David Morreale is a husband and father, teacher, motorcyclist, and writer. He spent his teens as a homeless street musician and wanderer, hitch-hiking Europe. Thirty-five years as a singer/songwriter, interrupted periodically by jobs, was finally punctuated by a return to formal education at 44, earning his undergraduate in Middle School Education at Towson University, and finally earning a Masters in Liberal Studies from Loyola University Maryland (Baltimore). He now teaches high school English and Film Studies.
essay
Giving the Void Its Colors
David Morreale, Riverside High School
In 1948, Albert Camus wrote a letter to his publisher asking if sales of his book La Peste had gone well. He asked because, “je voudrais m’acheter une motocyclette!” (“I want to buy a motorcycle!”).[1] In his novel The Fall, Camus’ protagonist Clamence gets into a road rage–induced fight with a motorcyclist. When a bystander remonstrates Clamence for wanting to hit a man hampered by sitting astride a motorcycle, the motorcyclist takes advantage of this hesitation and punches Clamence and quickly rides away. This may be a “sour grapes” moment in Camus’ writing. If Albert can’t buy a bike, then all bikers must be cowards.
Riding motorcycles is not merely escapism, a flight from reality. Riding one of these machines is proof of one’s willingness to engage with the world. For some (and I am one of these), riding is living in Camus’ state of revolt. I have been riding motorcycles for 40 years, and when the day inevitably arrives that I can no longer ride, it will be a little bit like death for me. Riding is charged with intensity and sensuality, and my motorcycle (La Grande Bandida Rojas de mi Corazon AKA Big Red) is an object with which I have a deep and abiding connection. I’m in good company in this. T.E. Lawrence, Che Guevara, Elvis Presley, Bessie Smith, that Clown Prince of European Motorcycle Racing, Valentino Rossi, and more have all ridden and testified to the aesthetic power of spending time with two wheels, an engine, and the horizon.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus espouses the belief that the universe is a cold, meaningless place, positing that humankind’s search for meaning is therefore the very definition of absurdity. Given this absurdity, Camus offered three choices facing the individual: suicide; the soporific vapors of religion; or revolt and acceptance of the meaninglessness, imposing our own, individual meaning on our lives, doing so in acceptance of the knowledge that that meaning, when we die, dies with us. Like Camus’ living in revolt, riding is an intense and lush acceptance of the knowledge of one’s limits and one’s ultimate fate. It is a state of being that I have embraced since I, as a boy, stared, eyeball to eyeball with the vast and hollow universe and, in my naïve hubris, rather fancied that it was the universe that blinked.
Even as a homeless teenager I was too in love with the experience of being alive to consider Camus’ first choice, suicide; as for his second, perhaps it was the Catholic priest who referred to me as “this piece of shit,” or the nun who daily rapped my knuckles with a grim and undisguised glee, who made Camus’ second choice, religion, also impossible.
Regardless of these experiences, I remember making the decision around the age of 5 that I was both terrified of the world and excited by it at the same time. I have always felt immortal and never had any problem embracing the richness and depth of the aesthetic experience regardless of value judgments defining any particular experience as “good,” or “bad.” Although I hadn’t any real understanding of Camus until grad school at the age of 50, his third choice thrilled my heart because I recognized my revolutionary self and my choices within it.
I knew early that I had no time or interest in hoping for another life. I wanted to breathe now, and missing out on the “implacable grandeur of this life[2]” was no sin I wished to commit.
Our lives are taut with tiny moments of import, little things we do, so casually and so often in what Camus deemed our “unillustrious” lives, giving undue weight to the “irrelevancies” that we miss their import, and so they slide past, escaping notice and seeming to hold no special weight. The trick lies in unveiling the meaning between ourselves and the machine, and when we do that—when we pull back the veil—we find that the tiny moment that is “the man behind the curtain” is the only thing worth paying attention to. In all of Oz, he is the only thing of real interest.
I became a husband at 38 and a father at 47, and fatherhood aside, it is motorcycles that have given me moments that rank among the most hair-raising experiences of my life; and I include my time as a homeless teenager. I left home at least once a year from the age of 5, and at 16 it stuck. At 17 in the London subway, I was making a living as a street musician, and one particularly frightening day I had to fight a very strong, belligerently drunken Scotsman who was trying to steal my tips.
I didn’t beat Tambourine Billy, but I didn’t lose either, which meant I could afford to eat that day. Rumor had it that Billy had killed a man in his younger days. It was easy to believe. But even the thrill of surviving a violent encounter with a man built to resemble a fist on legs pales in comparison with the gorgeous and rich experience of riding motorcycles.
Trying to efficiently control the power of 103 horses contained within the 1,250 cubic centimeters of the engine of my motorcycle is a lesson in acceptance, in finding meaning, and for all the danger involved in riding a throbbing red motorcycle, intensely emotional. It fulfills what Camus called “the mind’s… appetite for clarity.”[3]
In fact, there are two moments every ride that are so heavily weighted, so pregnant, so beautifully fraught, that the actual riding between these two moments can seem like an ancillary benefit.
My son was two years old when he learned to ride a glider-style bike. His feet on the sidewalk did the locomoting for a week or so until the need for speed tweaked his amygdala, and on his third birthday, I put the pedals on his bike.
That was the summer we spent deep-diving into European motorcycle racing, and we were big fans of nine-time Moto Grand Prix champion Valentino Rossi. Both of us, father and son, thrilled to the legendary voice of British MotoGP commentator Nick Harris, whose emphatic and excited rasp narrated Rossi’s moves on the course of every race. So, when the boy would button up his leather jacket, and throw a leg over his pedal bike, he would, in the manner of children the world over, narrate his feats in the same emphatic and excited tone. Sometimes, like Valentino celebrating a win, he’d jump off the bike and kiss the driveway.
One sunny morning, jumping onto his bike, Harlan said to me, “Papa! OK! When I start riding, you say, ‘…and Valentino is certainly on top of his game today! Look at him go as he races through the chicane and exits at top speed and hits the fast left-hander and powers through the long straightaway and wins the whole, big race!’”
In the middle of this monologue, he took off, his little feet pedaling furiously, I yelled,
“That’s an awful lot of words to remember! Which words do you want me to say?”
With a flick of his wrist, he shouted over his shoulder, “say all the words, papa! Say all the words!”
The modern era and social media have intensified our very human need to prove to the anonymous world that we exist. Bulwarks of ones and zeros stave off mortality and are shared with the world without discrimination. Bolstered by hashtags, likes, and dislikes, we “say all the words,” and although this very human impulse has been a driver of great art and feats of mind-boggling construction, the democratization of the internet has also caused the web to become a muddy morass of utterly questionable content, murder, riot, and over-sharing. We share pictures of our meals, our marathon training runs, our favorite and too often most mundane achievements. “I sync, therefore I am” is the ethos by which humanity in modernity lives, and my son also feels the need to place himself within the story of the world—to place himself on the page.
We are participators and our own commentators, and like the tree falling in the woods, we require observers to hear the sound of our exploits to know that we are, in fact, alive—Harlan was just living by the question, “If no one saw me do it, did I really do it?” And although we could debate that existentially, all of this is to say that both stories and motorcycles move our lives forward into the future.
Every story, every narrative worth speaking and hearing has a few, basic requirements; a protagonist, a desire, and an obstacle. Stories sometimes even require beginnings and endings, and although these can be difficult to define, the final requirement is that a story must have ears to hear.
We are the protagonist in our stories. As to desire… what do we want? Of what we may desire, what is there to be found on two wheels that cannot be found on four, on foot, in a church, on the mountaintop? How are we to know when we’ve become a real aspect of our own stories? How do we leave and re-enter the quotidian? What obstacles stand in the way? For those like myself, for whom neither suicide nor religion are possible, how do we observe Camus’ third option and find meaning in our lives and experiences?
To be sure, we construct our lives the same way a writer con-structs any narrative. We begin at the beginning and end at the end, and in between we can subside into passivity and be content, or we can actively direct our lives, ride the goddamn motorcycle ourselves, and wince at the roar of the wind. Camus once said, “Being aware of one’s life, one’s revolt, one’s freedom, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum.”[4] It is my belief that it is impossible to ride and remain ignorant of these.
Although there may be no more James Dean moment in any one’s life quite like kick-starting a motorcycle, it is a rare chance that, in this electric-start world of ours, anyone gets to do such a thing. Even the manufacturers of retro/vintage-designed machines are afraid to rely on leg power to light that fire, which explains why it’s such a badass move. It fits my inner story as I would like it to fit, and that, in modernity, is what matters. Kick-starting a motorcycle says “all the words.”
Like the prenatal moment immediately before the big bang, when the entire mass of the universe we know was compressed into a space infinitely small, ready to explode into creation, the universe got its first glimpse of meaning in the tiniest increment of a moment. This shortest increment of time, before time even was, infinitely laden with promise and intent—in that super-heated moment, the universe was saddling up, in all its glorious, heartless meaninglessness, to throw a leg over and ride.
We thrill at these big moments, and motorcyclists are more prone to this thrilling than most. With bikes, it is the dramatic, sweeping curves, the wheelies, the wind. In our elation, however, we miss the little moments that are often the ones most heavy with potential and promise. In fact, it is these little moments that carry the most water. The clunk of the gear shift, vibration through the bars, or the rushing pavement six inches under our boots which is so easily ignored (the old saying goes that there are two kinds of riders; ones that have gone down, and ones that will go down, and when the day arrives, it is guaranteed that the pavement will become immensely more immediate and visceral). Motorcyclists are a pure distillation of Camus’ absurdity by dint of this. Everything is enormously heavy with meaning when perched on two wheels moving through the world at 70+ mph because anything can kill you at that speed. The caress of the wind, the carnal scream of it in your helmet, is deeply sensuous in a Camusian sense. Camus must have felt that pull when he wrote to his publisher to see if he could afford his “motorcyclette.”
The two aspects of riding I love best are those moments where I begin and end the story, and although the “grin factor” at everything in between is pretty high, the riding is work compared with the super-heated excitement at the beginning and end of the story.
The world is full of writers who love to ride. Breathlessly they describe the big moments, the rush of the wind, the elemental roar of it—and how riding helps us feel free of, and simultaneously connected to, the natural world. We read often about the weirdly universal love for the smells of rubber and gasoline and the sounds of the rising growl of a hot engine. All of these things are indeed aspects of riding that are loveable and that pluck the strings of the cosmos in whatever mix of gravity, entropy, and physics gives the void it’s colors. Tires hot from the asphalt do carry a peculiarly attractive scent, and choosing the right line in a curve on two wheels (and executing it well) is truly a lovely thing.
Camus’ man experiencing that “certain point on a curve” and acknowledging “having to travel to its end”[5] must have been a motorcyclist deep in his rejection of tomorrow. There is no tomorrow in a curve. There is only now. No curve is ever the same curve no matter how often we navigate it, and riding is the multitudinous experience of the infinite moment because too much relies on too many intangibles to be encapsulated. Road surface, the temperature of the tires, my emotions, whether I am hungry or have an itch between my shoulder blades, the way the light hits the road hiding or revealing loose gravel, wet leaves, or a mud puddle lurking on the inside of the turn stand ready to hand out the most thrilling and painfully friction-filled aesthetic moment. You’re going to get that aesthetic moment good and hard if you screw it up. These are all factors that may well determine, even on familiar curves, one’s fate. Will I exit this curve on two wheels or be spooned off the pavement later? Often, the determining factor is our ability to apex correctly.
The art of the apex is the quest to find the ever-changing, deeply meaningful (in the physically consequential sense of the word) line of travel which allows for the longest sight-line past the exit of a curve. This is late-apexing, and it is necessary because a rider should never outrun his vision, and to apex late is to find that furthest point in the turn that offers the best vision through the turn and beyond.
It is in the nature of acceptance to know and understand that every moment in seeking the perfect late apex is a moment spent in that perfect place where the past and future come together geographically—where velocity and centrifugal force, hot rubber and pavement all marry together, officiated by the hand on the throttle that regulates fuel and air delivery to the spark within the cylinder where thousands of barely contained and controlled explosions per minute deliver power to the wheel that moves rider and bike into a future defined by its ephemeral nature. This moment was here, and then it is gone, and although the literal apex lies at the geometric middle of any turn, when riding, the perfect apex is always evanescent.
Like Robert Pirsig’s Phaedrus in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Albert Camus believed that, if we are to find our own meaning, that it would exist only in the relationship between oneself and the thing. In other words, to ride with integrity is to understand that what controls all of this is the relationship between one’s body and mind and the motorcycle itself.
It’s a safe bet that most two-wheeled philosophers will attest, when being honest, to finding meaning in “the ride.” We all have different names for it. Some call it “wind therapy,” Hunter S. Thompson called it “meeting the Sausage Creature,” and Harley-Davidson, ironically enough given the dollar cost of their bikes, calls it “freedom.” Regardless of the nomenclature, it is obvious that the search for the perfect late apex is the creation of meaning, at least for me, and I should know, because I am a Motorcyclist.
Speed is fun. I’ve sought it rarely enough, because although I have had fun at high speeds, mostly I’m not a speed junkie. At higher speeds, only the horizon seems still. Everything in the immediate vicinity blurs and the wind is shrill enough that there’s hardly room for thought. Thinking at high speed is a problem, at least for me. At the kind of speed that most sane people eschew, but which is just another day in the life for those racers and hooligans living on borrowed time, I’ve found that thinking slows me down. When the world is a blur, revolt is the rule and is, in fact, really the only thing that sticks to us long after the roaring wind has blown all common sense right through us.
However—and here we return to the original point of all this—as much as I love curves, speed, late apexing, good braking, and all of the other aspects that contribute to the search for meaning on a motorcycle, all of these aspects truly pale in comparison with those two tiny moments that all riders experience, regardless of skill or lack thereof and that we are all, at least subliminally, aware of for their bottled up tension, power, status, and sheer Marlon Brando electrical sexual current.
They are the mount and the dismount.
These moments are so heady, so redolent of iconographic authority, that they seem to stop time, to hold it while all those lucky enough to behold them are reminded that Motorcyclists reside among them. It is these two moments when my participator and commentator are both speaking in unison. Getting on and off the bike I become James Dean, The Fonz, The Ghost Rider, The Easy Rider, a Wild One, a Lone Wolf on the edge of Oblivion, a Bad Seed. As Pee Wee Herman once warned, “You don't want to get mixed up with a guy like me. I'm a loner, Dottie. A rebel.”[6] Pee Wee Herman, Revolutionary.
This is the narrative. Like my son, I need the words. All the words. They explain how I fit into my story.
I do not pretend to speak for other riders, but a story is not a story without someone to see it, and it is true that, like my son, I love the commentary and awareness that I am swinging a leg over a two-wheeled mech-animal that carries with it a romance and mystique as impermeably American as John Coltrane and as complex and commanding as Gatsby.
Every time I pull my gloves and helmet on and swing my right leg over the seat, Nick Harris’ British accent rasps into my cerebrum and informs the world in time and space entire that a Loner and Rebel in Black Leather is let loose upon the globe. Beware. One hundred three horsepower, thousands of immaculately timed, tightly contained explosions a minute, a drive chain that could chop a leg off, and a whole sackful of arrogance lacking any self-regulation or introspection are riding through your neighborhood on two wheels looking for something to rebel against.
A dialogue
Mildred: Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?
Johnny: Whaddya got?[7]
A True Motorcycle Story
Yugoslavia, August, 1983
Like the motorcycle they had ridden in on, they were gorgeous and slim, built for speed. Their bodies encased in bright, skin-tight racing leathers, sexy and sleek, were curved and their faces tanned and glowing a beautiful nut-brown. Their dark eyes flashed, and their teeth were bright behind their confident lovers’ grins. Their hair, glossy, dark, and abundantly curly tumbled from beneath their helmets, pulled this way and that by the wind and glinting with vigorous health in the sun.
Dismounting, the woman flung a casually perfect leg over the seat and stood, hip cocked to one side, and hung her helmet on the bike. She, with all her curves, strode away, careless of the power she held over me in all my hopeless, nameless longing and, not sparing even the tiniest glance in my direction, headed towards the cinderblock bunker that slightly resembled the restroom where my girlfriend was moaning miserably from food poisoning. But the man, easily and objectively her masculine equal in physical beauty, threw me a wide and cocky grin as he followed her long legs across the parking lot.
It may have been my own poor circumstances, my hazy finances, my insecurities or my naïvely unshakeable faith in my own ability to survive and to thrive, and a girlfriend throwing up from food poisoning in this violently hot, dusty roadside rest-stop in the southern Yugoslavian summer of 1983, but it certainly seemed as though everything around us, the sun and sky, the few towering clouds, the dust kicked up by the endless stream of traffic roaring by, the wind itself, all of it existed at that moment because of them, and that amazing blue and white motorcycle sinuously gleaming in front of me seemed an inextricable part of them.
They were so casual in the way they’d alighted from the machine, presenting as a single entity, existing outside the bounds of entropy, clearly designed to create a longing, and unavoidably aware of the sharp gulf that yawned between my own miserable, homeless, dusty, and purposeless self and the gorgeous majesty of Them. The way they casually swung their legs over the seat and off the bike struck me as profoundly romantic, and I sensed Camus sneaking up behind me and whispering seductively of happiness and meaning and of how I might find both once I find myself on two wheels.
In the end, I write my story afresh at the beginning and end of every ride when I mount, and again when I dismount, observed by any, all, or just myself. It doesn’t matter because, like Sisyphus, I have constructed my own meaning.
Give me the lonely, tiny, understated, super-heated romance of the mount and dismount any day. Like all the words, the beginnings and endings, the transitions and curves between Here and There, without them, there would be no story to tell, and no ears to hear and Camus’ options one and two would be all we would have left. Every novel needs a reader, every song needs ears, the wild cry of babies and birds can only strike the bell of our hearts if they are heard. The mounting and dismounting, the late apexing, the throbbing, red motorcycle, and the twist of the wrist that propels me into my future; these are how I compose the story of the life in which I also take part. In this way I am forever in the myth-building phase of my existence, because myth both points to and lights the way. Myth is also how I both make sense of the world around me and how I find my place in it. My bike, my son, and I—we revolt. We say all the words.
Notes
[1] Ted Bishop, Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books (London: W.W. Norton & Co, 2007), 170.
[2] Albert Camus, “Summer in Algiers,” Nuptials, in Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 91.
[3] Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 17.
[4] Ibid, 63.
[5] Ibid, 13.
[6] Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, directed by Tim Burton (1985; Burbank, CA: Warner Brothers).
[7] The Wild One, directed by László Benedek (1953; Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures).
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