Voting in the Flesh: 24 Things Jeremy Corbyn Believes

In short, we make political statements not so much by the way we vote as by the way we live.

Henryk Skolimowski, Living Philosophy

I wrote a poem earlier this year called Election Day when, instead of finding myself hovering about the polling booth, I discovered myself atop the Kilpatrick Braes with the hover flies sketching a fencepost. I recognized the irony instantly. That is, if everyone refused to vote and endorse a system that is spiritually and ecologically corrupt from the inside, and if everyone on top of this refused also to conform to a system of conventions that sees them slowly wither under the weight of it all, and instead come up here to the hills and breathe.... well, the world and its welter would change overnight. Everyone thinks of changing the world, Tolstoy once wrote, but no-one thinks of changing himself. 

Elect to change yourself, to come into these hills and breathe (whether by bicycle or on foot), conjoin with the cycles of nature, and you will have little need of polling booths and ballot boxes. In other words, vote not with a pen, but with your whole being. Every breath is a vote for freedom and for immanence. To hell with the politics. The body is the world, wrote Alan Watts. Look after it, and you look after the world. And what better way to look after the body than to do as the new Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, does: cycle everywhere. 

Indeed, it is for my discovery of Corbyn's 'flesh reality' that I see him not so much as a politician as a human being trying to do his best. The bit that convinced me was not so much his suggestion that the hundred billion pounds earmarked for replacing Trident instead be spent on 'national well-being', or his quest to have more allotments in our cities, or even the imposition of an arms embargo on Israel, but his cycling....

In a BBC article entitled 24 Things JC Believes, at number seventeen, was this:

Corbyn backs cycling. He does not own a car and declined to share one with the BBC's Chris Mason for an interview, saying: "I cycle all the time. Actually I've got a confession to make, a rather naughty secret - I've got two bikes." 

And it's not just for his cycling, because let's face it cycling isn't just cycling. It's for his refusing to get in the same car as the BBC correspondent. This is what real cycling is about. It's as much about one's hesitation at non-ecological ways of transport, as it is about wayfaring and finding one's own way. I loathe cyclists who pop their bikes in their big gass-guzzling SUVs and drive them to the tops of hills so they can tear the landscape up with their two thousand pound hard-tails. These are not cyclists; they're lunatics who treat cycling as some kind of pastime or adrenalin-fuelled pursuit. But this is not what cycling is. Fundamentally, and Corbyn has it here, cycling is about a way of moving... everywhere. It's about walking as well as cycling. It's about using your own steam to get across the land. It's very very simple, but few of us are seemingly able to grasp this simplicity. Instead, we just wrap it up, cycling, in the already established convention that sees it as a means to some form of entertainment or day out. It's not. If cycling isn't your bread and butter in terms of general getting about, if you have a car for those rainy days or for those days when it just seems too cold to get on a bike, then you are not a cyclist. You're just another spoilt little child who baulks at the idea of a little icing on the skin, or a few raindrops on the noggin'. But, take someone who cycles no matter what, and you have a bona fide person coming to terms with his own hyper-organic humanity. This is a person I am prepared to believe in. Someone who votes not with an x, but, rather, in the flesh.

JC & bicycle