Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
A cyclist (someone who cycles, someone who is aware of his/her involvement in cycles) is always meditative. All the others 'cyclists' are simply speed-merchants no better than car-drivers who treat cycling as a means to an end. Cycling, however, for the MC, is both a means and an end in itself. At any rate, just checking out the Trek website today (in order to register my new Trek bike) I am confronted in bold black letters 'The Future is Faster'. I might actually go one better and say (in equally bold and black letters) that 'The Future is Picnoleptic' (that is, so fast that people cannot think anymore). At any rate, my sort of cycling is never about speed, just as it is never about slowness. It is rather about using your own steam to explore the local, to find your way, and to understand place (moving from a variety of perspectives towards the panoptic). This trinity of locomoting, locating, and locus is all you need to reach 'God'. When you in-source your own engines (brain, heart, body) and become responsive to them (as they do to you), there is no need for 'Christ'. One has become christened and anointed simply by this enactive natural involvement of the self. So, the future may well be faster for many, but not for me. For me, the future will always be the future: an illusory realm of action that never ever comes. For me, and for the meditative cyclist, there is no future as there is no past and there is no present. All there is, in actuality, is being alive and being somehow conjoined in a grand matrix of conviviality to reveal place and person as one and the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment