Today, however, we know that the destruction of experience no longer necessitates a catastrophe, and that humdrum daily life in any city will suffice. For modern man's average day contains virtually nothing that can still be translated into experience. Neither reading the newspaper, with its abundance of news that is irretrievably remote from his life, nor sitting for minutes on end at the wheel of his car in a traffic jam. Neither the journey through the netherworld of the subway, nor the demonstration that suddenly blocks the street... nor those eternal moments of dumb promiscuity among strangers in lifts and buses. Modern man makes his way home in the evening wearied by a jumble of events, but however entertaining or tedious, unusual or commonplace, harrowing or pleasurable they are, none of them will have become experience.
Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History
It is a quest these cycle journeys, these days of locomotion, around the bucolic shires, with my ever faithful 'Rocinante' (the foremost of modern day steeds, the bicycle), the quest being part of the overall question: Who-Where-How am I? The who, let's not forget, is a function of the how and where.
For there is no more pressing question, no more urgent work to be done, than discovering and uncovering who-where-how you really are. And so the quest begins by acknowledging that 'You' is comprised of all that enabled your bodymind to emerge out of this earth and to be alive. 'You' in other words is not just the body, but all that made that body in the first place: the weather, the geology, the fields...
All culture begins with the wind...
In today's day and age it's all too easy to get lost in the solipsistic narcissism of a whittled down aliveness and to see our 'parents' and origins in such small-minded ways. In the society of the spectacle, it's all too easy to think that I means me. But this me is not you, not even close. It is instead an aberration, this construct of 'me', and a straying away from the natural-healthy path of living. It is this 'me' that is swept away when you re-enter Nature as Nature intended, that is, solitarily, locomotively, and with a heightened sense of awareness. One begins through the quest to question everything. One sees another world when one walks or cycles. One's perspective 'slows down' to an almost full stop to allow you to inhale the scene, and to allow you to co-breathe with everything else. One then feels the land breathing, as the animals breathe, the sky breathing as the rivers and streams breathe, the trees breathing as their flower and fruit breathe.
This is the quest then: to Breathe (and See) with a capital B.
While scientific experiment is indeed the construction of a sure road (of a methodos, a path) to knowledge, the quest, instead, is the recognition that the absence of a road (the aporia) is the only experience possible for man. But, by the same token, the quest is also the opposite of adventure which in the modern age emerges as the final refuge of experience. For the adventure presupposes that there is a road to experience, and that this road goes by way of the extraordinary and the exotic (in opposition to the familiar and the commonplace). Instead, in the universe of the quest the exotic and the extraordinary are only the sum of the essential aporia of everyday experience. Thus Don Quixote, who lives the everyday and the familiar (the landscape of La Mancha and its inhabitants) as extraordinary, is the subject of a quest that is a perfect counterpart of the medieval ones.
Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History
This is how I feel when I cycle through the shires. The ordinary becomes somehow extra-ordinary. The routes I have plied for years, though familiar, are never the same. They have a patina that modernity shies away from. That patina is Nature, is Space-Time, is cosmic. The result of this is 'grace' (as the beauty of form under the influence of freedom) and 'experience' (as the aliveness and essence of action). And you quickly realize why all this is so invigorating, why after each cycle trip I feel as if I have uncovered a new world, it is because of the natural nexus out of which this aliveness emanates. In this way, every cycle trip is the discovery of a new world.
In losing touch with our origins we have lost touch too with the originary and that which 'gives rise to'. It is quite possibly the biggest mistake we can make as existential entities: forgetting the past, forgetting how we have come to be how we are. To extemporize and abandon ourselves in this way means that we become more easily manipulated, more easily thrown about by false winds, because we have let go of our aboriginal anchor.
Our complete capitulation to the forces of libidinal destruction... what Agamben calls 'the apparatus' (anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses or living beings: the nemesis of the animal that we essentially are)... and others have called 'hyper-synchronization' (the industrial destruction of time and the production of technologies that hinder our potential as existential beings), has led us down the garden path into domestication and domination, and into the brainless and the spineless. We have become straightened and polished, and coiffeured. Furthermore, we have done our best to straighten and polish Nature too, to topiarize it into some thing that can mirror our own manicured state. For Agamben then, as with all astute seers, the current human population attached to the apparatus is the most 'docile and cowardly social body that has ever existed in human history'.
So, next time you're out on the bike, try a new route (root)... off-road, bike and hike, cross-country... and leave the electronic accoutrements behind (no GPS, no gadgets and gizmos, no bloody smartphone or walkman, maybe just a map and a flask of java). To be sure, there is an anxiety that comes when the security of the road and the signs vanish, and 'The Quest' begins. But that is part of your new-found aliveness, and the re-emergence of experience. At first, it can be quite unsettling. Yet, there are signs here too, natural signs, tracts and tracks, that you can come to identify; landmarks that are the land itself. It is here where we become most awake: alone (and all one) in the wild, learning to identify our very selves through Nature, and gazing into 'The Great Existential Mirror' that does not reflect back your own sur-face but reveals, originarily, what lies deep beneath it.
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