Motorcycle Explorer February 2015 Issue 4 | Page 108

I
’ m in India. Only a few days after having left Henrietta, my father, and a familiar life in
England, I had crossed Europe and arrived in the city of Sambalpur, where I checked into
a hotel. Again, with unerring regularity, I was motorcycling around the world. One would
think I’d get bored, but the quickness of the tempo kept me on top of everything that
had to get done. Yet once again a new journey was to drag me across new layers of
uncertainty. After a week of riding fast on a motorcycle, I now lay in the room I had
transported myself to, the shabby walls encrusted with thick blotchy paint, fighting back
waves of excitement and fear. The cream-coloured telephone and Formica-topped
television made a pretence at being welcoming, when in reality the phone didn’t work
and the rest of the furnishings looked tragic and second hand. The place depressed me
with its morbid dinginess; it was a room that looked as if it had died. I was to sleep here
for five hours while cockroaches crept from under the bed to rub against where the
walls met the floor, their backs scratching along the peeling wallpaper. I was so tired and
needed a long sleep but there wasn’t time, trapped in this journey between wanting to
be home and needing to be far away. Travelling for me was a craving; it was an escape
from somewhere but not always to a place where I wanted to go. Perhaps more than
anything it was the abrupt change it wrought that I needed most, a reality shift so swift it
genuinely shook how I felt about my ordinary life. I knew that wherever you are, for that
moment the landscape, the dust, the way you turn grey like the road, can become a part
of you. There were times too when it was important to block this osmotic process before
your body started to absorb, in some uncontrollable way, too much change too quickly -
but how to temper the impact? Somehow you had to stop your body being irradiated
with too much realism in case something rotten began to set in.
I had parked the bike in the hotel car park and the engine was still warm when my head
hit the pillow. I dreamt of a time before I had been overwhelmed by the endlessness of
the desert - any desert. Heat had the trick of making clocks stand still for travellers.
During the day the shimmering air dilated the sharpness of the horizon, and the will to
voyage was slowed by the coolness of the shadows. There was brownness everywhere
you looked. Brown mountains and brown trees, brown people with brown dogs and
brownness in the baked air.
The year was 1997, and I wrote a book about that journey entitled Fastest Man Around
the World. It attempted - with mixed success - a style of self-narration which included an
assumed identity. It allowed for a conversation to take place, which given the speed of
the journey wasn’t in reality practical. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,
Robert Pirsig introduces his own fictitious character, Phaedrus, to reflect an ethical
discourse about the nature of quality. Pirsig received mixed reviews, ranging from
academics who accused him of being philosophically naïve and pretentious, even
downright ridiculous, to those commending his genius. Like Sartre’s Nausea, De
Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, the Bible, or more recently Stephen Hawking’s A Brief
History of Time, Pirsig’s novel was one of those books everyone bought but not
everyone read. My own interest struggled with his proclamations about the essence of
quality – my limitations, not his - yet he inspired me to use a previous identity
simultaneously with my present persona. In his reconstruction of Phaedrus – his former
personality before treatment for insanity - he had this to say: “…but who was the old
personality whom they had known and presumed I was a continuation of? This was my