Daredevil: The Heretic & the Hero

Dare to leap into the origin. Asvaghosa


The real daredevil, the real daring heretic, is the hero-human-being who chooses his own way, who devises his own route, through the landscape called life.

The daredevil questions and investigates from the outset societal conventions and ways of being not so much in the world but with the world. In the words of one such courageous and daring Scot, Dugald Semple, (who appears to have been largely forgotten in these times of excess and entertainment), it is necessary to conform little and reform much. Or in the words of his trans-Atlantic predecessor Henry Thoreau, to confront the essential facts of life.

Cycling is part of this reform, part of this essential fronting process - with Body, with Mind, with Nature, that can reconnect us to our greater selves. Start with this. The rest will soon follow.

The daredevil dares to not work at the behest of a system that is predicated upon profit, upon the exploitation and destructuring of our fellow beings and the land that shelters us. The daredevil dares to use his own engines, his brain, his heart, to reach the origin. He dares to become an outsider, to become egregiously autonomous, whilst leaving the comfort and security (and the oblivion) of the herd. He understands that lonelinless is a construct devised by men to explain their ignorance of the aliveness of the world. He dares, this daredevil, to have faith in his higher self, this self that man has outsourced and sought to call ‘God’.

The daredevil dares to cycle, to flow and flourish, and to radiate outwards. He dares to re-insert his self back into his environment from which he has been unnaturlly wrenched.

He dares to know, not through some spurious scientific enterprise, but, conscientiously, through the body, through the mind, through the heart.

The daredevil dares to belong, and, beyond the familial and familiar, question the deeper essence of ‘Family’, for our relations and relatives do not suddenly stop with our own kind.

Living in the Presence of Air

..
so there they go
through the wind, the rain, the snow

wild spirits
knowing what they know...

Kenneth White, Late August on the Coast

That's the definition of the word 'aerobic': living in the presence of air. It reminds me of a phrase I read recently in Tim Ingold's book Being Alive to describe the person who moves beneath their own steam, who, in effect, wayfares : Engaged in the currents of the life-world. This, I guess, stands in stark opposition to those who do not wayfare, who rely instead on someone else or something else to fare the way for them, to those who have been disengaged and disconnected from their greater matrix of aliveness: that is, embroiled in the stasis of the workaday world. Where the former is aliveness, the latter is deadness. 

Aerobics, though we may all be acquanited with the word and the organised aerobics of gymnasiums and morning television, is a way of life, and a way of being-in-the-world that is conducive to understanding that world as a natural self-organising phenomenon (into which we are rooted and out of which we flower). Aerobic living gives way to an understanding in the flesh of what the Jains of India and the Celts of Europe (as well as many other intelligent-sensitive beings) called inter-dependent co-arising, the dependence of all things on other things in order to grow and cycle. In the modern-day West however, atomised and segregated beyond repair in some cases, we have lost touch with this inter-dependence and collaboration. There have been many causes of this: beginning some say in the 1600s with the dawn of modern science and Cartesian dualism, swiftly continuing with Newton's mechanistic view of the universe and the triumph of reason and logic over other ways of knowing, and the prevailing propaganda put forward by an overly scientistic society which no longer believes in God (because it no longer has the time nor the inclination to work out what 'god' actually stands for). Any sensitive, conscientious scientists that have come along - Goethe, Schauberger, Schwenk, Sheldrake, Capra, who refuse to accept the possibility of separating the observed from the observer, and put forward corresponding theories, are either dismissed entirely as crackpots, or lauded and then quickly forgotten about. As the wandering Scot Kenneth White states in his essay The Crisis of Reason:

If this modernity has know triumphs it has now reached a stage where, for example, scientists are no longer philosophers, but mere laboratory artisans (hence a science with very little living sense to say to people), where philosophy has degenerated into the mere history of philosophy as a succession of 'schools' one plods through before giving it all up to become a logical positivist, and where psychological distress, based ultimately on the loss of world, is rife and rampant.

Science is all about separation after all, con-science about recognising the connections.

At any rate, getting out into the air, on the air, on a bicycle is a fine way to learn of physics and metaphysics, of science and conscience. Science without conscience is as Rabelais states in Gargantua, the soul's perdition. But of course, scientists have never bothered to work out what soul means. The lack of meditative-contemplative thinking leads one away from the great questions, and the great 'abstracts' like god, soul, love, and leads one instead into the domain of fantastical thinking and fantasy. Cycling aimlessly in the countryside, up to the tops of hills, and along the shores by the sea, emphatically not across the earth but in and through her, is itself an act of intercourse that is not entirely dissimilar to making love. There is union, there is intimacy, there is penetration.

As Henryk Skolimowski writes in Living Philosophy: 'Human beings are just like plants; they can only grow well by working the elements of life into their beings'. Whilst, presumably, at the same time, working out the nonsense.

In a world that is increasingly becoming obsessed with its own narcissitic meanderings, and its own outsorcery, where the pandemics of obesity and stupidity can be easily prevented through a more sensitive and intelligent nurturing and education, where war is a constant headline wherever you look, where security is the buzzword of nations with enemies, maybe living in the presence of air and lifting the lid off our self-made tombs, 'making love' (not war) by riding your bicycle, is not such a bad idea.

The Choreographer: Cycling and the Dance

Cycling is a sort of dancing. Indeed, any form of auto-mobility is a form of dance. The cyclist, like the walker, by virtue of his openness to his environment is attuned to the sounds of where he is, whether it be open country, high plateau or busy city. I find it somewhat alarming the amount of people these days who choose to barricade their senses from their surroundings via headphones and those infernal mobile devices. It is perhaps an indictment not so much of their appreciation of music but their lack of appreciation of where they are, or, perhaps, as the case may be for those city workers (heads down, ears plugged in) heading off to for another day in the office-coffin, a precise understanding of where they are. There is no apparent dance in these crowds of commuters, only hustle and bustle. They have been removed from their larger selves, and forced to sell their days for gold.

When I lived in Warsaw, I initially took the underground the few stops to work every day. When, eventually, I had my bicycle sent over, I began cycling to work, and quickly realised in a series of marvellous epiphanies how much quicker it was, how healthier it was not being squeezed up against some flu-bearing commuter sneezing all over you, how much cheaper it was (although in Warsaw, public transport was remarkably reasonable in price), and how much fresher I was arriving at work having energised my bodymind in that idyllic 20 minute cycle through parks into the city centre. From that day on, I never looked back, and always looked at those passing crowded trams with a smile from then on in. Not only that, but I was privy to great flocks of jackdaws every so often lighting up the night sky. I always wandered why at the age of 37 it had taken me so long to start doing this. Now, at 45, I thank myself for having done it when I did. Now, I cycle everywhere. Even in a supposedly wet environment like Strathclyde which of course is not as wet as people like to make out.

In becoming attuned to the environment, the cyclist soon becomes attuned to the weather, the prevailing winds, the various species of rain, the greys and the movement of clouds, not to mention the dance of the seasonal cycles themselves. A car driver needn’t bother with such ‘trivial’ things. Indeed, now, with the onset of modernity, man has not just sealed his self behind screens and speed, but emphatically behind ‘proofs’ (water, wind, sun, cold…) whose sole purpose is to deliberately prevent the environment from ‘getting in’. If ever there were an indictment then on man’s estrangement from his greater self, from not so much the environment but the domain of entanglement in which he is inextricably involved, it is his eagerness to clothe himself (often at great expense) and ‘create himself’ through the fashioning of a cloth identity, a fatuous and obviously false identity (more like a brand) that is removed from the greater context that allows it.

Admittedly, cycling has suffered too from this crass clothing boom, seeking to doll up cyclists in the latest proofs and sealskin gear. But this is not what I am about. To be sure, a good pair of padded shorts goes a long way, but if I have learned anything about cycling it is that you can cycle in just about anything. The eagerness to doll yourself up is simply another part of the capitalist machine at work, that seeks to convince you that you need, that with this product you will be a better person. Capitalism gets its claws into everything, even (and especially now) into Poetry.

The polka-dot cycling population are victims then of low self-esteem, and gullibility. Victims of the industry that cycling has become the world over. But it is not the industrial that I am interested in, it is the incantational… and the capacity of cycling to enchant and, by virtue of this, to cause to dance…