Blog 206 St Médard de Guiziérés to Montmorillon

16th May

Reality resists classification which is exactly what this journey is all about. I'm sprinting across France, Belgium and The Netherlands to finish in Amsterdam.

I will soon start writing the book of the journey. The writing will be nothing like the blog. This body of work is just an aide memoire to what happened these past 9 months; notation for what I did every day.

Let's go back to my research notes: for example; Sixty years ago, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and multiplied Marilyn Monroe screen-prints exposed modern repetition as an ideal of mindlessness – an inescapable capitalist pattern ingrained in "oversaturated modes of production and consumption that distract and overwhelm while nurturing an irreducible sense of modern apathy." My repetition is my daily riding.

Question: How many times is too many?

Answer: As many as it takes to get where I need to be.

Repetition is a complex phenomenon but simple to do: it can deepen or hollow out experiences depending on how it's deployed and blogs highlight the lightweight phenomena of an otherwise deeper thinking and rational view. Repeated ad libitum anything shocking quickly becomes commonplace. Aware of the risk, good artists try not to repeat themselves; instead they strive to constantly reinvent. From Friedrich Nietzsche to Søren Kierkegaard and many other modern thinkers have dwelled extensively on the all-pervasive pacifying powers of unwitting repetitiveness. In this way, every day I ride my bike, much the same way as the previous day and likewise the day ahead. The shock of the new quickly melts into the air.

And if wealth for example is one thing we can all do without, it is exactly the accumulation of it that stops you from doing exactly what you really want to do. Isn't that the greatest irony?

Each day I am getting tired, by evening after riding 130 miles, after each week when I ride over 900 miles, exhaustion creeps into every part of my body and mind. I suddenly can no longer think so let me give you 4 quotes from the Russian author Dostoyevsky

Quote # 1    I gave up caring about anything, and all the problems disappeared.

Quote # 2    The secret of man's being is not only to live but to have something to live for.

Quote # 3    Only through suffering can we find ourselves

Quote # 4    People are terribly afraid of being ridiculous, and are miserable because of it

Map of the Day

Postcard from Home

More sheep sent to me by Dr Caroline, probably getting their tails clipped