Words Fail Me
For those of you who have ever talked about bikes, bikin and bikers and have ever heard or used the phrase: "If I had to explain, you wouldn't understand...!!"
For Openers,
everything you have
ever heard or read
about motorcycles and
bikers....is crap.
Yeah, yeah I
know.
You've been told that
bikers bring freedom
that ridin is a mark of
individuality, that bikers
are sex symbols, that
adventure lurks in
those V-twin cylinders.
Horseshit.
Riding is the
whole thing,
the only thing, the
unembellished activity
itself an experience
unique to the rider, one
needing no explanation
or interpretation, no
middleman to explain
what it means or
signifies, because the
meaning and the
experience are the
same-
and that adventure
you're lookin' for lurks
in your mind not in
you're manifold.
The adventure
consists
of flyin' down that
unique stretch of
asphalt that brings in
awareness and ends in
oblivion, and between
that beginning and
end, meanders through
the convolutions of
you're brain like
highways crisscrossing
the road map of you're
life.
At best,
descriptions,
interpretations, studies,
analyses, only hint at
the reality.
At worst,
words shrink and
distort that reality,
reducing it to
ideas...propaganda...
cliches...bullshit...jive.
The subject
is just too large, too
real, to be captured by
words and stuck on the
page like a dead insect
pinned to a board
behind the glass of a
display case in a
museum.
Words are
Lilliputians trying
to hold down
Gulliver
with miserable little
ropes of thread.
Words are crude
tools used
by the verbal
pathologist to dissect
the corpse of
something that once
was alive, tools for
examining the lifeless
remains of the smells
and sights and sounds
and sensations and
emotions and power of
the experience- an
autopsy, slicing open
the cadaver to reveal
the pathetic, shriveled,
internal organs.
For most people,
words
provide a replacement
for- not an
enhancement to-
reality, a safer, a
protection against the
frightening prospect of
actual involvement with
their own lives.
Absolutely
astonishing
that
most guys
will never
ride a motorcycle in
their life.
They will never
ever know what they
missed, and all the
words in all the
dictionaries can't return
to them what they don't
even know they lost.
And yet,
throughout
their wretched,
dehydrated lives,
they're carryin' around
a head full of words-
shit eatin', self-
satisfied, words
inflating their stunted,
dwarfish egos like pus
swelling an infection.
Inevitably,
like an inexperienced
rider on his first run,
tryin' to keep pace with
the point man up front,
words are
outdistanced, and must
struggle just to keep
reality in sight, the
experience they
attempt to convey now
only a tiny dot in the
distance, the words
staggering after that
disappearing pinpoint,
sweating and
wheezing and flushed,
but always losing
ground, losing the
experience in the futile
attempt to extract and
abstract its essence, to
desiccate the moment, to
freeze-dry it, and stuff
it in a Zip-lock bag, to
be dragged out and
thawed later, whenever
someone wants to
know the "meaning" of
biking.
Like a good puke
brings relief
from food poisoning by
expelling the tainted
mess making you ill,
riding your bike
cleanses you mentally,
purging language's
feverish, silly
hallucinations.
Twist the throttle,
and the butterfly valves
in your brain open
wide, and the
experience of riding
fills your head like high-
octane mist rushing
into the cylinder on the
intake stroke.
Blown out on the
exhaust stroke
are all the weak, tame
words, all the vaque,
tired ideas, all the
pretentious, empty
rhetoric and all the
Mickey Mouse drivel
that not only
misrepresents biking,
but actually betrays it
by reducing the magic
to the level of the
understandable...the
mundane...the
pedestrian...the
ordinary...and saddest
of all, the trivial.
Pop the clutch on
your life,
twist the wick, and run
through the gears,
scattering words and
abstractions and talk
like dead leaves
swirling down the hot
asphalt in the wake of
your passing.
A motorcycle
takes you
somewhere
that language can't
follow, where
experience always
eludes and mocks
attempts to capture
and shrink it to the
pitiful dimensions of an
old snapshot, a fuzzy
image carried in a
wallet, glanced at now
and then, and
immediately forgotten.
Oh, by the way...
don't believe these
words either.
This bold but true statement was authored by
Tex Campbell
I'd bet he never expected to see it on the web.
Back to Open Road Cycle......
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