The watercolors are right here

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: One year. The whole series is here.

James and I ran the Brooklyn Half Marathon on Saturday, the first seven miles a leafy tangle around and through Prospect Park, the second a long, straight, asphalt shot down the parkway to Coney Island. (This time-lapse video shows the extreme contrast between the two parts of the course.) The Brooklyn two years ago was my first half-marathon, the longest I’d run up to that point. Last year it fell hours before Sam and Adlai died.

I’ve been thinking about our convention of classifying human states as opposites—sadness and happiness, effort and release, death and life. I don’t know where it ever originated, the idea that one feeling is the inverse of another. It’s pretty silly—a tendency of language that buries the truth. Emotions dance, pulse, bleed into one another. They’re hybrid, self-contradicting, and gone or unrecognizably changed in seconds. Crude enough of us to say that our subjective condition matches a narrow set of descriptors to begin with—happy, sad, courageous. I’ve always struggled to get that far: Describe what you’re feeling. To make that request of someone is like handing Monet a magic marker and asking him to paint the pond.

But we don’t have to use the magic marker when the watercolors are right here. Our bodies are equipped for expression in a billion different forms. For me, two externalities have gotten close in the last year to lining up with the truth of my spirit: listening to one of a few designated symphonies on a long run (Mahler 2, 4, 5, and 10; Bruckner 4 through 8; Sibelius 5), and improvising at the piano. Language is ultimately a truncation. But movement and music—these are fields we can add to, whatever we need. They don’t have a limit.

If we become free, it will not be a result of something someone else made. It will be by the acts of our bodies.

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