An antidote to the modern world

I found this article about working for Amazon haunting. What have we come to when staff are controlled in such microscopic detail that they are no more than fleshy robots? Only the computer knows where items are stacked and only the computer knows best route so there is no room for expertise  - remembering a layout, fixing a mental map, knowing what you are doing. But worse than that the computer knows how long you should take and makes sure you keep-up. No time for a chat or anything that would mark you out as human.

You could say it is a story as old as the industrial revolution and is there any difference with the production lines of the twentieth Century? I don’t know. Logically there are contiguous but most of those workers, especially in the car plants,were paid a good wage; there were unions, and a community. The line certainly forced the pace, allowed only so much time to tighten a bolt and limited the space for expertise but the Amazon world seems more atomised. The workers are controlled individually and have no collective rights -  it seems bleaker. Previous generations have had hard lives, ground down by work, but there have been hidden corners and ways to work round the edges of the system - the chance to find a little personal space. The cavernous warehouse echo;  empty of such places.

We all knew it would come to this. Science fiction has been writing about it for decades  but it still raises the question of what it meant to be human in the Twenty First Century. Where do we find our own interior life in a world where almost everything is shared and known?

A running blog is not the place to explore such wild and woolly speculative projects (and so I will go no further, except to say read this article from John Naughton that explains the template of the digital age and also read this tangentially related essay about the Google Bus and the effect on the neighbourhoods of San Francisco). A running blog is instead a place to remind myself what running means. How, despite all the technology and branding, it is still a basic, fundamental, human activity that connects us with our forebears. It is one of the ways we are meant to move and rediscovering this simple fact makes us feel more alive. It also provides one of those dark, fecund corners we can go to, to recover a sense of ourselves. We test the body and explore our physical capabilities, and have the opportunity to let the mind wander wherever it wants. Most thoughts will be (if you are anything like me) fleeting and  inconsequential but that is not the point. The point is the freedom.

Go for a run and you escape outside direction and are free from interruption (unless, of course, you take your phone with you).

Embodied

Reading an opinion piece about dictionaries in CIF I found this paragraph:

There's more. We humans are embodied creatures. As philosophers put it, we are extended in space and time. That's no humdrum observation. Our intelligence depends upon it, for we feel our way through the world. Moreover, the same embodiment is intimately linked to our capacity for imagination which, in turn, has much to do with the growth of knowledge. The material world we inhabit nurtures our ability to think, as some of the synonyms used for intelligence themselves suggest: we say, "she's bright", "he's sharp", "they're quick" – metaphors all derived from the physical world.

I need add no more. It is the reason I run.

An Unexpected Reminder

Last Sunday was really dark. As everything was falling away I wondered why I spent so much time not only running but thinking about running. It was all a waste as I was achieving nothing. How could I say it was good when there was only struggle?

These thoughts were worst around half way, when it would have been easy to abandon as the course is a squashed figure of eight, and the end seemed a long way away. But as one foot followed another the distance gradually reduced and I knew I could finish and by doing so find some consolation: prove to myself that I could at least carry-on. Important because I have always believed that all the benefits of running flow from the simple act of keeping going. Consistency is everything.

So I finished and rested and as the feeling of physical weakness receded my spirits started to lift. On Saturday I read this poem in the Guardian and for some strange reason they lifted even more. I know that the metaphor of the marathon is one of the most common in the language (and applied to almost everything) but as I read it here it became inverted: I was the marathon man and the metaphor was the ageing poet. When I thought of 'the first flower in the world' or the 'original bird' I thought not of verse but of the excitement of those early days of running when everything seemed fresh and clear.

My continuing project is to try to maintain that sense of clarity. And this poem brought me back to my purpose. It also reminded me that the only way to see the flower and hear the bird is to be outside, with your senses opened up.

Oh and I also like the idea of being a rowdy at deaths door for whom the last moment is not too late

Some Older American Poets
Borders Bookstore, White Plains, NY


Tired of the accomplished young men
and the accomplished young women,
their neat cerebral arcs and sphinctral circles,
their impeccable chic, their sudden precocious surge,
their claims to be named front-runner,
I have turned to the ageing poets – the marathon men,
the marathon women – the ones who breasted the tape
and simply ran on, establishing their own distance.
Home after another funeral they walk by the pond
with a sense of trees thinning and cold in the air,
yet thrill to the dog's passionate slapstick,
his candid arse-up in the debris of last year's storms.
You sprightly mortals, you rowdies at death's door,
for whom the last moment is not too late to begin!
I can't get enough of you, bright-eyed and poetry mad
in the fields next to the cemetery, where you drop to your knees
before the first flower in the world, where you lift your heads
to that bare cry among brambles, the original bird.

Frank Ormsby from Fireflies.
Published in the Guardian 17th October