AKA: A Genealogy of the Saddle
Artist publication for Beyond Words – Book Works/Freedom Festival, Hull
Watch out for the bump lads! The quintette bicycle pumps along the flat low lying road. Richard is hard on them, wrapped inside their slipstream. He is cosy in his labour. They are travelling dangerously fast. A local cycle club pulls over, wondering at how this huge machine with its team of five furiously whirling men might negotiate the approaching rise.
I arrive at the end of the race. My arrival marks the beginning of another journey. I have not ridden a bicycle for a decade, so I do not race. Taking it easy, as I was instructed, does not however come easily. I must learn how to ride a bicycle once more, although it is said that one does not forget. Certain physical memories are like riding a bicycle.
I am looking for a body of evidence. Within this body we receive names. Names will locate the clues. Clues thread their way across the city. Names, clues, and cities; these are the means by which this invisible moment of a noun opens the body.
Within the limbs of this body, which cannot yet be opened, there is an ache.
The memories are locked down, closed up, they are folded away, and thus they are invisible. The ache of invisible memory inside the ache of an invisible limb: This might be a definition of a city.
A ceaseless wandering in an impenetrable mask; we dredge for a story, and sometimes ancestors are pieced together, pulled from obscurity so as to rise again, a living memory. I find repeated catastrophe in the stories. There are terrible endings which are never so terrible as to crush a story into extinction. The story continues and yet it cannot be heard. Catastrophe and celebration, trauma and blessing; rolling beneath the wheels of this race I find our urgent spiralling is an excellent mode of staying still.
