Fixed Wonder

Ok, so after some time away from posting on nerdy stuff, I'm back with some more.

I'm working on a paper about something called the 'politics of emotion' in relation to photography. This is intended as a contribution to my thesis, which centres on the multitude of ways photography (re)configures selfhood, memory, and time - the BIG question is about the ecological import of this reconfiguration.

I have just come across a discussion of wonder that piqued my interest, as I can see how it will be useful to my thesis, but also matters bicycle related. On that note, I am happy to report that I have decided to write a book that will bring most of my academic interests to bear on matters (bi)cyclic. It will be a collection of essays on a host of topics. My working list of chapters looks like this (in no particular order):

1) Bicycle Messengering, Capitalism(s) and Rugged Individuality
2) Fixed Gears and Singlespeeds: Technological Purity in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
3) The Somaesthetics of Speed: Phenomenology, and Time/Space
4) Light vs. Dark Green: Ecology and the Bicycle
5) Self-Fashioning: Sculpting Mind and Body
6) Embodied Knowledge: Bio-feedback, Zen, and Yoga
7) Philanthropy and the Bicycle Industry
8) The Wilderness Movement and Mountain Bike Access
9) Bicycle Communities: Cyberspace and the 'Real World'
10) Downhill and its Discontents: Disability and Charity

I am presently 'working on the book,' since I have decided to write the first chapter (on messengering) as the term paper for my Media and Urban Life course. My prof is totally into it, and keen to read other sections, which is awesome and should be a huge help and asset. This paper will look at the documentary, 'Pedal" that I discussed in short last month. There is enough to talk about to form a whole book on that alone, but I'll start small.

This stuff about messengering links me back to where I began, on wonder. Explaining the appeal of fixed gear riding to Danielle's brother over x-mas time, I recall saying that, for me, it is an experience. I meant that riding fixed made me more aware of what I was doing, I am engaged in a way that differs in degree from the 'experience' of riding a regular coasting bike. I think this attentive, conscious experience fades to a degree as riding fixed becomes one's point of reference, but I think one must always retain a degree of consciousness not required on coasting bikes. In my reading, I encountered the following discussion of wonder, which better articulates my sentiment:

“Descartes’ 'The Passions of the Sou'l describes ‘wonder’ as the first and primary emotion, as it is about being surprised by that which is before us (Descartes 1985:350). As he elaborates:
When our first encounter with some object surprises us and we find it novel, or very different from what we formerly knew or from what we supposed it ought to be, this causes us to wonder and to be astonished at it. Since all this may happen before we know whether or not the object is beneficial to us, I regard wonder as the first of all the passions. (Descartes 1985: 350)
Wonder here seems premised on ‘first-ness’: the object that appears before the subject is encountered for the first time, or as if for the first time. It is hence a departure from ordinary experience; or, by implication, the ordinary is not experienced or felt at all. We can relate this non-feeling of ordinariness to the feeling of comfort, as a feeling that one does not feel oneself feel.... Wittgenstein also discusses the ordinary – or, in his terms, the familiar – as that which we do not experience (Wittgenstein 1964: 127). What is ordinary, familiar or usual often resists being perceived by consciousness. It becomes taken for granted, as the background that what we do not even notice, and which allows objects to stand out or stand apart. Wonder is an encounter with an object that one does not recognize; or wonder works to transform the ordinary, which is already recognized, into the extraordinary. As such, wonder expands our field of vision and touch. Wonder is the precondition of the exposure of the subject to the world: we wonder when we are moved by that which we face”

I think fixed gear riding might be considered a practice of continuous wonderment. This might be an overstatement, in that one need not necessarily encounter 'first-ness' while spinning to work on the ol' fixie. But if riding sans freewheel can be characterised as a confrontation and embrace of mortality, this does not imply that it is comfortable. Rather, it is active resistance against the comfort made possible by the freewheel that engenders consiousness. The freewheeling bicycle allows that which has the potential to be noticed as novel to fade into the haze of background ordinary, taken for granted. Thus, I would assert that the fixed gear bicycle is a technology of presence, of embodied mindfulness.