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MY OF AUDACITY repeat successfully is not to repeat. We need to keep in mind, as always in matters internal, that we have to tread with care since those whom we deem to be stuck in monotonous perseveration may themselves feel that they are simply being sensitive to something supremely worthwhile. In any case, matters such as these take their time to unfurl and so they ought; with a touch of good fortune just about a lifetime of meaningful repetition should suffice for most of us. And, of course, time, as a perpetual opening towards the indeterminable, does have a say in all of this; ‘No repetition will ever exhaust the novelty of what comes. Even if one were able to imagine the contents of experience wholly repeated – always the same thing, the same person, the same landscape, the same place and the same text returning – the fact that the present is new would be enough to change everything. Temporalisation itself makes it impossible not to be ingenious in relation to time’.3 Time, then, is the inevitable unfolding of alterity. If, for a minute, we allow ourselves to run with this thought we can state that the passage of time is our unfurling towards an otherness that is a death, that most indeterminate of certainties, which for each and every one of us is absolutely ours but which we can never know. I think that to cycle is to want to arrive at matters central to identity through interesting obliquity, via circuitous routes within given frameworks consisting of route sheet directions, cut off times, distances, minimum and maximum speeds, technology and so on (alongside our own infinitely changeable mental and physical presence, movements in the
Arrivée Spring 2011
earth’s atmosphere introduce into this framework ceaseless unpredictability). Obliquity, after all, is about finding other ways in, of acquiring an angle that gives adequate purchase and keeps us from waffling feebly on. We may be looking for such oblique discourse, such useful deviation, in order to uncover new routes towards our own uniquely critical puzzles of identity. This is something that needs to be done again and again in order for us to evolve and to sense that the progress of time is felt to be satisfying rather than petrifying. To be alive, then, is a bit like reading a good crime-novel; we chase an absolute narrative conclusion, nevertheless, should the plot unravel too soon we will, most likely, feel short changed. We need just that bittersweet ache of the oblique story line to prevent our descent into cynicism. In this way the plot’s resistance to surrender too easily its secrecy ensures for each and every one of us a sense of moving down our own path to death, a path on which, Freud noted that even ‘the most painful experiences … can yet be felt … as highly enjoyable.’4 Indeed, even though it may ache and smart, we do want our battles to go on. Of course, they sometimes go on so long that we forget the initial cause and become increasingly mired in cultivating a martial spirit that seeks battle for the sake of battle and nothing more. This process of becoming, of moving down our own unique path, entails the ongoing work of mourning the death of possible selves that have been slain by our fidelity to choice. We must be sufficiently audacious, as it were, to come up against our ontological finitude; the fact that we can never be all that we can
be and are therefore always bringing into reality one way of being while an infinite number of other ways are abandoned and left for dead. It goes without saying that not choosing is the ubiquitous preference and so one may drift along like a thing among things. In my work as a psychotherapist I have often sensed how difficult it can be to remain sensitive to the motives that may drive some of us towards withdrawal and make us move back into the murky dreams that tend to cluster around lives merely intended. The foundational structures of such forms of aliveness consist of anachronistic assumptions that tend to treat future events as part of what has already come to pass (something that the ancient Greeks knew as ‘prolepsis’). This is how we come to flood an uncertain future with our present certainties and turn unknown terrain brimming with possibility into uninspired parking lots. A good illustration of this tendency could be observed in ‘Secondlife’, a vast user-created online game which over time, despite being played in a virtual realm potentially free from constraining boundaries, became nothing but a slightly more sexually licentious reproduction of what we all agreed on calling everyday reality. Now, apparently, this virtual realm once heaving with eager avatars is a rather desolate place with only a few scattered groups of jaded diehards stalking the scenes. I imagine by the way that while we are thinking this article together, somewhere out there in some fold of the virtual ether the construction of yet another computer‑ generated facsimile of what we already know is in full swing. As cyclists our advance through
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