Seamus Heaney's "Casualty"
Thoughts on running.
Casualty
I He would drink by himself And raise a weathered thumb Towards the high shelf, Calling another rum And blackcurrant, without Having to raise his voice, Or order a quick stout By a lifting of the eyes And a discreet dumb-show Of pulling off the top; At closing time would go In waders and peaked cap Into the showery dark, A dole-kept breadwinner But a natural for work. I loved his whole manner, Sure-footed but too sly, His deadpan sidling tact, His fisherman’s quick eye And turned observant back. Incomprehensible To him, my other life. Sometimes, on the high stool, Too busy with his knife At a tobacco plug And not meeting my eye, In the pause after a slug He mentioned poetry. We would be on our own And, always politic And shy of condescension, I would manage by some trick To switch the talk to eels Or lore of the horse and cart Or the Provisionals. But my tentative art His turned back watches too: He was blown to bits Out drinking in a curfew Others obeyed, three nights After they shot dead The thirteen men in Derry. PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said, BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday Everyone held His breath and trembled. II It was a day of cold Raw silence, wind-blown surplice and soutane: Rained-on, flower-laden Coffin after coffin Seemed to float from the door Of the packed cathedral Like blossoms on slow water. The common funeral Unrolled its swaddling band, Lapping, tightening Till we were braced and bound Like brothers in a ring. But he would not be held At home by his own crowd Whatever threats were phoned, Whatever black flags waved. I see him as he turned In that bombed offending place, Remorse fused with terror In his still knowable face, His cornered outfaced stare Blinding in the flash. He had gone miles away For he drank like a fish Nightly, naturally Swimming towards the lure Of warm lit-up places, The blurred mesh and murmur Drifting among glasses In the gregarious smoke. How culpable was he That last night when he broke Our tribe’s complicity? ‘Now, you’re supposed to be An educated man,’ I hear him say. ‘Puzzle me The right answer to that one.’ III I missed his funeral, Those quiet walkers And sideways talkers Shoaling out of his lane To the respectable Purring of the hearse... They move in equal pace With the habitual Slow consolation Of a dawdling engine, The line lifted, hand Over fist, cold sunshine On the water, the land Banked under fog: that morning I was taken in his boat, The Screw purling, turning Indolent fathoms white, I tasted freedom with him. To get out early, haul Steadily off the bottom, Dispraise the catch, and smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt Somewhere, well out, beyond... Dawn-sniffing revenant, Plodder through midnight rain, Question me again. from Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (FSG, 1998)
I am writing about this poem this week because I want to talk about running. But before I talk about that, I want to talk about this poem — this long elegy concerned so deeply with the way violence can shatter the ordinary with such terror that it renders the ordinary no longer commonplace, in that it renders violence so commonplace that, perhaps, there is only the extraordinary difficulty of the world we live in. This poem is — will always be, surely — one of the poems I return to over and over again. It might have been the first poem I began returning to again and again.
This poem today merges so many of Heaney’s distinct strengths as a poet: his sense of rhythm (a gentle lilt of it), his capacity for immersing the ordinary moment with such a sense of wildly specific detail (“a weathered thumb / Towards the high shelf”), and a remarkable ability to enact the way violence (or revelation, or surprise, or anything that stuns or enlivens or devastates) enters into — and then changes — the everyday.
That happens here in today’s poem — after we, perhaps, have fallen for this kind of yeoman sitting at a bar, a fisherman who mentions poetry:
He was blown to bits Out drinking in a curfew Others obeyed
Poems such as this one reveal why the conversation that so often occurs about the political in poetry or the purpose of poetry or the intersection of politics with anything feels so trite. Even reductive. Frankly, sometimes quite annoying.
And I say that because this poem is inherently about the fact that, even when you are trying — perhaps — to refrain from the political, to enjoy, with a “turned observant back,” your nightly beer (or more), you might still find yourself making a political statement by the sheer fact of your presence. Or, even if you are not trying to make a statement, you might find yourself, tragically, being part of someone else’s statement made — a casualty, one could say, of it. However horrific that statement might be. In the case of this poem, which makes its subject one of the thirteen people killed during Ireland’s Bloody Sunday, even someone’s nightly leisure in the aftermath of work becomes inherently political. Such a person becomes, even and especially in their ordinariness, a casualty of violence.
I want to name that up front because, to be honest, when I first fell for this poem, I didn’t grasp its political implications quite at all. I fell, and still remain in the perpetual state of falling, for these lines:
I tasted freedom with him. To get out early, haul Steadily off the bottom, Dispraise the catch, and smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt Somewhere, well out, beyond...
Heaney, at the end of this poem, returns the subject of the poem to a kind of life. A kind of eternal life. These lines, to me, have always felt cinematic — they have the quality of a movie’s final shot, the water lapping along the sides of a boat. Mist, maybe. The frame widening. The boat disappearing into forever, wherever forever is. There is grace in such an image.
When I first read these lines, I was a competitive runner in college, competing for my college’s track and cross country teams. For the next race, and for nearly every race that followed for almost the rest of my life, I wrote, in a Sharpie, on my spikes:
smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt...
Every time I purchased a new pair of racing shoes over the decade-plus that followed, I performed this ritual of life. Uncapping the Sharpie, finding a free spot somewhere along my shoes, and scribbling out these lines of Heaney’s.
I loved these lines when I first read them because, better than any piece of writing I’d ever read, they conveyed the near-magical sense of joy and finding-oneself-through-losing-oneself-ness that I have found in running over the course of my life. To run, especially into and among distance, is to find yourself being worked or moved rather than working or moving. There is a passivity in the activity, a way of giving yourself over to the feeling of being moved rather than moving. There is a gentleness, I am trying to say, that sits next to the pain. It can be quite beautiful to realize this. It can feel, I think, a little bit like joy. I think this relationship exists in life, too. Running has taught me that.
I still love these lines for that reason. And I love them even more, too, for what I see them doing as a kind of work in Heaney’s poem today. In that, in the aftermath of tragedy, these lines return someone lost to life; they return them to the life they lost, and to the feeling that buoys up and enlivens that life with joy, with something approaching the mystical.
I am thinking of these specific lines today because, as I write this, I am on a train (cafe car, window seat, facing north, watching the city dissolve into the coast) on my way to Boston to run the Boston Marathon — a race I ran every year from 2015 to 2019 — for the first time in five years. And, if it’s okay with you — which, I guess, if it’s not, you can just, well, close this email or this tab or fold into a paper airplane this piece of paper that someone may have printed and given to you, if that’s how it happens in your life — I’d like to write about running for probably the remainder of this newsletter, which, if you are familiar with my writing outside of this newsletter (much of which has been published thanks to the kind editors at Longreads), might be of no surprise to you, since I write so often about running. The fact of this is of no surprise to me, because to live inside my body in the middle of a long run is to feel so close to who I am and to my small and fragile connection to the world that I know only a few other comparable joys.
But I feel compelled to write about running today because, over the past twelve weeks, I have been building, in my mind and with the help of my body, a house of gratitude that I can live in for a couple hours on Monday morning, starting at 10:00 AM.
Almost a year ago, nursing some pain in a knee I once thought healthy, I found out, after a couple MRIs and various appointments, that I would need performed, on my left knee, the same surgery I needed years ago — in March of 2021 — on my right knee. A cartilage transplant in my trochlear groove, in exactly the same place. That surgery in 2021 was followed by a recovery that included almost two months in a straight leg brace and six months absent of running. I wanted to run a marathon again, and I did. And then I ran another, over two years after the surgery, and qualified for Boston. And then, not much later, the left knee pain, and the not-great news.
What has been strange, though, is that the pain in my left knee subsided not long after the diagnosis. What, in fact, had been causing the immediate, acute pain, was a bone bruise I suffered while doing something that even I acknowledge, with a smile, was a little strange: running for an hour on a treadmill set to a 10 percent grade in order to prep for the Mount Washington Road Race — which is exactly what it sounds like, a race up the almost 8 mile road that winds to the top of Mount Washington at an average grade of around 11 percent. And so: a couple follow-up appointments, and a tentative wait-and-see on the surgery. No surgery until the pain, any pain, returned. When I told my surgeon about my plan to run Boston this year, he said, with a shrug, something along the lines of hm or alright then or let’s see what happens. I don’t remember if he smiled. I like to think he did.
And so, for the past three months, I have been building this house of gratitude, unsure, at the start of my training, if I would ever finish. I have been waiting for the pain to begin again, for the pain to pull the plug for me. But the pain hasn’t happened yet. And so the house has gotten bigger. It has little windows and rooms. It has all these memories. Long workouts before dawn on school day mornings. Repeat miles and repeat 5Ks. Central Park in the winter, ice on the eyebrows shimmering in the just-rising morning sun. Long runs followed by an hour or two on an indoor bike. A puddle of sweat in my living room. Sitting down with a Dr. Pepper. Maybe another.
Normally, I think, people write about a race after they have run it. But I want to write about this race before I have run it because I am grateful to be able to run it at all. I am grateful to center these lines again:
smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt...
I am grateful to be worked, in this life of so much other work, by the rhythm of stride and footfall, and to find, in such rhythm, not escape but rather peace, not a way out of life, but a way deeper into it. That preposition that Heaney uses, the into — it matters.
In Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy, he writes:
Joy is often imagined as the result of some accomplishment or acquisition…this definition also suggests that someone might be able to live without — or maybe a more accurate phrase is free of — heartbreak or sorrow.
He goes on to acknowledge that to live without heartbreak or sorrow is a sheer impossibility — that, as such, we should reconsider our relationship with joy as one that is intertwined with something like sorrow, rather than absent of it.
To train for Boston with the knowledge that my training might stop at any minute, at the onset or end or in the midst of any run, has been to train with full knowledge of my limitation and my finitude. It has been to train with an understanding that heartbreak might happen any second. Such training began with a bit of trepidation, a little worry. I was scared that, as my training continued, I was setting myself up for even greater heartbreak. And maybe that was true. And still is. But what is true at the same time is that, as each day has progressed, so has my gratitude. My relationship between each mile run and each brick of gratitude laid down in my house of gratitude has been one of positive correlation. With each step, I have felt more gratitude for each step.
And it’s funny — I have also gotten fitter, which has complicated my gratitude. I allow running to be a place to express the side of me that finds some value in competition. I allow this because, well, it feels safer and less harmful than letting that side find expression in other aspects of my life. And so yes, I love to race. And during the past twelve weeks, I ran the fastest half marathon of my life, a 1:16 for a top ten finish in a local race in Central Park. And I ran some workouts — repeat four mile tempos, repeat miles, repeat 5Ks — faster than I had in past marathon builds. And what has been funny, even strange — fascinating, really — is that this fact of my training has been what, lately, has caused me more anxiety and stress than anything else.
I have, for example, spent the better part of this week alternating in and out of anxious hazes, as the weather forecast for Monday has see-sawed between something approaching pleasant and something approaching the overtly warm. The weather, to be clear, would not affect my gratitude. But it would, to be clear, certainly affect how fast I run. And so, in these recent moments of anxiety, I have been thinking less of gratitude and more of accomplishment. I don’t like this; I wrestle with it; I try to steer my mind back toward something closer to gratitude. But it is hard. In George Monbiot’s How Did We Get Into This Mess, he writes, of intrinsic and extrinsic values:
These values suppress each other: the stronger someone’s extrinsic aspirations, the weaker his or her intrinsic goals.
And he writes, too, of how such values are affected by our culture:
By generating feelings of insecurity and inadequacy — which means reducing self-acceptance — they also suppress intrinsic goals.
Gratitude, in other words, is hard. It is hard, sometimes or maybe often, to accept the big thing that is the tiny, finite act that is your life. To not wish it bigger or more accomplished, especially when so much is reminding you of what was not or has yet to be accomplished. It is hard, sometimes or maybe often, to remember the joy of dawn light, breath steaming in the morning, a body warming into itself. To say to yourself, no matter the speed, that this is enough.
And so, over the past week, my wife has had to remind me to turn on the light in my head, a phrase we overhead a father saying to his little daughter on the bus one day, as she cried about — I think — going to summer camp.
Turn on the light. Smile. Find a rhythm working you. Slow mile by mile. It’s that word slow I love. And it’s that word slow that I have to remind myself of today, as I write this. Oh, I’d love to run fast on Monday. I won’t lie to you. But running fast should have no claim on my gratitude. No, not at all. That’s why I am writing this now, before the race begins. I want to remember, on Monday, to smile — that this is a little bit of a dream and a whole lot of reality. I want to remember, too, that some of my most beautiful runs have been my slowest, the long miles shared among friends, the times I’ve had to stop, doubled over as I’ve gotten with the beautiful non-burden of laughter. And I want to remember what many poems have reminded me — something about possibility. That this is possible, at all: what fragile luck, what wild hope, strange chance, gentle joy — my life.
In a recent essay for Longreads, I wrote:
There is still so much I don’t know. I don’t know when I will need surgery, though I know that I will, and I know that, when I have it, I will be, once again, a grown man with a cane moving slowly through the world as the world moves fast around me.
All of that not-knowing is still true. I feel it every day. But I feel, too, the real joy of waking my body up into a morning, of feeling my breath rise in my chest, of letting my legs settle into a rhythm, of learning, always learning, how to manage the pain or discomfort that sits, sometimes, just to the right or left of jubilation, of resisting the urge to fight it all, to make of my one life just one feeling — how it could it ever be just one? I hold onto this loosely, like my dad taught me, how you don’t run with tight fists, how you don’t break the potato chip between your fingers. Yes, loosely. Let it go. I’m better at being okay with the fact that it all will go away. I’m better at being okay with limitation. Fragile bodies, these things we are blessed with. To find joy in them is also to know the heartbreak of having a body at all.
Some notes:
As I will continue to mention, Writers Against the War on Gaza has been a powerful resource that has, in these days, reminded me of all the various potentials for solidarity in this moment. You can follow them on Instagram here.
Here is a list of urgent fundraisers for Gaza, if you have the means.
The independent press distributor Small Press Distribution (SPD) just shut down without any warning. This article provides good context. If you have the means, consider supporting any of the presses affected. Here is a list.
If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.
These bodies, man. What wonders. Thank you for this—I needed this more than you can imagine. Enjoy every step tomorrow. (& I’ll see you at the start line!)
“Sitting down with a Dr. Pepper. Maybe another.” ❤️