While motorcycling has a lot to do with the specific, technical aspects of your bike— its design and engineering, how you maintain it, care for it, and tune it for top performance— these aspects of motorcycling are important only because they lead to the personal, cultural, and nearly spiritual dimensions that motorcycle riding offer.
To ride a motorcycle is to embark on not only a journey through the world, but also a journey into the self. The speed at which one travels through space often is at an inverse relation to the speed at which one simultaneously travels into the self. The faster you go, often the slower and more meandering is the journey you take within yourself. There is nothing that breeds deep focus and internal equilibrium than speed. As John Berger, the acclaimed author, painter, and avid motorcyclist once wrote, “In the tunnel of speed there is also a kind of silence.”
“In the tunnel of speed there is also a kind of silence.” -John Berger
Yes, we like to talk about bikes, their specs and engineering, air-fuel ratios, lambda calculations, and Brettschneider equations, but that’s not what we really ride for. We ride to attain states of being we cannot attain off of our bike. Again Berger helps us understand the mysterious, nearly numinous experience of motorcycling and how it affects us when he writes,
One is all the time surrounded by risk. The thing about riding a bike is that you ride the risk, so it’s no longer unknown or shadowy. Another thing is that when you’re riding a bike the time between a decision and the effect of that decision – and both depend on your whole body – is the briefest possible. You decide something, and it happens, and at that moment you’re touching something which is very close to existential freedom.
After a few hours of driving across the countryside, you feel you have left behind more than the towns and villages you’ve been through. You’ve left behind certain familiar constraints. You feel less terrestrial than when you set out. Supposing at this moment you stop, cut the engine, take off your helmet, stretch your back and your neck, and then walk a few paces along the road, into a wood or a field. You look around. There’s nothing spectacular or picturesque. But you’ve stopped, and this already makes the spot special … The point of arrival is unique, and recognizable as such.
Motorcycling is a mysterious confluence of engineering and ecstasy, fuel and focus, the hard facts of physics and the nearly philosophical feeling that we have come— by way of this strange and glorious machine and in some way we have no way of truly understanding— to know ourselves.
Contact us at sales@bridgeanalyzers to learn more about how we can help you care for your strange and glorious machine of grace.
Photos courtesy of Verso Books and Il Sole 24 Ore