October 2011
21 posts
Motorbike
The saddle is frozen solid.
The chronically wet rubber sponge
Inside the leopardskin cover
Crunches like shingle.
I hold my cuff
And wipe off the surface rain,
Lean over and flood the carburettor,
Jump on the start again.
A sneeze.
A little plume of steam.
The old tubes cough up a bit of phlegm
Then fade.
I have chronic catarrh, a raw ankle,
Pinkeye, blackheads and foul hair.
I have a humiliating sheepskin coat
And I lust strangely after a new alternator.
Hugo Williams, Sugar Daddy (1970)
“Across the open countryside, / Into the walls of rain I ride. / It beats my cheek, drenches my knees, / But I am being what I please.” In spite of his leather-clad image, you can’t help wondering if Thom Gunn ever actually owned a motorbike. If he didn’t, then I have been riding one under a misapprehension for the past forty-four years. I read those lines in 1958, and soon afterward hire-purchased my first motorbike as part of a wider programme of plagiarism.
…
Like Thom Gunn, I was always a slightly fraudulent cafe racer.” —
…
Like Thom Gunn, I was always a slightly fraudulent cafe racer.” —
Hugo Williams, ‘Free Lance’, Times Literary Supplement, 14 September 2001.
“On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there; so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.”
—
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (London: The Bodley Head, 1974), 4.
Another motorcycling conductor - Osmo Vänskä
“Author and neurologist Oliver Sacks motorcycling in Australia.”
—
“Walking the mountains was a habit young [Samuel] Beckett adopted from his father, but as an adolescent he preferred using a motorcycle, as Deirdre Bair, his first biographer, reports: “In helmet and goggles, he flew over the narrow roads and ditches, stony-faced and grim, impervious to the dangers that lay around every curve in the landscape.” There lay not only dangers, however, but also chances for success: in March 1925, Beckett on his 2.75 h.p. A.J.S. took part in a motorcycling race through the Wicklow Mountains.”
—
http://www.samuel-beckett.net/JoysOfCycling.html
Samuel Beckett in the early 1920s.
Your Eyes Blaze Out: On the Move, by Thom Gunn →
youreyesblazeout.tumblr.com
The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows
some hidden purpose, and the gust of birds
that spurts across the field, the wheeling swallows,
have nested in the trees and undergrowth.
Seeking their instinct, or their poise, or both,
one moves with an uncertain violence
under the dust thrown by a baffled sense
or the dull thunder of approximate words.
On motorcycles, up the road, they come:
small, black as flies hanging in the heat, the Boys,
until the distance throws them forth, their hum
bulges to thunder held by calf and thigh.
In goggles, donned impersonality,
in gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,
they strap in doubt — by hiding it, robust —
and almost hear a meaning in their noise.
Exact conclusion of their hardiness
has no shape yet, but from known whereabouts
they ride, direction where the tires press.
They scare a flight of birds across the field:
much that is natural, to the will must yield.
Men manufacture both machine and soul,
and use what they imperfectly control
to dare a future from the taken routes.
It is part solution, after all.
One is not necessarily discord
on earth; or damned because, half animal,
one lacks direct instinct, because one wakes
afloat on movement that divides and breaks.
One joins the movement in a valueless world,
choosing it, till, both hurler and the hurled,
one moves as well, always toward, toward.
A minute holds them, who have come to go:
the self-defined, astride the created will
they burst away; the towns they travel through
are home for neither bird nor holiness,
for birds and saints complete their purposes.
At worst, one is in motion; and at best,
reaching no absolute, in which to rest,
one is always nearer by not keeping still.
“I felt close to the bike, but not in an emotional way. I did not humanise the bike because that would have taken away whatever spirit the steel and spark plugs themselves may have had. Somewhere, pitched within the molecules of metal, there is something that I feel is more than machinery. This is the bond between the bike and me: that this beautiful beast, the red one that kicks ass, shoots dust and dribbles mercilessly between motorists and trees, somehow takes me beyond my dreams to where I come out the other side, and allows me to be original in a world where so much has already been done.”
—
Nick Sanders, Fastest Man Around the World (Powys: On the Road Books, 1999), 144.
Thom Gunn, The Unsettled Motorcyclist's Vision of His Death
Across the open countryside,
Into the walls of rain I ride.
It beats my cheek, drenches my knees,
But I am being what I please.
The firm heath stops, and marsh begins.
Now we’re at war: whichever wins
My human will cannot submit
To nature, though brought out of it.
The wheels sink deep; the clear sound blurs:
Still, bent on the handle-bars,
I urge my chosen instrument
Against the mere embodiment.
The front wheel wedges fast between
Two shrubs of glazed insensate green
- Gigantic order in the rim
Of each flat leaf. Black eddies brim
Around my heel which, pressing deep,
Accelerates the waiting sleep.
I used to live in sound, and lacked
Knowledge of still or creeping fact.
But now the stagnant strips my breath,
Leant on my cheek in weight of death.
Though so oppressed I find I may
Through substance move. I pick my way,
Where death and life in one combine,
Through the dark earth that is not mine,
Crowded with fragments, blunt, unformed;
While past my ear where noises swarmed
The marsh plant’s white extremities,
Slow without patience, spread at ease
Invulnerable and soft, extend
With a quiet grasping toward their end.
And though the tubers, once I rot,
Reflesh my bones with pallid knot,
Till swelling out my clothes they feign
This dummy is a man again,
It is as servants they insist,
Without volition that they twist;
And habit does not leave them tired,
By men laboriously acquired.
Cell after cell the plants convert
My special richness in the dirt:
All that they get, they get by chance.
And multiply in ignorance.
Jan Sandström: Motorbike Concerto (Trombone Concerto No. 1) (1988-89) →
jansandstrom.com
A youtube video of the fifth movement is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC7J41MXTro
