Against representation

Posted by Ed on August 31, 2022

It’s been eight months or so since I posted anything on this blog. There are reasons for that, which are two-fold.

First, running this year has simply taken up less space in my life. That’s not to say I’ve not been running — I secured a half marathon PB at Milton Keynes in May, and a 50k PB at Lea Valley in June. But, compared to the year-long odyssey that was the 2021 Centurion 50-mile Grand Slam, 2022 has been much less unidirectional. I’ve enjoyed jumping into races and going on the odd adventure, but not until the last few weeks in the build up to Ring of Steall have I engaged in anything like focused training.

The second reason I’ve not been writing much here, though, is a bit harder to grapple with. It might sound paradoxical for a running-oriented blogger to admit this, but I’ve been struggling with the idea of writing about running at all. There are deep-rooted ideas underpinning this doubt — Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary is perhaps its primary cause — but fundamentally what I’m wrestling with is the fact that writing is fundamentally representative, whereas running is, to borrow McGilchrist’s terminology, ‘a presencing’.

By ‘representative’, I don’t mean the contemporary sense of the word as it pertains to diversity and inclusion; I mean it a bit more literally. To borrow McGilchrist’s lingo again, I mean it as a re-presentation; the hollowing out and displaying of something once alive, now little more than an illusion, a shell. Writing takes the near-infinite realm of untrammeled experience and distills from it a linear, sequential, representational shorthand — communicable and graspable, but fundamentally not the thing itself.

I worry sometimes, when I think about such things, that I am going mad. But my experience reading The Master and His Emissary has been that, as much as it disquiets me to comprehend (such that I occasionally have to stop reading out of something like fear), McGilchrist is onto something very, very profound. Something we, in the 21st century, have almost completely forgotten. And that forgetting is something I worry I am contributing to when I blog, or use social media, or try in any way to cram some aspect of the world into a neat little package and share it.

Writing about running in the last year or so has sometimes felt, to me, to me, like taxidermy. To take everything that running is — that even a single run around the park is — and condense it into prose? Impossible.

And yet… taxidermy can be beautiful. And so can writing be. And this is the problem.

Is it better to try, and fall short of the thing itself, than to not try at all? Probably. But it is so painful, sometimes, to contemplate how far short one’s attempt falls in comparison to The Thing Itself. And running is a wonderful Thing.

I will, undoubtedly, get over myself, and write more. But I think this state of doubt is necessary. I don’t want to become engorged on my own representations, such that I lose sight of what it is that I am doing in the first place. Writing is how I think — it’s my quiet hope that, in descending deeper into the question of why, I’ll come up with better hows.