Children in the Garden: On Life at a 3,100-Mile Race
longreads.com
longreads.com
One of the bolded quotes: > If the soul is like a garden, then it is most often something we prune for the world, worried about the way in which it might grow out of its plot, and reveal itself past the confines of whatever private property we have come to call ourselves.
A thought which comes to the author while listening to a friend tell stories about his own endurance race over beers.
> What I noticed about Matt in the aftermath of his race was that he was overcome with an almost boundless joy. It was a joy, too, that didn’t seem to arrive as a result of finishing, but simply as a result of being. For a few days, he had lived in a world that didn’t operate by the rules of this one...
Endurance sports, travel, a new piece of music, a good book, making a new friend, anything that immerses me in a different world, allows me to see myself as more than I thought I was. There's a growth of the essential thing that is me, whether you call that a soul or whatever and it loosens the hold of those cares of the old world.
On the one hand, live and let live.
But on the other. I've _never_ met a person interested in this kind of ascetic practice that wasn't desperately running from some profound dislike of themselves or the world. Despite the triumphal and positive rhetoric in this writing, I can't help but feel that underneath it all is a deep hatred from the ordinary experience of being alive. What else could explain such an enormous desire for what is surely a self destructive drive towards ecstatic experience?
To sacrifice the part of you that is devoted to ordinary human life is to usually not value such ordinary human experience much to begin with.
But our culture also makes heroes out of such sacrifice. Just enjoying a normal, family-oriented life is considered mediocrity in many (most?) circles.
To me, this: > desperately running from some profound dislike of themselves
sounds awfully close to a human universal. The folks in the article are literally running from the ordinary and I think part of what author is getting at here:
> To see someone, anyone, in this world is to witness someone engaged in a feat of endurance.
are the similarities they saw in the outlandish act of running around a city block for 52 days, 18 hours a day, and the ordinary experience of being alive and how the one illumines our understanding of the other.
They have my respect for the dedication it took to do this. I feel though that running in circles around a block missing a point somewhere.
The Inter-American Highway[1] is 3,400 miles and would be a rougher journey, but would seem more fulfilling. Or they could go across the breadth of the U.S.A. using the Pacific Crest Trail [2], which is 2650 miles.
What point would that be? The point that you feel is important? I don't mean to be dismissive; I'm with you, even as a person who does stupid shit like this[0] and runs long distances, I would do it differently. But I also feel it is you and I that "miss the point" if we're ready to tell others what "point" they should be shooting for. Especially when I'm not entirely sure what they're shooting for in the first place. :-)
> “The poets gave away their own books, handbound sometimes, and letterpress broadsides made on antiquated machinery, they gave their time to editing each other’s work in their bedroom offices … they performed their work for nothing but applause, and they gave each other places to stay, couches to sleep on.” She makes her point at the end of the paragraph: “I guess … it’s easy for me to believe there’s an alternative to capitalism because I feel like I’ve lived it.”
Yes, yes, you've lived it inside a house that was built with a system closer to capitalism than anything else, sharing couches made in a system closer to capitalism than anything else, printing books and poems on antiquated machinery made in a system closer to capitalism than anything else ...
I live my life in some ways on the periphery of capitalism, in some ways closer to Bliss and her fellow poets, as I somehow manage to convince people to pay me to keep working on software they could otherwise get without paying, software they can copy freely and use for any purpose they want.
But ... that existence is embedded within an utterly enormous capitalist system, and while my entirely optional-in-life DAW software (as with Bliss' poetry) might find a way to break the mold, to live outside of the assumptions of capitalism, I find it so hard to imagine how the food I eat, the bicycle tires I ride on, the solar panels that power my house, how any of the actual physical, tangible essentials and inessentials of life could do the same.
Graeber of course has always had much to say about our paralysis, our inability to imagine a future unlike our present, but as yet, even his writing has not given me a way to do that to the point where I could share Bliss' belief in an alternative.
Perhaps some day non-capitalism means might eventually create entirely separate possibilities. But these here examples of non-capitalist ways of living are meaningful & significant to me, to these peoe, today, and i tend to accept their claims of legitemacy. To disregard some people's deliberate attempts at living otherwise for their lack of complete purity in doing so seems beyond the point.
Maybe some day we can build alternate modes, where all ends are satisfied internally. But being able to host & share, to cooperate together in alternate modes with one another seems like the defining behavior & characteristic that is essential, to me, that is defining. It's enough. It's valid.
Lets test the extremes. What about a hyperadvanced group of oligarchs, owned an advanced automated industrial world, & competed among themselves under capitalism. But provided food & shelter & surplus to the rest of humanity to live under? There's a vestigial capitalism working at some level, but the mass of humanity operates at some other level. To me it feels like the lived perceieved experience of an individual is what counts. We dont have to chase back the entire dependency tree; something new that happens will almost certainly be evolutionary, less revolutionary/apart. Im ok if we want to introduce the idea of a continuum, but i dont feel like some interaction with capitalist production negates the validity.
(Also, thanks for the interesting, quote heavy comment!)
> To me it feels like the lived perceieved experience of an individual is what counts.
but I think we differ on the impact, in your scenario, on perceived experience is of these "hyperadvanced group of oligarchs, owned an advanced automated industrial world, & competed among themselves under capitalism". While the scenario would certainly allow for a certain kind of freedom and choice, in the backdrop, a system that could allow only a range of choices would still be calling the shots.
Perhaps that would still be sufficient for many people ... it might even be sufficient for me. It's certainly the sort of gamble that the Chinese system seems to be trying to take. But one of the inevitable consequences of capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth, and the freedom to challenge that might be considered an important part of "the perceived experience" of people living in such a system.