Freedom on Custom House Quay

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. Frank Herbert, Dune

It's a wonderful monument, La Pasionaria - an aria of passion - on Custom House Quay, just by the river, dedicated to all those who 'fought and died for freedom' in Spain during the reign of Franco. As I cycled past it the other day I got to imagining that she was holding up a bicycle in her outstretched arms, and I guess she might well have been, for freedom begins with the body. Body, after all, is everything, just as Mind is everything. It's for the neglect that we dish out to our bodies that makes us suffer so. The human who recognizes his own body as the power source and not just as a plug that he can connect to that source and switch on or off (or simply, as he is apt to do, casually leave on stand-by) is the body who recognizes all things as that self. We might go so far as to call this 'freedom'.

The cyclist fights for freedom simply by cycling. His motion and momentum is itself a monument to liberty, and a monument to moment. The cyclist (by 'cyclist' I mean the human being who eschews all forms of techno-mechanical transportation in favor of faring the way himself). Let's be clear here: the bicycle is not a form of transport like the car or the bus, it is a means with which to move oneself and an accessory through which one can energize oneself and fly. By contrast, transportation divests the self of its own internal engine, and leaves the body wanting. The path of least resistance, with the onset of technologies and machines, has reached new rock-bottom levels. But it still keeps on plumbing. 

But where does this plumbing end? With the human race intravenously hooked up to all manner of devices that instead of revitalising you, literally suck the life right out of you, until there comes a point where you can't think or move for yourself without the aid of techno-crutches or some kind of cyber-zimmer frame. It's all rather pathetic and pitiful, which might explain why the world still believes in God as some sort of external entity. But God is not some thing out there. Do not allow your intellect to outrun your intuition. It is you, the cyclist, connected to every earth capillary, moving under your own steam, open to the elements and each other, faring your own way, questioning the conventions and the paths that have been laid down for you. It's that simple.

And so here we have it, Freedom as the domain of entanglement, as the dawning realization that, in spite of the limits imposed by society on your vision, there is no point where the self can be said to start or finish. Where cycling as a way of living, as a way of moving, helps us reach that realization, our increasing reliance on being transported (physically and mentally) stifles it.

As the words on this statue to liberty reveal: Better to die on your feet, than to live forever on your knees.