excess

Last post I started thinking about how a hobby is always excessive to the outside observer. Being a leisure activity, it's pointless. It thus seems an extravagant expenditure of time. The question about distance running is not whether it's a form of excess, but what kind of excess it is, and what its excesses mean. To endure means to continue in spite of adversity and discomfort. The virtue of endurance lies its exceeding ease, being in excess of what we normal do, in excess of quitting, capitulating, giving up. Distance races exist because they fascinate us in their excessive character: in the excessiveness of the strength and stamina they call on, in the expenditure of pain they exact.

Distance races display and demand excess, but whether distance running, the daily running habit we have, is a form of excess of the more banal kind: a compulsion or addiction, an obsessional neurosis, that's a symptom of or a compensation for a frustrated desire. Runners, we know, rarely stop running. Marti Liquori no long runs because of an illness, but plenty of other retired greats who have achieved all they could in the sport still try. Joan Benoit Samuelson, for example, was recently trying to make the cut for the U.S. women's Olympic trials. Obviously, running presents itself as textbook compulsion, something infinitely, excessively, psycho-analyzable. (N.B. The runner-analysand probably won't be found on a couch.) So it's one of the least interesting, though often true and apt, ways to talk about runners and running. Anyone can be analyzed. Its interpretive interminability leaves all the power with the analyst; even this here resistance to analysis can itself be analyzed, etc., etc., ad infinitum.

Resistance to analysis aside, or my reluctance to confront the latent content of my so obvious symptoms, I've been reading a great book by psychoanalyst and literary intellectual Adam Philips called On Balance. Why do we think balance is such a good thing?, he asks. What can we learn from our attitude toward excess, and toward the excesses of others? I just started it but so far it's an excellent read; his essays wind between lucid interpretations of Freud and Lacan and suggestive meditations on the problem stated in its title. I'll probably blog more about it as I try to untangle the problem of running and excess.