Cyclogeography E-Book

Jon Day

• Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 199

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Cyclogeography is an essay about the bicycle in the cultural imagination and a portrait of London written from the saddle. Informed by his years spent as a bicycle courier, Day reflects on the way bicycles connect people with places. Parasitic on the city, couriers have an intimate knowledge of London, and for those who survive the grinding toughness of the job the bicycle can become the only thing holding them together.

Leseprobe

‘Magically good. Jon Day conjures the secret city of the cyclist, revealing himself over the course of his swooping journeys as an astonishing writer, capable of dizzyingly elegant and thrilling flights of thought.’ – Olivia Laing

‘Armchair cycling turns out to be an exquisitely indolent sport – at least when one has in one’s hands a book as choice as Cyclogeography. His style is witty, clear – a delight …With this unmissable book, Jon Day makes his mark.’– Kate Kellaway, Observer

‘Cyclogeography’s magic lies in the quality of the prose and Day’s skill in looping together disparate threads in a way that feels natural … His many literary and philosophical detours make for an interesting ride.’ – John Sunyer, Financial Times

‘Jon Day’s ode to the bicycle takes the reader pillion from petrol-choked city to rolling dale in eloquent prose, which at best pedals in beat to the accompanying landscape.’ – Nicholas Hogg, Independent

‘There’s a gap in travel writing, and Jon Day has just zipped into it – like a bike courier between white van and black cab.’ – Michael Kerr, Telegraph

Jon Day is a writer, academic and cyclist. He worked as a bicycle courier in London for several years, and now teaches English Literature at King’s College London. His essays and reviews have appeared in the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, n+1 and the Guardian. He writes about art for Apollo, and is a regular book critic for the Financial Times and the Telegraph. He is a contributing editor of The Junket, and a 2016 Man Booker Prize judge.

© Clifford Harper. London, January 2013

Jon Day

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CYCLOGEOGRAPHY

Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier

for Dora

Contents

– Title Page –– Dedication –– 1 Prologue –– 2 Circulation –– 3 Cartesian Centaurs –– 4 Race –– 5 Off the Map –– 6 On the Road –– 7 Coda: Breaking Away –– References –– Acknowledgements –– About the Publisher ––Other titles from Notting Hill Editions –– Copyright –

1

– Prologue –

The bicycle is half way between the shoe and the car, and its hybrid nature sets its rider on the margins of all possible surveillance. Its lightness allows the rider to sail past pedestrian eyes and be overlooked by motorized travellers. The cyclist, thus, possesses an extraordinary freedom: invisibility.

– Valeria Luiselli, ‘Manifesto á Velo’

A few years ago, after finishing a degree, I was looking for a new job. I’d tried many: private tutor, mercenary essay-writer for the rich and lazy, barman, gardener, marketing consultant. Three months as a runner at a TV production company were enough of a taste of office life. Days spent tea caddying, photocopying and washing up left me cold. I couldn’t drive, and my bosses told me I needed to learn if I wanted to get ahead in television. I arrived early and left late. Men carrying clipboards with radios strapped to their waists often shouted at me. I couldn’t work the telephone system. I spent my afternoons shredding endless scripts on a temperamental shredder.

The only part of the job I did enjoy was the daily run to the edit suites in Soho, over the river from where I worked, carrying the day’s rushes – heavy blue tapes sheathed in their grey plastic wallets; volatile nitrate film adorned with ‘no smoking’ signs and warning skulls and crossbones; hard drives stuffed with data – which I did by bicycle. Soon I’d volunteer for any job taking me outside the office and across London, the further the better. Going to the archival warehouse to dig out old tapes or embarking on treks across the city for some specific prop became absurdly exhilarating. It was the solitude I valued, the freedom of the outside, the sounds and smells of the street. Soon I gave up my TV job and became a bicycle courier.

I’d grown up in London and had always loved to cycle. My Dutch mother and car-phobic father ensured I learned to ride a bike almost as soon as I could walk. They’d push me along the road by the scruff of my neck, riding beside me and steering me through gaps and around potholes with the delicate touch of puppeteers. The earliest bike I remember cycling under my own steam was a war-era, single speed machine with an iron frame and crumbling rubber grips. It was a faithful conspirator in my early explorations of the local territory. Together we built up our own map of the area – noting the location of a chipped kerbstone that allowed us effortlessly to ramp up onto the pavement; the green car, always parked in the same spot, which shielded our turn from oncoming traffic – charting features that felt as permanent as the roads we travelled over and the buildings we passed on our rounds.

When I became a bicycle courier I found that I loved cycling for my living. I loved the exhilaration of pedalling quickly through the city, flowing between stationary cars or weaving through the lines of moving traffic. I loved the mindlessness of the job, the absolute focus on the body in movement, the absence of office politics and cubicle-induced anxiety. I loved the blissful, annihilating exhaustion at the end of a day’s work, the dead sleep haunted only by memories of the bicycle. By night I dreamt of half-remembered topographies, each point-to-point run connecting in an ever-expanding series. Sensations of falling were transformed into forward motion. Hypnogogic jerks, those juddery twitches that occur on the edges of deep sleep, were smoothed out into circular pedal-strokes of the legs.

Most of all I loved learning what London taxi drivers call ‘the Knowledge’: the intimate litany of street-names and business addresses that constitutes a private map of the city, parallel to that contained within the A–Z but written on the brain, read by leg and eye. After a while the trade routes became entrenched. By bike a new and unfamiliar London unveiled itself, a London dominated by road surfaces and traffic, a London composed of loading bays and stand-by spots, characterised by a sense of movement and flow. As a cyclist you inhabit the gaps between traffic, and as a courier you profit from what Jonathan Raban calls, in Soft City, ‘the slack in the metropolitan economy’. The job allows you access to a subterranean world of cavernous loading bays and car parks burrowed away underground. It’s the iceberg theory of architecture. Another city exists alongside the London most people know, and cycle couriers are privy to this backstage city, with its post rooms manned by neon-tabarded security guards, its goods lifts, its secret, parallel infrastructures.

Big commercial buildings can feel like miniature city-states, and to a cycle courier the conflict between public and private, between the rules of the road and those of corporate estates, is constantly apparent. The glee with which the police hunt down and fine couriers who jump red lights (while letting off their commuting counterparts) is well known. But the guardians of private land are just as intolerant. In the biggest developments access for couriers is restricted to the cargo bays. Hulking ramps and doors must be navigated, pictures are taken, ID cards printed off stating your name, company, purpose, and privileges.

Sometimes, proclamations of ownership are local and specific, as in the small ‘Polite Notices’, which read as anything but, informing you that ‘Bicycles locked to these railings will be removed’. Elsewhere the limits of ownership spill out beyond the railings. Representatives of the ‘West End Company’ patrol Oxford Street in red hats, giving tourists directions and admonishing cyclists who ride on the pavements. Some large commercial estates, such as Devonshire Square off Bishopsgate in EC2, have their own private police force. Anyone who isn’t obviously an office worker, snatching a lunchtime sandwich in the open air, is moved on. Running is forbidden.

I worked as a bicycle courier for three years, on and off, as I bided my time in between stretches back at university and tried to work out what to do with my life. I loved every moment of it. Or perhaps love is the wrong word. For after a while on the bike, doing this work, you simply need to carry on to feel normal. You feel ill if you don’t work five days on the bike, anxious and twitchy when you take your feet off the pedals. You can’t sleep without the weariness provided by the miles.

A bicycle courier’s experience of London is formed by the demands and rhythms of capitalist circuits. Couriers occupy a contained space, the boundaries of which are fluid, established by the economic footprint of what our controllers – intermediaries between client and courier who take booked jobs and issue them over the radio to riders – contemptuously refer to as the ‘push-bike circuit’. The rough borders of the circuit run round practical limits described by the confluence of physical capacity and the post-code system. Wapping, populated by exiles from Fleet Street, forms the eastern hub; Knightsbridge marks the Western front. There’s usually not enough short-hop work to justify sending bicycles much further. The circuit doesn’t penetrate far south. Occasionally I’d dash over the river, but, other than the odd outlying raid on Peckham or Stockwell, would never go much further south than Elephant and Castle. Mostly I’d skim along Southwark Street, working the edge of the river which was once the greatest trade route in London but is now lined only with the husks of trade: warehouses and docks repurposed as office blocks and yuppie housing. To the North, the foothills of Camden, Highgate and Hampstead are the outer limits. There isn’t much work above the economic tree line.

Cycling through the city everyday makes you learn not only its abstract properties – street names, business addresses, the locations in which policemen like to lurk and wait to catch you running red lights – but what it feels like to ride down a particular road in the wet (mapping the placement of slippery drain covers that wait to catch you out on sharp turns) or the dry; the specific sequence of lights at a much-crossed junction. As a courier you learn to inhabit the places in between the pickups and the drops. You learn the secret smells of the city: summer’s burnt metallic tang; the sweetness of petrol; the earthy comfort of freshly laid tarmac. Some parts of London have their own smells, like olfactory postcodes. The Shisha bars on Edgeware road haze the area with sweet smoke; the mineral tang of Billingsgate fish market wafts over the Isle of Dogs.

Riding a bike for a living means you learn to read the road too, calculating routes, anticipating snarl-ups, dancing round potholes almost unconsciously. It is an activity that forces you to think of the city in literary terms. With its signs and painted hieroglyphics the road is an encyclopaedia of movement: drive here, walk here, park here, no stopping here. Look down and the tarmac tells you what to do. Traffic lights regulate the entire mechanism like enormous clocks, telling you when to move and when to stop. Textures too are important: kerbstones separate walkers from the flow of traffic; knobbled paving alerts the blind to a coming crossing. Very soon the rhythms of the street become internalised. Traffic lights and vehicle indicators, the wails of sirens and car alarms, warn you to get out of the way or lure you on. Eventually you come to feel part of the city’s secret networks, at one with its hidden rivers and its dead-letter drops, at one remove from its anonymous crowds of commuters.

Alongside riding London I began to read it. I always kept a book in my bag for the slow days, and usually I sought out books that offered commentaries on my own working environment: anecdotal accounts of the city, or novels set in London, or histories of the city. Cycling itself felt like a form of interpretation – a mode of engaging with the urban text – and I also wanted to understand the strange and distinct attraction to place that I’d discovered by riding my bicycle, so I read about cycling too: biographies of the heroes of road racing, histories of the grand cycling Tours.

London is generally thought of as a walker’s city. It’s been written about from the perspective of the rambler and the stroller, but never much from the saddle. This lack represents a greater gap in travel writing, which is so often associated with shoe rather than saddle leather. Though there are ‘a lot of walker-poets’, as Paul Fournel – member of the avant-garde literary group Oulipo, keen cyclist and author of Need for the Bike, the best work of cyclophilosophy I know – has argued, the bicycle is less well represented as a literary vehicle. ‘Cyclist-poets are less numerous’ than walking poets, writes Fournel:

but that’s due to inattentiveness, since the bike is a good place to work for a writer. First, he can sit down; then he’s surrounded by windy silence, which airs out the brain and is favorable to meditation; finally, he produces with his legs a fair number of different rhythms, which are so much music to verse and prose.

I wondered if this oversight had something to do with the history of the bike. In Wanderlust, her wonderful history of pedestrianism, Rebecca Solnit argues that the act of walking for its own sake – and the tradition of writing about walking for its own sake – coincided with the rise of European Romanticism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idealised walk, in which leisured individuals could embark on journeys of their own volition, accompanied by bodies that were allies rather than traitors or burdens, and over terrain they were allowed free access to, was, Solnit says, the first example of a kind of ideological or philosophical pedestrianism which coincided with the rise of the city. For Rousseau walking was a tool that could be used to measure yourself against the natural world, a world that was coming into keener focus as urban life began to dominate human experience. You found your place within it by beating its bounds.

For the Romantics walking was an act of authorship too, a way of writing yourself onto the landscape and thus claiming it anew. Walking was democratic. Wordsworth privileged the act of walking not only because, as he said, his mind ‘only worked’ with his legs, but because as an act it created the paths and rights-of-way that would eventually be etched onto maps or fossilised in tarmac.

With the formation of the modern city the Romantic walker was transformed into the urban flâneur, the solitary (and generally male) ‘stroller’ who haunted nineteenth-century Paris, getting lost amongst its boulevards and arcades and documenting his experiences as he went. Yet unlike the Romantic walker the flâneur was a decadent figure, a leisured dandy who, freed from the demands of the rat-race, was able to spend his days at one remove from the mob, losing himself in the crowds of the city as he travelled amongst them. For him the city became reconfigured as a spectacle: buildings could be as sublime as mountains; streets were abstracted into riverine torrents. The rural walker became urbanised. In ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, an urtext of flânerie, Charles Baudelaire described ‘Monsieur G.’, a figure based on the artist Constantin Guys, the archetypal and original flâneur. As Baudelaire wrote:

He marvels at the eternal beauty and the amazing harmony of life in the capital cities, a harmony so providentially maintained amid the turmoil of human freedom. He gazes upon the landscapes of the great cities – landscapes of stone, caressed by the mist or buffeted by the sun.

The flâneur treated both the city and its inhabitants as inanimate objects to be viewed disinterestedly, as though through glass (Walter Benjamin would base his Arcades Project, a sacred text for contemporary flâneurs, on the idea that modern urban life was best exemplified by the figure of the window shopper). But the figure of the flâneur also celebrated the subversiveness of walking, politicising pedestrianism (especially in cities which were increasingly hostile to walkers) and celebrating the slow, the meandering, and the directionless over the concerted migrations of capitalism. The undirected walk challenged the timetable. The stroll was opposed to the commute. Flânerie represented a way of confronting the endless flow of people who thronged the city’s streets twice a day, regular as clockwork, on their ways to and from work. On foot, the flâneur avoided the official channels of movement – the circulatory networks of tram and bus and train – choosing instead to inhabit the hinterlands and marginal areas of the city. For Benjamin the leisured status of the flâneur was a kind of political statement also. In The Arcades Project he argued that ‘the idleness of the flâneur is a demonstration against the division of labour’ and that ‘basic to flânerie is the idea that the fruits of idleness are more precious than the fruits of labour.’

By the 1950s, these radical pedestrian impulses had been channelled into the loosely defined notion of ‘psychogeography’, a term coined by the sociologist Guy Debord and derived from his investigations with the Situationist Internationale, an avant-garde revolutionary group which organised various subversive happenings in mid-century Paris. Psychogeography was both a political call to arms and an urban thesis. It described both a mode of existing within the city and a methodology for researching it. At the heart of psychogeography was the practice of what Debord called the dérive, the ‘drift’, which he defined in his essay ‘Theory of the Dérive’ as ‘a technique of passage through varied ambiances’. ‘In a dérive,’ Debord wrote:

one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.

For Debord, the dérive was a journey conducted on a whim, but it wasn’t quite aimless. Although they may have been undirected, these walks were constrained in other ways: governed by arbitrary rubrics imposed in order to generate unlooked for surprises. The Situationists used maps of Paris to navigate Berlin, they followed psychologically resonant ambiences in the urban fabric, they drew crude symbols onto their maps of the city and went out to walk and document the routes those symbols described. Walking was the favoured mode of transport. From these journeys it was hoped might emerge, writes the archmagus of London psychogeography, the writer Iain Sinclair, ‘dynamic shapes, with ambitions to achieve a life of their own, quite independent of their supposed author. Railway to pub to hospital: trace the line on the map. These botched runes, burnt into the script in the heat of creation, offer an alternative reading – a subterranean, preconscious text capable of divination and prophecy.’

Removed from the ‘usual motives for movement’ the psychogeographer was free to get lost in the stimulating Gesamtkunstwerk of the modern city, losing him or herself in the process, becoming one with tarmac and glass and steel. These journeys were neither work nor leisure, therefore, but psychic research. Debord imagined a time when people could be liberated from their intelligences and sensibilities so as to be released as aimless particles in urban space, to be blown where they may by the winds of association, set free to hunt for the hidden ‘fissures in the urban network’ as they went. In doing so they could, he thought, transcend the linearity of both the map and of the commute, uncovering a realm of unconsciously registered connections and ambiences as they went.

Walking was good enough for Debord, but the bike, which came to maturity alongside the modern city, and which would seem to have been an obvious vehicle for him to make use of, was nowhere to be seen in the writings of the psychogeographers. In her ‘Manifesto á Velo’, the Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli recognises this lapse, arguing that the bicycle should be reclaimed from the single-issue fanatics – from the cycle couriers, commuters, rickshaw drivers and, above all, lycra-clad racing cyclists, who so often give it a bad name – and used as a tool for a purer form of urban exploration. ‘Riding a bicycle is one of the few street activities that can still be thought of as an end in itself,’ she writes:

The person who distinguishes himself from that purposeful crowd by conceiving it as such should be called a cycleur. And that person – who has discovered cycling to be an occupation with no interest in ultimate outcomes – knows he possesses a strange freedom which can only be compared with that of thinking or writing.

The longer I worked as a bicycle courier, the more I realised that the freedom of the cycleur – a pedalling equivalent of the flâneur – was implicit in the story of the bicycle itself. The history of cycling is the history of the modern landscape. Since their invention in the mid-Victorian era, bicycles have been associated with freedom, allowing previously immobile groups of people to become self-propelled and socially mobile, to discover the landscapes they inhabit. It has been said that the bicycle did more for the gene pool than the railways, allowing – perhaps for the first time in human history – the poor to leave their villages and mix with their near-neighbours. The bike was the first technology of mass mobilisation. It is a nostalgic technology but it is also forward-looking, utopian and hybrid, tempered both by the backward glances of a pastoral cycling tradition and by the mad futurist visions of F. T. Marinetti, Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien. The bike is a technology of Man fused with machine, but also of machine communing with landscape.

As Luiselli and Fournel argue, the lack of representation of the bicycle in travel writing is surprising, then, especially as there does seem to be something inherently literary about the act of cycling. Both cycling and writing are self-directed activities. If you stop working, you stop moving. The verb ‘to spin’ used to refer to the making of thread from fibre: spinning yarn on a wheel. Later it was applied to the motion of the wheel itself, and eventually the metaphor came full circle, describing the way in which stories themselves are told: spinning a yarn, stitching together a series of observations into one continuous, unbroken narrative. Cycling, like writing, forces you to think not just in terms of individual steps but in terms of conjunctions, routes and structures: how am I to get from here to there? How exactly will I navigate this particular snarl of metal and rubber and steel and chromium? How will I get to the end?

The rhythms of movement provided by cycling seem perfectly suited to the writer’s need to notice. At bicycle-speed your eyes focus on a single scene as you glide past, and for a few seconds you can isolate one incident before you’re rolled onward. Then on to the next. The saccades of the eye’s-snatch-and-focus synchronise with your velocity, flicking from rubbish bin to lamppost, from bus swerving out in front of you to pedestrian about to cross the road behind. The bicycle provides a road’s-eye view midway between the ponderous bus-gaze and the start/stop stress of the car. Driving, in the city at any rate, is binary, reverential, distancing. Cycling flows, converting static and isolated glimpses of the city into a moving, zoetropic flicker of life.

Finally, cycling is instinctive, making you feel a landscape rather than merely seeing it. By bike your environment writes itself onto your body. ‘Certain configurations of field, road, weather and smell,’ writes the historian Graham Robb, ‘imprint themselves on the cycling brain with inexplicable clarity and return sometimes years later to pose their nebulous questions. A bicycle unrolls a 360-degree panorama of the land, allows the rider to register its gradual changes in gear ratios and muscle tension, and makes it hard to miss a single inch of it, from the tyre-lacerating suburbs of Paris to the Mistral-blasted plains of Provence.’