motorcyclemeditation.com

First time on the motorcycle since the holiday and enjoying every minute. On home turf, each curve of the road containing a reassuring familiarity, giving license for extra speed most of the time, also recognition of occasions for caution. The motorcycle stable and potent, patient but ready to go. Holidays, fine, but the motorcycle is what you look forward to returning to.

After a few miles, rhythm and motion settling the brain. Motorcycle comfortably cruising. Mind emptying. The resultant vacuum, one of motorcycling’s therapeutic gifts, also carrying the excitement of discovering which particular thought will stray along to fill it. Thoughts unbidden often containing as much or more value as thoughts enforced through concentration.

In this case, floating to mind’s surface, Kafka, finally read on holiday after several false starts over the years. English translation, unfortunately, wish I had the skills to read the original. Authentic voice of the twentieth century, the critics say, and you can just about see their point.

On the motorcycle, slowing, the traffic ahead bunching. Smooth flow arrested for no accountable reason, motorists’ best intentions thwarted. In the cars, resolutions being formulated as to future means of travel. Frustration turning to anger turning to helpless resignation. Exactly like Kafka.

The key insight being the helplessness. Not from structured design or focused persecution, rather just a casual crushing by unseen systems. Opaque, arbitrary, impersonal, indifferent. In Kafka, emerging in bureaucracy, here, the traffic. A tiny difference somewhere, huge ramifications elsewhere. Nothing so elegant as chaos theory’s neat formulae, far more lumbering and mindless than that.

Godlike on the motorcycle, these frustrations swiftly swept aside. The Kafkaesque traffic, an authentic conundrum of the twentieth century, also twenty first. But its counterpart, those centuries’ authentic symbol of freedom, surely a motorcycle.