This article is a preview from the Summer 2018 edition of New Humanist
Dennis Mustard is a retired British Gas telecoms engineer from Sunderland. We are outside Pease Pottage Services on the M23. He sighs out a thin, neat plume of smoke and says, “Your positioning needs to be more extreme.”
I glance at our bikes: his huge BMW adventure-tourer with hard panniers that I’ve never seen him open, and my bug-eyed orange Street Triple.
“It’s just all a bit . . . scrappy,” he says, marking the ellipsis with his roll-up. “When we passed that white van after Billingshurst I saw your brake-light. Just roll off the throttle and into the gap.” His Mackem accent swallows the T’s. I look down at my feedback sheet, which lists 23 aspects of motorcycle technique, each scored out of five. This is my first training session with Dennis. He has given me mostly twos and threes.
* * *
Robert M Pirsig died a year ago. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he claimed that “the Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower.” “Buddha” and “Godhead” are shorthand for what Pirsig called Quality, a term he spent much of his ride across America trying to define.
The book begins with a disagreement: Pirsig’s companion John Sutherland employs a mechanic to maintain his motorcycle, whereas Pirsig maintains his own. It feels trifling, but Sutherland and his wife soon reveal themselves unwilling to talk or even think about technical things. They are a hip couple, who holiday to get away from “it all”, and the motorcycle somehow brings “it all” back. “The ‘it’ is a kind of force that gives rise to technology,” Pirsig writes, “something undefined, but inhuman, mechanical, lifeless, a blind monster, a death force. Something hideous they are running from but know they can never escape . . . You go through . . . a large city and there it all is.”
Because of its mechanical nature, the motorcycle represents this death force too, so if we master taking care of it then we have made a stride towards mastering everything. “Watch [the broken motorcycle] the way you watch a line when fishing,” Pirsig advises, “and before long, as sure as you live, you’ll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you’re interested in it. That’s the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it.”
Advice like this is being called for in the secular world. The neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris has said that atheism is “just a way of clearing the space for better conversations. It is not itself a philosophy; it’s not an ethics; it’s not a world view.” For Harris, freedom from religion is just a moral starting point, and one senses that Pirsig would have agreed. “In the final analysis, freedom is a purely negative goal,” he writes. “It just says something is bad.”
Zen and the Art. . . aimed to unite the “dull, awkward and ugly” square with the “frivolous, erratic, irrational” hip: to reconcile classical and romantic ways of seeing the world and make fleeing from our everyday lives unnecessary. What is conspicuous by its absence, though, is any advice about how a motorcycle, once working properly, ought to be ridden. Might there be some psychological or spiritual benefit in considering that, as well?
* * *
Four years after completing my training with Dennis Mustard, I am biking in Mid Glamorgan. It has rained but the sun is shining, and the close Welsh hillsides look hyper-real and Tolkienesque. Long roads twist between the villages. There are cliché-surpassing quantities of sheep.
Dennis himself is not here – Facebook has him touring the Black Forest one month, the Atlas Mountains the next – and I am following a man called Hugh, who wafts through the bends on a white touring BMW reminiscent of an ambulance. His progress is serene, apparently effortless, and very rapid indeed. Everybody on this trip has passed the advanced riding test of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, a gold-standard pass of which is described as “the highest civilian riding standard available”. I have one, but it still isn’t easy keeping up with Hugh.
It is fun, though. Through tight corner sequences I tense up and the bike gets unwieldy, but the sweepers feel flight-like and perfect. When we stop for coffee I think of Pirsig. “Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire,” he says, “It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.” Chapter One of the police handbook Motorcycle Roadcraft feels like an echo: “You are three times more likely to be involved in a crash when responding to an emergency. Your attention is not on the riding but on some specific goal.” Caring for process rather than outcome been a mainstay of performance psychology for years, but feels especially relevant to biking. Hard acceleration yields instant joy, but if applied inappropriately can be fatal.
Yet dying felt unlikely on our ride this morning. Roadcraft states that you must be able to stop safely on your side of the road within the distance you can see to be clear. Hugh could ride fast because his position always provided him with the longest view around each bend. Had he abandoned the Roadcraft rule he could have gone even faster, but it would have made not crashing a matter of chance. “The very pursuit of happiness is what thwarts it,” wrote the neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl. “Success and happiness may happen, but the less one cares for them the more they can.” His summary, in Man’s Search for Meaning, was that “happiness cannot be pursued, it must ensue”. Pirsig agrees that “any effort that has self-glorification as its final endpoint is bound to end in disaster”, but never connects this to motorcyling itself.
In “The Summer Day”, the poet Mary Oliver asked, “What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” I’d never known why practising road safety with a group of older men – at 38 I am a youthful curiosity – felt to me like an acceptable answer to her question. The following day, though, when riding behind our tour leader Tim, I figure it out.
I wouldn’t claim that Tim is faster than Hugh, but it’s possible. He rides a ’95 Ducati with a tubular steel frame with welds like pie crusts. Large parts of the fairing are square, and its V-twin sounds like a primitive automatic weapon. A discussion last night about weighting the outside footpeg has clicked with me, and I am able to live with Tim as he howls and clatters over a winding moorland pass. He and his old machine lean as one – less a man on a bike than a two-wheeled centaur – but it is only when we are tootling through a town that I see what I realise I’ve been looking for all along. Up on the moor the only hazards were crests and corners, but here in Merthyr Tydfil hazards are everywhere: oncoming cars, junctions, traffic lights; cyclists, scooters, pedestrians. And the position, speed and direction of Tim’s bike take all of it into account, as it arises, and in proportion to the immediacy of its threat.
It is the constantly correct solution to the changing equation of his environment, and I think about Frankl again. “In the age in which the Ten Commandments . . . have lost their unconditional validity, man must learn to listen to the ten thousand commandments implied in the ten thousand situations of which his life consists.” What Frankl is talking about, and what Tim is demonstrating, is awareness. This seemed to matter to Mary Oliver too. “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is,” she says earlier in the poem. “I do know how to pay attention”.
* * *
As a culture, we are saturated with awareness-talk. I recently reviewed five memoirs about swimming, all of which mentioned “being present”, or similar, somewhere. But our use of the road is heading in the opposite direction. In a 2017 interview Thomas Doll, the president of Subaru USA, said that what most sells cars to young people is “connectivity” with the internet, and articles heralding autonomous cars are everywhere. Vehicles that drive themselves will make us more productive – we’ll be able to work on the way to work – and safer, because driver error causes over 90 per cent of collisions. Both arguments are valid, and persuasive, unless one happens to harbour the suspicion that human life might ideally be about something other – something more – than keeping busy or being cocooned.
Riding and driving can, if we want them to, be paths to a greater awareness of a personal, very Pirsigian sort. “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands,” he wrote. “Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.”
Motorcyclists know, for example, that a farm entrance might mean mud on the road, or that a line of trees up ahead gives away the severity of a bend. We can usually judge within a couple of seconds whether another vehicle is likely to do something unexpected – a gleaming sports car is not likely to pull out of a junction without looking; a minivan with a dented door evidently is. While driving a car seems easier (according to Pirsig, “in a car . . . everything you see is just more TV”), really it just has a more palatable distribution of risk: the car’s size and weight mean its driver and passengers are safer, but it is much more dangerous for anything it hits. The Royal Society’s motto is “accidents don’t have to happen”, and when something goes even sub-accident-level awry in a car – you’re in the wrong lane; a light changes unexpectedly – more awareness beforehand would usually have prevented it.
If we accept awareness as important for driving, then it must also be so when we’re riding a bicycle, or going for a run, or chopping up the vegetables for our dinner. From here it is a smooth ride in: we give ourselves a hangover with an ill-advised final round; we damage our career with an email sent in anger; our minds are wandering, so we forget our keys. These little “crashes” of everyday life don’t kill us, but they do add up to an existence that is not smooth, nor likely very enjoyable.
The problem, though, is that improving life-awareness is hard; the sheer number of tasks and relationships can be overwhelming. But on the road we can ease off the throttle, see things one at a time, and then speed up again when we are ready. When transport is fully automated the environment will surely benefit, but something else valuable will have been lost. According to the biker and behavioural scientist Bernt Spiegel, the driving licence is “a permit to continue to practise without supervision”. It is arguable that what we are practising is life itself.
On my way back to London, the motorway traffic is as heavy as the rain. I do not show my brake-light, though; I just roll off the the throttle and into the gaps. I don’t know whether becoming a better motorcyclist has helped me to become a better person, but I would love to move through life with grace like this. I raised a rapidly cooling mug of coffee in thanks to Dennis Mustard this morning, and then to the memory of Pirsig as I lubricated and adjusted my chain, and properly stowed away all my gear. It took a little time, but now my gearbox is snicking gratefully, and when I arrive home all the items that need to be dry still will be. The weather is cold and inhospitable, and truck-spray makes it hard to see, but there is no means by which I would rather be going. I am away from it all, and in the middle of it all as well.
