audacity part II

On the anatomy of audacity Ulfson Arvidsson Part two Pain and certainty

Bewildering though it may seem, many long distance cyclists appear to willingly move towards the very phenomenon which in the affluent and supposedly developed ‘first’ world most people seek to avoid. Pain, this protest made by the body, is something which commands our attention like few other things in life and there is almost nothing like it that underscores quite as severely one’s sense of being alone in the world. In his book A Philosophy of Pain (2009) Vetlesen describes how pain sets us out, how it is a differentiator that if intense enough can throw us from being cultural bodies all the way back to where we are organisms devoid of self, culture and language (a state described by philosophy as ‘pure immanence’.)12 Making a link to my aforesaid notion of ‘subdermic seclusion’ we may think that to be in pain is to have absolute certainty; pain is mine, it makes my body unambiguously mine because pain cannot be taken away from me. I cannot hand to you my pain as if it were a spoonful of cod liver oil in order to let you have a taste of it, or relieve me of it altogether.

The degree of pain that I imagine many of us have at some point experienced on really long rides increases immanence; it deepens our sense of being in ourselves. Moreover, the physical pain that we experience is clearly localised, that is; we can usually point quite accurately to where it is and more often than not we have a clear sense of what may be causing the pain. Contrary to this physical experience, psychic pain tends to seep into every recess of our inner worlds. Like drops of India ink released into a jug of water psychic pain comes to gradually suffuse our entire being with its leaden tint and therefore offers no spot to which we can point as being especially involved in the pain. Heartache, as we all know, is total and so is depression proper when it rolls in. And maybe this is what is so beguiling about controlled physical pain; it gives a sense of focus.

Thinking about these matters brings to mind an episodically very creative but also severely distraught patient who once confessed to drinking excessive amounts of hard liquor, not so much to get intoxicated in order to bear the dearth of meaning in his life, but to generate pounding hangovers that would offer him a longed for sense of internal focus and an obvious kernel to his being when any enduring sense of self was absent. Canadian born Tour de France rider Michael Barry, in his collaborative book Le Métier (2010), writes in the book’s final paragraph: ‘Over the hundreds of thousands of kilometres I’ve ridden, I’ve slowly come to realise why my desire developed and became an obsession. Without it, I struggle – I am anxious, unfocused and tense.’13 Underscoring this is scholar C. Fred Alford (2002: 45) who in exploring the thought of well known British paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, states that ‘The greatest burden of being is always having to hold myself together.… Dedicated to the reactions of others, I can never just be.’.

Going on being and flow

‘Going on being’14 is Winnicott’s term for the infants experience of continuing aliveness within the holding environment provided by a parent sufficiently attuned to the infant’s internal reality. Of course, this is a best case scenario where the infant can trust mother’s reliable physical presence and mental capaciousness to find himself through her continuous recognition of his changing internal states. Somewhere here we find the experience of ‘Going on being’, a state in which the infant is not charged with reacting to something beyond its capability, such as the moods of a parent, say, or an excessively drawn out absence of a feeding breast. When, however,

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things are not as favourable then the infant’s flowing sense of aliveness is traded in for an anxious and vigilant use of mind in order to avoid being over-stimulated. Such a sacrifice made by the infant is a dire one; In Winnicott´s words the baby´s ‘own creative capacity begins to atrophy’.15 This is the moment that Alford was alluding to, when the infant becomes saddled with the often lifelong burden of holding itself together. Once the dread of this rupture has been experienced we will seek to return to the state of uninterrupted aliveness from which overwhelming impingements wrested us. We conduct this search in different ways and through different means. What we are looking for is the return to full immersion in unobstructed flow.

In an interview with Wired magazine, Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the father of ‘flow theory’, described flow as ‘being completely involved in an activity for its own sake.

The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.’16 When I read this quote I get an almost visceral sense of natural and graceful fluidity. Most probably we have all had such epistemologically private moments, when intrinsic motivation has pulled us towards the edge of our personal ability and we have had a heightened sensorial awareness of our physical bodies and the world around us; our heart rates in synchronicity with cadence and breathing patterns, the distinct whirr of Italian freehubs on a long descent, the heady scent enveloping us when hammering out a solid pace on country roads winding through fields of rapeseed, or the first recognition of that raw potato peel damp that rises with the approach of nightfall. This; to reach the outmost edge of one’s ability in something one does for the pure love of it, is what every person seeks, even if ultimately experienced only ever so fleetingly. It is of course also tied up with play and sex; these brief experiences of unforced culmination and climax, of the temporary suspension of our common incapacity for enjoying the pleasures of the senses, the momentary fading of one’s ego and lessening of vigilant self regard. Little wonder that we are so devoted to racking up the miles.

Randonneurs mondiaux

The French word ‘randonnée’17 loosely translates to ‘long journey’ or ‘ramble’. The term ‘ramble’, much like the ‘bonk’ known to endurance athletes, is a verb that offers multiple semantic possibilities; to walk, roam, to go on, to stray and digress. Freud’s basic analytical rule, ‘free association’, a rule which entails reporting without reservation whatever comes to mind, encourages a form of ramble into ones inner world. Free association produces speech that naturally gravitates to where we no longer know where we are going; it is speech that is not predominantly governed by secondary process18 thinking and therefore it roams freely, often straying rather brilliantly into unknown psychic territories. We all know this; how our interiority spills over in slips of the tongue. Even when we don’t commit obvious slips we tend to say more than we intend to because language inevitably speaks us more than we speak it in its relentless effort to reach the deepest point of our inner worlds. Contrary to the narcissistic fantasies of, say, captains Nemo and Ahab, Freud proclaimed that conscious man was ‘no longer master in its own house’,19 the ego no longer sole master on board. Rather he suggested that we bob, some rather more languidly than others, on the surface of an infinite unconscious ocean. What psychoanalysis can do is authorise us to submerge to great depths, towards the existentially abyssal 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

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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 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

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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 natures 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 ekstatic creature. By this I mean that we are produced by ekstatic 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 nowhere and nothing. In anxiety, then, our familiarity with the world around us withdraws and our sense of being at home in the particular thrust and drag of obvious everydayness in which we have come to understand ourselves breaks down. I think now of Henry David Thoreau who wrote in his well known book Walden: Or, Life in the Woods (1853), which chronicles the two years he lived in a small cabin on the shores of a pond in

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Massachusetts: ‘Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realise where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.’25 Touch any ocean (or pond for that matter) and you are instantly connected to its farthest shores.

Anxiety, then, can be seen as an individuation of Dasein, when it realises that it is not at home in the world, when it collapses out of the everyday and pulls towards its own unique dense singularity. Sartre holds that such anxiety is part and parcel of the human condition and that failure to acknowledge this is down to what he calls ‘bad faith’. To act in bad faith, according to Sartre, is to try to behave like an ‘object’ or ‘thing’ (being-in-itself ), as a question already answered. In doing this a person (being-for-itself ) pretends they have a fixed or determined nature. His well-known illustration involves a Parisian waiter whose exaggerated gestures signal to Sartre’s particular eye that the waiter behaves like an android whose essence it is to be a waiter. Again, existence precedes essence and not, as our poor waiter seems convinced, the other way round.

I believe there are more themes to explore here; rootedness versus mobility, solitude in relation to the question of others, autonomy and self reliance against heteronomy, etc.

I would, however, like to draw to a close simply by quoting Alphonso Lingis (1998), who says that ‘[existence] understood etymologically, is not so much a state or a stance as a movement, which is by conceiving a divergence from itself or a potentiality of itself and casting itself into that divergence with all that it is.’

Footnotes

12 Immanence, derived from the Latin in manere – ‘to remain within’. The French word ‘immanence’ means to be fully present with oneself, to be closed upon oneself.

13 Barry, M. and McMillan, C. (2010) Le Métier. London: Rouleur Ltd p.165.

14 Winnicott, D. W. (1958) Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis.

2002. p.303.

15 Winnicott, D. W. (1971) Playing and Reality. London: Brunner Routledge. 2001. p.112.

16 Geirland, J. (1996) Go With the Flow. Wired magazine.

September, Issue 4.09.

17 The word ‘randonneur’ originates from the French for a male long-distance cyclist. In French a female long-distance cyclist is a ‘randonneuse’.

18 Secondary Process Thinking is the conscious mental activity and logical thinking controlled by the ego and influenced by environmental demands.

19 Freud, S. (1917) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 16. London: Vintage. 2001. p.285.

20 ‘Dasein’ is Heidegger’s term for human being. It is derived from the German da-sein, which literally means being-there.

Dasein is that being which is capable of ontology, that is, capable of questioning its own way of being.

21 Safranski. R. (1999) Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press. p.199.

22 ‘It is worth drawing attention here to the etymology of ekstasis and existence – both deriving…the 1st in Greek, the 2nd in Latin from a combination of the prefix ‘out’ or ‘from’ with the verb to ‘stand’. A conjectural link is provided by the Greek verb ‘existeni’ meaning to put out of place, to change, to alter.’ Caws, p.(1979) Sartre. The Arguments of the Philosophers. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. p.87.

23 ‘Lacan described as ‘real jouissance’ such unmediated satisfaction as is sought by the animal who pounces on its prey out of hunger or follows the rhythm of its mating instinct. But however far back one goes in the life of a human being, one cannot find any trace of access to that real jouissance. Language has transformed us into beings subject to a logic that is other than biological or natural

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logic.’ Cantin, L. (2002) ‘The Trauma of Language’, in Hughes, R. and Malone, K. R. (eds.) After Lacan. Albany: SUNY Press. p.35.

24 Heidegger, M., (1927). Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 2008. p.232.

25 Thoreau, H. D. (1853) Walden: Or, Life in the Woods. Mineola: Dover Publications Inc. 2002. Ch. 8.

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