article even, without for that matter leaving us to fear for our lives. What I want to make a case for here is that long distance cycling originates from an impulse similar in nature to the one cultivated in psychoanalytic psychotherapy; the will to know oneself. Moreover, both pursuits seem to me to spring from a belief in the understanding of difficult situations through familiarity, of revisiting that which defies and tests us. I propose that owing to its intensity and extended duration – sprinting disciplines were, to my mind, always haunted by the whiff of atavism, an escape-the-sabre-tooth-tiger urgency not especially conducive to deep self exploration – Audax cycling invites a subversion of earlier readings of self, it invites us to get away from our familiar selves in order to happen upon ourselves in a new light. And, is it not the case that those who are seen to lead full and deep lives are often also the ones who are prepared to recurrently pull themselves out of their tendencies and tear down restrictive conceptions of self? To do so means choosing to momentarily relinquish the buoyancy afforded by the imaginary coherence of our egos, thrown like tarps about our subjects, and to sink into the deep, there to drift and be transformed by what is beyond the manipulation of conscious control. To move like this, inwardly, is to actively comport oneself in an exploratory way towards ones being, that is, one becomes that being for whom its being is a question. What we are working our way into here is of course a tough ask, prone as we humans are to distil static essences out of fluid processes; a tendency that has allowed man, ever surging towards omnipotence, to seize his subject as an object that can be prodded, probed and measured and made to give up its secrets under the controlled pressures of a reductionist interrogation. The main thrust of the enlightenment hinged on such rational, positivist scientism and it has continued to stamp its presence on many branches of inquiry ever since. A visual equivalent to this inclination towards methodically breaking matter into its constituent parts is provided by Edward Muybridge’s photographs of a horse galloping. Captured by a bank of the most technically advanced cameras of the age against a controlled and uniform backdrop, his photographs taught us that a horse can indeed fly…. On a somewhat greater scale we can witness this tension between flux and fixity played out for instance in the tug between progressive liberal politics and fascist ideas of a nation state. It comes maybe as no surprise in our age of globalisation and the attendant increase in the permeability of boundaries that we are witnessing the emergence of regressive and extreme political parties in countries all over Europe; when boundaries begin to flex and give the fretful always rally towards retrenchment and contraction as a kind of paroxysmal affirmation of identity. If in our minds eye we zoom out even more then this oscillation on the level of the individual can be seen to recapitulate an entropic universe which, we assume, collapses over the same period of time it takes to expand into nothingness. The result of the collapse will be an infinitely dense singularity which will explode into existence as it has and will, over and over forever. In a moment I shall have reason to revisit this idea of contraction and explosive expansion when trying to bring to light how the thought of German philosopher Martin Heidegger may link up with our experience of bicycling.
Landscape, being and ekstasis
Mountains, Ruskin observed, ‘are to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with force and convulsive energy, full of expression, passion, and strength.’ Come July many of us with an interest in cycling usually try to watch on the television a few, if not all, stages of the Tour de France. My favourite week of that race has always been the one during which the peloton has to negotiate the big cols, legendary mountain passes like
Arrivée Summer 2011
‘Come July many of us with an interest in cycling usually try to watch on the television a few, if not all, stages of the Tour de France.’
the Ventoux, Tourmalet, Croix de Fer, Galibier and Madeleine to mention a few. It is here, against the backdrop of these settings, that we witness the emergence of the unique cyclist to whom the landscape gives birth. However, the environment, be it ever so verdant foothill woodland or the barren and near-lunar landscape around the peak of the mighty Ventoux, is always subordinate to the main argument; the vigorous claim to life and triumph made by the consummate ‘grimpeur’. There have been many such characters throughout the history of the tour; from Pottier and Bottecchia during the early years of the 20th century, through outstanding riders like Bahamontes and Van Impe, to modern day climbers such as Armstrong, Schleck and Contador. For me, what these riders have all managed to encapsulate so vividly is the protracted and often painful materialisation of man out of silent nature. Again, Marlow on the couch: ‘If we were umbilically connected you would not be there and neither would I. Understanding hinges on an irremovable distance.’ The distance that he places between us is an internal recognition that ‘within man a Da-sein20 a ‘being-there’ has opened up a clearing [Ger. Lichtung] to which the things and creatures which to themselves are hidden can appear.’21 Nature does not have this ‘there’. In Heidegger’s notion of ‘Earth’ as impenetrable and self-sufficient nature rests no such clearing. Man’s lack of being is opposed by nature’s mysterious existing-in-itself, by organisms sunk deep into the cloudy liquid of their world. Tourists’ thrilled awe produced during a safari trip is perhaps about this, man getting close to unrestrained creatures that coincide completely within themselves, creatures that suffer no gap between what they are and what they do. If we come a bit closer to home we all know that when we take it out of the shed we don’t have to wait for the bicycle to decide that it is a bicycle but for man, however, it’s a very different story. Man is condemned to be free; ‘existence precedes essence’ as Jean-Paul Sartre would have it. Unlike a thing that is determined, a thing that has an essence, we each have to deal with the question of our being, our identity, our very existence. We know that we exist22 for the reason that we do not coincide internally; we are all beside ourselves, not in the everyday sense of being beside ourselves with any particular feeling, just irrevocably beside ourselves as ontological beings. Man is an ecstatic creature. By this I mean that we are produced by ecstatic thought and remain haunted by an ineffable ground. In trademark oracular form the French maverick psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1966: 183) put it like this: ’We think where we are not, therefore we are where we do not think.’ This can be deemed an ontological parallax; the gap or difference between our senseless being there and our horizon of meaning. Carel (2006: 88) asserts that ‘The Future is the Being projected by the For-itself, because the For-itself is perpetually apprehending itself as unachieved in relation to it. Dasein is never united with the “there”, the world or its possibilities and is therefore always projecting towards it.’ Lacan (1966: 277) maintains that the subject’s lack of being, the wantto-be, is ‘the heart of the analytic experience’ and ‘the very field in which the neurotic’s passion is deployed.’ Alaska, I understand, is the destination of choice for those who attempt to make actual this yearning, if not for a convergence of horizons (would this not equal psychosis; when the split between nature and culture has not been accomplished?) then at least to attempt to reduce the parallax by travelling into the wild and to live off the land while being of the land. What they seek to do is tweak the dial of what Lacan called ‘jouissance’23 in order to gain access to more being. It is a doomed project. Once we have entered language there is no return. Our awareness of this ontological parallax, inviting as it does a resurgence of the dichotomous relationship between being and knowing, does, however, come at a price; namely anxiety. Heidegger asserted that in anxiety, Dasein is not threatened by a particular thing, rather ‘Being-in-the-world itself is that in the face of which anxiety is anxious’,24 what threatens is
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