Muscles, mud, and mummies

As a runner, my most frequent and immediate contact with nature—nature in this case referring to anything on the other side of the front door—occurs during my daily training runs. These encounters with the world outside are distinct because, unlike most of my other attempts to experience nature, the thing I am most acutely aware of is my own body. Usually when I go hiking or camping or backpacking (or even driving) in the so-called “middle of nowhere” I do so with the goal of shedding my day-to-day worries and all the self-consciousness (self-centered-ness?) that comes with them. One of the reasons I enjoy backpacking so much is that after living for a week or more off of only what I can carry on my back I realize how silly most of the things I worry about really are. Running, however, yields the opposite effect.

Complete attention to the body is an affect that running not only produces but necessitates. That is the essence of running, whether the distance is 400 meters or a marathon: perceiving and interpreting all of the physical and psychological signals, good and bad, your body is sending you in order to maintain a level of effort that is just on the cusp of your sustainable limit. Of course, the state of mind I just described applies more to racing than it does to training, but even this morning, on an easy training run, I noticed my breathing and the soreness in my right knee more than the cracked ice sheets floating on the river next to me. I was attuned to changes in the wind, but only because it stung my face.

My broader point is (I think) that when we experience Nature, “nature”, or nature, we have to experience on some level through our bodies. Perhaps if I spent some time studying meditation techniques I could learn to disconnect my mind from my bodily senses, but I’m definitely not at that point right now. As a consequence, the experiences in nature I remember most vividly are the ones where I was in the most physical pain. It’s not that I remember the pain itself, but that I am more likely to remember the event if it was accompanied by pain. I remember hiking up a mountain in Yellowstone when I had tendonitis; I remember the time I fell down a near-vertical ravine (and I lost my fearlessness); I remember the trail-run where I was lauded as “bloodiest runner” as I crossed the finish coated in mud. Why, in the presence of breath-taking mountains and awesome forests do my own body and its physical reality leave a greater impression on me? And why do I find this troublesome?

I’m going to leave those questions unanswered for now and completely change topics. I have a few ideas (more like images) that have been tumbling around in my head for the first essay. They all kind of (vaguely) center around the question of what life is, what is it in us that recognizes life, and how we can produce the illusion of life.

- When Dashi-Dorzho Itigilov, the leader of the Russian Buddhists from 1911 to 1927, was exhumed 75 years after his death, he was reportedly in the condition of someone who had “been dead for 36 hours”: still sitting in a lotus position, still with soft pliable skin, and still enveloped in a sweet fragrance. He (reportedly) underwent no embalming procedure of any kind.

- I went to the MIT Museum on for the first time on Friday when my parents were visiting. I was entranced by the kinetic sculpture of Arthur Ganson. Many of his sculptures seemed to so perfectly simulate motion that we instantly recognize as lifelike, even though it is driven by gears and pulleys instead of chemical reactions. For example, there was a cart you push around the room that has a rotating treadmill of shag carpet creates the illusion of crawling worms with fibrous tubes. There is also a bed of rice grains that squirms like maggots (entitled “Brownian Rice”), and a wishbone that “walks” along a track. It was amazing. The funny thing is, I saw this room right after I saw the robotics gallery, where machines were meticulously engineered to move or behave like humans or other animals, but I found Ganson’s kinetic sculpture much more successful at stimulating the (someone creepy) feeling of recognizing lifelike motion in something inanimate.

- As most of you are no doubt aware, the MIT campus is practically overrun with rats. (Or, they rule the campus by night, at least. The squirrels have a pretty good run of it during the day.) While I often see a rat (or two or three in succession) scurrying across open concrete, I am most acutely aware of the rats when I walk close to bushes and shrubs. Instead of seeing discrete rodents, I hear an entire hedge shaking. I can’t tell if there are two rats or twenty rats in there, and it seems like it’s the bush itself that is alive and moving.

Ok, so maybe once I let those out of my head they don’t seem so connected (or relevant to nature).