The trail takes me out of the trees and into a backcountry parking lot. I hear Miriam cheering before I see her beaming face.
“I’m done,” I say. “It’s too hard. I can’t do it. I’m bailing.”
Miriam shakes her head. She’s all kitted out in her running clothes, headlamp, backpack, and trekking poles, ready to pace me to the end like we’d planned.
“There is absolutely no way you are not finishing this thing!” she says, with the kind of joyful exuberance that made me fall in love with her. Some fires are so warm and toasty, you never want to put them out. How could I let her down?
“Okay,” I say. I sit down. I change my shoes and socks. I ask a medic to patch up my blisters. I say goodbye to Emily and Andrew and kiss the kids goodbye. They’ll stay with Emily and Andrew tonight, who’ll take them to school tomorrow morning. Then Miriam leads me into the darkness. I follow her on a dusty trail heading uphill. It’s all I can do to put one foot in front of the other. I hear Miriam talking, catching me up on her day with the kids. I can’t focus on what she’s saying. It’s not the topic that I’m having a hard time managing to process but language itself. My thinking mind is shutting down altogether. My brain’s working at something like the level of a three-year-old. Are we there yet? I don’t like this. I wanna go home . . .
XI
Dysnomia
The Tower
Out beyond the Kuiper Belt there is an even more distant realm of icy rocks called the Scattered Disc. One of them is called Dysnomia, named after the Greek god of anarchy. There is a school of thought that anarchy never accomplishes anything worthwhile. But chaos can be creative, the seed of breakthrough, rather than breakdown.
Kazimierz Dąbrowski was a twentieth-century Polish psychiatrist. When he was in his twenties, his best friend died by suicide. When he was in his forties, the Nazis put him in prison. After World War II, Stalin put him in prison again. Dąbrowski sought to understand an apparent paradox about the chaos of war: its capacity to yield both heroism and murder, the best and worst poles of human behavior. He developed a theory he called positive disintegration.15 Psychological maturity requires the ability to see life from what Dąbrowski called a multileveled perspective. An immature person sees the world from a rigid, single point of view: me versus you, us versus them. A mature person sees the world from a flexible point of view, moving between different perspectives and integrating them. To shift from a rigid, all-or-nothing, single-level state to a flexible, multilevel state, a certain kind of creative chaos—positive disintegration—is necessary. Disintegration doesn’t always end well. It can be negative, as Dąbrowski witnessed in his friend’s suicide and the atrocities of Hitler and Stalin. But chaos can be harnessed toward transformational ends.
Recent neuroscience research has illuminated some of the brain mechanisms involved in positive disintegration. The principal breakthroughs in this area have come from research on the clinical use of psychedelic drugs. The use of psilocybin for depression and anxiety in cancer patients suggests that the therapeutic benefits involve the stimulation of a disordered brain state similar to a waking dream. Neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris calls this state the entropic brain.16 Psychedelics induce a waking dream by increasing the amount of entropy, or disorder, in the network structure of the brain. Under ordinary circumstances the brain maintains a balance between two essential modes of consciousness, primary and secondary. Primary consciousness is the mind of emotion and dreams and infant reverie. Secondary consciousness is the mind of thought and reason. The brain is a system of electrochemical circuits negotiating a balance between order and disorder. Psychedelics push the balance toward disorder. It is this chaotic state, Carhart-Harris proposes, that can reorganize the rigid neural patterns associated with anxiety and depression.
Can ultrarunning, like psychedelic drugs, induce the entropic brain? Proof awaits confirmation through empirical studies. Eighty-four hours into the Tahoe 200, I sure felt like I was tripping on acid—though for a while not in a positive way. I was in Dysnomia: a state of psychological anarchy, on the verge of breakdown.
WORDS. THERE ARE MANY of them, these words, running together, one upon the other. Long ago I might have known their meaning. I might have heard about a river. Children. A boat upon the river. Children. Boat. River. I would have heard these words and turned them into pictures in my mind. I would have seen the children on the river. She is telling me about the time before. The old time, before I came here. Now there are boulders in every direction. A rock. Step over it. Another rock. Step over it. More rocks, forever. Focus on the next ten steps. Get from here to that bush over there. One. Throbbing pain, from ankle to knee. Accept it. You can do this. Two. Stabbing pain. Three. Another stab. You can do it. Breathe. Four. Stab. Five. Stab. Six. Stab. Stop. Kneel down. Sit on your heels. Stretch out the shins. No pain now. I could stay here, kneeling. Then the pain would disappear. I could kneel and pray for morning. But then the end would never come. I see two men by the side of the trail ahead of me. One man is lying down. The other sits by him, waiting. Perhaps they were promised the morning, these men. Perhaps they know something that I do not. One . . . two . . . three. I pass the men. The trail leads to the edge of a vast, steep plunge into nothingness. I can’t see the ground beneath the shroud of dust that covers it. I take a slow step forward. A jagged rock stabs my feet. I look at the path ahead. The boulder maze extends as far as I can see. The world’s shrunk to a pale sphere of light beyond whose frontiers the forest disappears into the void. I can smell the stink that wafts from a body encrusted with days of sweat. I feel dizzy from fatigue and lack of oxygen at this high altitude. Pain from my blistered feet cuts like a dagger with each—Ow!—step—Ow!—forward. My legs throb in agony after days and nights of running over almost two hundred miles of rugged mountain trail. I have nothing left to give. But I can’t stop. The end is fifteen miles from here—it might as well be a billion. I know that all I can and must do is take—this—next—step. At least the ground is flat. It’s the descents that punish my aching shin tendons. I take—another—step. A maze of jagged boulders. The air thick with dust. A patch of ground lit by the sick yellow rays of my headlamp. A shroud of dust flattens the ground from three dimensions into two. Behold the collapse of space. The darkness seems infinite, severing the moment from past and future, stranding me here alone in pain. Behold the collapse of time. Perhaps I am supposed to be here, alone and hurting, in the darkness beyond all reason. I am back in the dark place. Rocks plunge into an abyss. A flat plane ahead. One. Another rock dagger. The mountain hates me. One, two, three. Stab, stab, stab. I must have done something very bad. The trail descends farther into the void. One . . . two . . . three. Kneel again. No pain. Then the knowledge of the distance still ahead. Standing, moving, the right and then the left. Rocks everywhere. The mountain smashed into pieces. Pain in my toes, pain in my shins, pain in my mouth and mind. What’s in your boots? Blisters. The need to keep on running. The need to remember something.
Right foot. Left foot. Right foot, left foot. You’ve really gone downhill, wee fella. Right foot. Left foot. Right foot. Dark. Dark. Dark. The sun has died. Breathe in. Breathe out. Plant the left pole. Now the right one. Hear the clock tick-tock. Hear the children play by the river. You may hear tones and then silence. One, two, left, right. You may hear moans and then silence. Right, stab. Left, stab. You are at the lowest level. There is no boulder beneath this one. Moans. Silence. Plant the left pole. Now the right one. Hear the children moan by the river. English male, disheveled, welcome to the City of Night. Another. Step. Forward. One. One. One. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Breathe in. Breathe out. Dust in the air, dust on the ground. Kneel again. No pain. Then standing and moving and the pain again. The patient understands the rule. Dot, dot, dot. Right? You could have gone anywhere. You came here. The clock. Tick. Stops. One, two, three. Ashes in the air, ashes on the ground. Daddy, please save me from the Bomb. I cannot remember the explosion. Oblivion. One, two, three. Trap shut, gob shut. Tra
p shut, gob shut. Ball, book, flag. Repeat after me: if I get lost or die, it’s my own damn fault. I am lost and dead. My fault. Mummy is lost and dead. My fault. I remember everything and nothing. One. Two. Three. Ball. Book. Flag. One. Two. Three. Left. Right. Left. Tell me the three things I asked you to remember. Mum. Is. Dead. Mother is dead. The others are dead. Repeat after me: shut up, shut up, shut up. Clean your teeth and shut your mouth. The runner understands the rules. The trees say, Hello, wake up. Wake up, wake up, wake up. Hear the clock tick-tock, hear the ghosts and silence. Ball. Book. Oblivion. Dust in the air . . . dust in my eyes and nose . . . ashes in my eyes. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. Help . . .
A LIGHT COMES ON in the depths of my scattered consciousness. I’m not alone and lost and helpless in an infinite darkness. I’m here in the mountains, with Miriam. I know what to do. “I have to sleep,” I say. “Immediately.” “Sure, babe,” says Miriam. I stride to the side of the trail and hurl myself to the ground on a pile of pine needles. I take off my pack and pull out my survival blanket. I wrap the golden foil around me. Miriam lies down next to me and gets underneath the blanket. I close my eyes, cocooned in my blanket and Miriam’s arms. A maelstrom of dream images rushes through my mind.
My eyes open. Ten minutes have passed. I am restored to lucid waking awareness. I stand. There’s a way out of here: one step at a time. The sun will rise, the darkness will end, and I’ll get back to Homewood. I follow Miriam downhill for a little while longer until we reach the bottom of the boulder maze. The trail ahead is a steep slog two thousand feet up to the last aid station before the finish. Barker Pass: mile 198.5. Miriam sets a solid pace on the climb. I can see her in my headlamp about thirty feet ahead. I catch up with another runner. “Top five, top three hardest things you’ve ever done?” he says. “No question,” I say. The two of us fall into a rhythm, matching each other step for step, until we reach the final summit. Inside the tent at Barker Pass I can see cots and blankets and a heater and tables loaded with food. I can see an exhausted runner, collapsed on a cot. I grab a plate of food and sit down by one of the heaters. I sit facing a man bundled up in blankets. I listen to him speaking to the woman sitting next to him, whom I recognize as the medic who tended to my injuries a long time ago.
“And we do this—for what?” says the man. “For a medal? A shirt? So that we can say we were there? Why do we do these things?” It was hard to know. He could have been a prophet, gazing down with sad eyes at the folly of the world. You could sit on a mountaintop and ask questions like that until the end of time.
A little while before I went to the hospital, when I was obsessing over what happened in Cannon Road, my father consulted the I Ching, the ancient Chinese book of spiritual prophecy. My father interpreted the text he read through this consultation with the following guidance to me: “It is as though you have climbed a high tower. From the top, you can see farther. But you can only see as far as the horizon. You must come down from the tower. When you do, you will gain the power to change a number of people’s lives.”
I DIDN’T COME DOWN from the tower for many years. It was so lonely up there, I almost died. I kept looking at the view. I gazed at every single tree. The past is infinite. The more you look at it, the more you understand. There’s no end to understanding. But now I understand enough. I’ve seen the trees. I won’t forget them. I’ve looked at the view so long, I can close my eyes and still see the forest. I’ll never forget it. The forest is a part of me. So now it’s finally time to go. I’m ready. It’s time to come down from the tower. It’s time to try and change a number of people’s lives. Even if that number is one.
“Let’s get out of here,” I say.
“Good call,” says Miriam. “This place is freaking me out.”
We hike out of Barker Pass at about two in the morning and start a long descent following the last seven miles of the trail as it circles back to Homewood. When the sun comes up, I can see the lake. We head downhill for hours, but it feels like the lake’s not gotten any closer, as if the circle around the lake has formed a kind of magic island that I will never leave.
Around nine in the morning I can hear claps and whoops from the crowd at the finish line. A bell rings. It’s hard to believe that soon I’ll sit down and won’t need to run anymore.
XII
The Oort Cloud
Stay Awhile
I hobbled along the busy downtown street in a dreamy state of mind. I was on my way to the courthouse. My legs still hurt. My mind was still reeling from ninety-six hours of running. I was due in court to testify as an expert witness in an asylum case. One of the patients at our clinic was a young man from Guatemala. He’d fled gang violence there and sought sanctuary in California. He’d survived a kind of violence on a scale altogether different from the challenges I endured in my own youth as a white man growing up in England. But I could empathize with the impetus of a fellow runaway seeking refuge someplace far away. As I made my way to the court, a crowd flowed past me. Everyone looked like they were in a rush to get where they were going, heads downcast to the sidewalk or a phone, no one looking forward or at the cloudless sky above. I wanted to high-five every one of them as if they were fellow travelers on the trail of life, saying, Good job, friend—you got this. My body had come back to the city. But my mind was still in the mountains, chanting, Namu kie Butsu. Perhaps it always would be.
The dreamy feeling stayed with me. It took a while to process what had happened on my last night in Tahoe. The meaning revealed itself in hindsight, like the route up a dark mountain I had only glimpsed in disconnected little parts at the time as I took each step uphill but that I could see as whole in the sunrise at the summit, looking back downhill. For so long I had wondered about all the holes in my memory, all the voids in my history, a vague intuition of something incomplete and forever mysterious and irrecoverable in my sense of who I was, where I came from, the throb of an ancient wound. What happened in Cannon Road? What happened to my parents? Why did the model and the soldier run away?
They were the wrong questions. I had been searching for answers in the past, in memory or history. But the knowledge I’d lost wasn’t there. It didn’t exist in time at all. Ninety hours into the run, at the point the waking dream became nightmarish, something felt all too familiar. The mountain was massive and terrifying. The darkness was infinite. I felt alone. I understood the infinite darkness as a time outside of time, when I was little and helpless and afraid. I was all by myself in the presence of something massive and incomprehensible: my mother’s psychosis. But now I understood her mind, and my own. I wouldn’t need to go back into the darkness ever again. This was what I learned in the fourth night in the mountains, running around the lake. This was the knowledge in the shadows.
I felt as if I had woken from a long and crazy dream. I could picture the early miles in the sunshine, high above the lake. The endless marching through the green tunnel of the forest. Infinite corridors of darkness, slogging up mountains in the night. The Mourner and Kindness and Mountain Buddha. The sensation of the whole of my past, the long trail from England to the present, folded inside the inner space that opened up and widened as I traveled farther outward. I had wanted to find the message that lay deep in the shadows. On the fourth night, I had found it. The meaning emerged in my mind over several months, as I followed the trail of memory from the nightmare world of the fourth night in Tahoe back into the past. Suicide. Drugs. Time after time, I stood at the edge of the abyss. I kept on circling back to the time it had always been, the place where I had stopped. There were parts of me I still didn’t understand. Voids in time that no amount of thinking or remembering or studying could ever fill in. But on the fourth night in Tahoe, I had finally traveled to that dreamworld with the knowledge preserved upon waking of what and whom my dream self had encountered there. I’d gone to Tahoe because of an intuition operating at the most primordial level of my mind, the way we experience the world as infants and in other liminal states of consciousne
ss like dreams. This level precedes rational thought and has its own rules that function according to a kind of magical illogic. If this unconscious part of me could speak, it would have expressed a belief as follows: If I collapse, Mummy will come back to me. Once there was a frightened little boy alone in his room. Then there was a man in the hospital, remembering the boy in the room. Then a runner on a mountain, remembering the man in the hospital, remembering the boy in the room. The mountain and the rooms were one. I kept collapsing, trying to stay connected to her, or to the place we shared where our minds ran into each other. But I didn’t need to do that anymore.
I told Shosan what I had learned. Several months later I participated in the jukai ceremony, where I committed to the vows of Zen Buddhism. It was a fitting acknowledgment of the long trail that led from the present moment back through the mountains that had healed me, to the hospital, to the Black Rock Desert, to England, Ireland, back through space and time. “All of my ancient twisted karma, from beginningless greed, hatred, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow,” I said three times, following Zen tradition for the ceremony. At the end of the ceremony, Shosan gave me a new name: Yakuzan. It means Medicine Mountain.
Running Is a Kind of Dreaming Page 27