It starts with the slightly awkward heave — leg up and over the seat, feet locating the stirrups — and the indrawn breath that says ‘Let’s go.’ This is a new discipline for me, this stationary bike, and I make sure to pace myself. I tip from side to side, easily and rhythmically, with a hint of a pulse, my movements mechanical at first, each slight shift of the vista in front of me tied to the downstroke of my foot on the pedal. After a while it becomes mildly hypnotic, not that I recognise this, though at some point I do register that time has blurred, that two or more minutes have clicked off on the digital counter without my noticing — I’ve been too caught up in whatever is piping through the wire in my ear, or gotten completely fixated on something I’m looking at through one or the other of the two windows. And what do I see out there? Not much. Everything.
Looking is oddly different on the stationary bike. Before I sat on this machine, before the business with the hip, I walked. All the time, miles every day, and it was like I had my looking with me on a leash. That was why I walked, a big part of it anyway. I loved the feeling of the moving eye. The neighbourhood streets were mostly always the same, so I used to pretend my gaze was a lens fixed on a rolling cart, a camera dolly. I would try to walk as evenly as I could so that I could film everything I was passing. And this, for some reason, allowed me to see it differently, put things into a new perspective. It’s similar to that other game I like to play. Make a box shape with both hands using thumb and index fingers. Look through, click. There in the little box — or the walking Steadicam — is what you normally see, along with the idea of seeing what you normally see. Which makes it completely different. And this, I’m finding, is what happens when I get myself up on the seat and start to pedal. Continue reading
Sources
- Sven Birkerts in Aeon
- Image: Theracycle Blog
Sven Birkerts is the director of the writing seminars at Bennington College in Vermont.