The other evening, in a moment of pure spontaneity, I took my pen and started sketching, with a view to scribbling a self-portrait that bore at least some superficial likeness to my visage (unlike my previous efforts). Unbeknownst to my consciousness, when I had finished (all of two minutes later) I realized I had scribbled in my bicycle too. In fact, the significance of this only hit me today some three days later. It was as if my sub-conscious had whispered to my conscious: 'The bicycle is now so much a part of me: my moving, my living, my breathing, my thinking... that to omit it would be like amputating a leg or an arm, or maybe a leg and an arm (and part of my brain).
It's funny how objects come to fuse themselves with the self, whether organic entities like children or animals, or inanimate objects like cars or sheds, or bicycles. It is a sort of synergetic dynamic in some cases (man + bicycle, man + animal, man + shed), and in others a parasitical one (man + car, man + ego, man + iPad). Where the former colludes to create an auxesis of living (an increase in health and energy - culture in its pure form), the other combines to de-create, and cause a depletion of living (the body's own engine usurped by the car's, the unindividuated self interrupted by the ego, the brain's own innovativeness corrupted by technology). Here, I had always known of the benefits of cycling since a very young age, and been correspondingly wary of allowing the car to take that away from me. Consequently, at the age of 45, and following, in all likelihood, a three and a half decade relationship with the bicycle (in a variety of forms), I am now very much part bicycle (as the self-portrait emphatically shows).
The question that now remains is: isn't everyone part bicycle (but they just don't know it) ?
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