nine-miler at dusk, but had to turn back.


Rest and ice. Massage, I guess.


Anyway, back to my long distance, bipedal aspirations. I'm really chomping at the bit to race again. While I'm pretty humbled by my current running companions—a group of guys I run with on Thursday nights—I hope to be able to keep up with them soon. They're great rabbits for me to chase, and while I may not catch them anytime soon, I've got to give it a shot.


It's been a while since I allowed the compulsion to overwhelm me. While it may not sound like a lot to some people, I ran six marathons in two years and I got pretty ground down by the training. My body and mind went through noticeable changes. My brain, and my way of thinking, changed. I began to consider almost everything in terms of time and distance and—if nothing else—I finally became able to do simple math in my head (you hear that Mrs. Updyke, you draconian bitch of a first grade teacher?). Most importantly, I had precious little energy for studio work. I spoke with a colleague about this phenomenon, and she agreed that she finds it impossible to divide her attention between athletic and artistic endeavor. For me, it felt as if the same reservoir of energy was available to both, and running drank the well dry.


I'm of the belief that if you're going to run 26.2 miles you should have a good reason, and for me the reason was always to fully appreciate the limits of my body by running that distance as fast as I was able. All told I did fairly well during that stretch of adulthood, and I'm sorry I took something of a break from it because there's a lot of catching up to do. 


I'll get there.

A new egocentric eruption.

Running

4.5 miles in 34:08 (7:35 per mile)

and a late race report:

The Human Race 10K

Rome

31 August 2008

Finish Time: 43:35 (7:00 per mile)

What a mob scene. The race was fun but in retrospect it wasn't really a race, more like a cattle walk! There must have been tens of thousands at the starting line and Carl Lewis fired the gun here (I didn't realize he was so tall—probably 6'2"-6'3"). 

I figured I'd shoot for 7 minute miles because I haven't raced in a while and really had no idea where I stood. I threw in a mile at 6:24 last weekend toward the end of an 8-9 miler, so I figured I could handle 7:00 per mile in a 10K. The first 3K were a complete bust! I must have lost at least two minutes walking and jogging along at the beginning of the race.  I finally resigned myself to just conserve my energy, knowing things were bound to loosen up. Finally, at about 3K, it grew less congested.

It was a spectacular course, and that was admittedly a good reason to sign on: it began at the Baths of Caracalla, ran past the Palatine Hill, the Colosseum, Via Del Corso, Piazza di Spagna, Piazza del Popolo, Piazza Navona, Piazza Venezia, Teatro Marcello and finally into Circo Massimo for the finish. I finished in 43:35, EXACTLY on pace, yet totally by accident! So this means I could have done better and it gives me an idea of where I stand for the next one. In a couple of weeks I'm running with my new team here in Rome, a race called "12 x 1 Hour." Sounds whacky but each of 12 runners takes an hour on the 400m track (I am scheduled for the hour between 9:00-10:00 AM, for example) and the team with the greatest number of revolutions after 12 hours wins.

*   *   *

I think I'm calling the above painting "finished" for now. I made some changes to color—very subtle differences but more resolved. I'm tired and ready for bed.

My running is going well. My painting is going well. Everything seems to be going well for me these days.