Routes with Roots: The Joy of Valley-Cycling

Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light.

Theodore Roethke

The route system of any life-form is vital to that life-form's vitality: How it goes through its environment, where it goes in that environment, what nutrition and insight it picks up along the way...

Routes, like roots, provide anchorage to the plant by fixing it into the soil, by locating it in space and time. And the soil, if you didn't know this by now, is the soul, the only difference being the small matter of changing an 'i' for a 'u'.

All plants (like cyclists) have a primary root from which lateral roots develop. I recall as a cyclist many years ago having no roots at all, really. I rarely left the confines of the city, the bicycle simply being a means to an end, that end being getting to where I was going without forking out cash I did not have for the bus or train. My primary root back then was a jogging route, but it didn't really fix me in place being as it was very small, too localised, and too confined.

Then, I discovered valley-cycling, and the beauty of cycling out of the city, into the hills, doon the watter, up into the lochs and highlands. And that's when those roots started growing and that anchorage to the land, to the stage now, some ten years later, where I feel truly rooted in the Glasgow strath. To the point now where 'I know my way around'.

Routes here, of course, are all about your locomotive force, your ability to carry yourself across and through the land, without polluting it; in short, to know your territory and your home range. The human is precisely human because of this territorial knowing, because of his rooting in the very contours of the earth itself. The 'soiling' of the self is essential for the human to breathe clearly. As is his locomotive and cardiovascular force. By this, I do not mean tearing the land up with your mountain bike as some people are apt to do, or treating the land like some sort of theme park for you to exploit, but using the bicycle sensitively as a form of expansion which can re-humanize you through its ability to expand your local range. The equation is simple: the more one comes into (semi-) wild places, alone and awake, the more one comes into one's Self, and the more one be-comes Nature ('becoming' simply meaning 'coming to' as an attentive and wakeful arriving).

If you think about it, what is a root (route) if not pure locomotion anchoring the organism within the greater matrix that enables it? The root though it may nourish a particular organism, is always on the move towards the universal.

Locomotion is the basis for cognition too. If you don't move under your own steam, then it follows that you're gong to have problems thinking too. Synapses and dendrites are their own kind of roots.

This is the great scam of the modern automobile that is neither auto nor mobile: it doesn't just dislocate you from place via the destruction of your anchor and the usurping of your vital force by a machine that carries and pollutes you, but it removes you from your own cognitive force, and your ability to think your way through the land, and thus yourself. In other words, machines like this turn the 'hu-man' into 'man' by divesting him of his intimate and dare I say it 'loving' connection with the soil (humus). This is the world we now live in - 'world' from the High Germanic wer + alt, meaning the age of man). Personally, I prefer Godard's definition as voiced by Jean-Paul Belmondo in Pierrot Le Fou: L'age du cul. Yet, it is not world we ought to be inhabiting, but Earth, and by extension, Cosmos. Once again, we are blind-sided by the stupor that is man and his self-polluting inventions.

It is this removal from your routes (and roots) that the technological society (as the decadence of being carried and prammed) is most guilty of. There is no more serious crime than the severing of a plant's roots so that 'nutrition' from an outside source can be delivered to it.

The result of this existential mutilation is the ghost in the machine, the absurd idea that the mental and the physical are not connected, or at least not intimately together. Man has removed his self from his greater body not knowing that to do so is to disembody himself. The ghost - the spectre of man - is the disembodied entity who has allowed his existential feelers to be amputated, his locomotive force to be cut off and replaced with an all-polluting one. The machine is the world - the age of man - that has decided that being prammed across the land is far better than negotiating it yourself, that pollution is better than health, that the particular and the particulate is better than the universal, that the global is better than the local...

Driving itself, or any kind of mechanical transportation that pollutes the environment, is a form of violence. One might argue that science itself has permitted this violence by separating the object from the subject, the perceived from the perceiver. One no longer sees the  land as intrinsically connected to one's existential self but tenuously linked to one's ego self. Driving itself is proof of this. Yet this violence is also perpetrated against the driver via the hijacking of his locomotive force. Man is no longer mobile, he is emphatically seated and belted in when driving. His consciousness is hijacked too. Speed infects his perspective. The violence emerges as a disease. A dis-ease with natural forces, with the simple and frugal, with the local: with getting from A to B under your own steam.... by your self.

We now live in the cake-eating age in the West, where people want to have their cake and eat it. It's a real problem. The cake however is only so big and most of it is gone now. Just a few crumbs left round the edges...

The sooner we all start baking our own cakes the better....Get that steam going...!