Blog 189 Ringgold to Knoxville

15th April

In psychology, there are five popular theories of forgetting; trace decay theory, displacement theory, retrieval theory, interference theory, and the consolidation theory of forgetting...I'll take the first two possibilities to suggest that a week after cycling through Knoxville I can't remember ever being there. What I do and where I go orbits around me for that day only then subsequent days move in to shift the perspective. The book of this journey will be much more than the sum of these daily parts. Journeys start with dreams, night dreams and those day-dreams when we look out of the window watching clouds reconstruct the sky.

How can you forget how much God loves America

When in time, tired from the weight of those dreams I start to build the beginning of a journey. I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. and when I look at the map, my route follows I-75 though the trees as I head towards New York it's as if I rode in a dreamless sleep pedalling through the day. How many times do we hear how 'in dreams you can achieve everything,' but that's related to the simple decay of not remembering. Knoxville, was I there? What did it look like. There are things that have to be forgotten if you want to go on living but forgetting a place I'd cycled through so soon.

The Sameness of Things

It's that man again; he reminds me of what I want to say.

“It takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything - love, convictions, faith, history - no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides on the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter.”

Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

So if I'm forgetting does that make it harder for me to understand what this journey is all about? Well, it's about slight passing pain - the cycling, and of no real consequence much of which I have forgotten; slight pain that becomes an emptiness and so quickly - did I really do that, could I? Did I ever really want to in the beginning or was it something I had to do. I think the beauty of the journey is not in remembering but like everything, it quickly becomes a feeling. It's often just enough not to know where you are or have passed through, but it's the sense of the moment that follows on; that flag, that enquiring look that says to me, 'I see what you do but I don't understand.'

And there I stand, apart, aside from the curse of a humdrum existence which for me would be like a living death.

Map of the Day