Freedom? That’s the easy part.
The wind, the engine, the open road, the come-hither horizon: You don’t need to be a crinkle-browed, soft-bottomed theorist to figure out that a motorcycle’s symbolic appeal is based in large measure upon the idea of freedom. A jumpy, muscular, just grab-your-stuff-and-go freedom. A shrugging, unstudied, unfussed-over freedom.
Because a motorcycle seems to deploy its cool liberty with all the disarming casualness of a quarter-inch of ash being flicked from a cigarette.
So: Dig deeper. There must be more to it than that. Lots of things, after all, mean freedom — fast cars, sleek jets, big rockets, nimble sailboats — and they don’t possess even a speck of the reckless, feckless glamor of the motorcycle.
From a fuel-injected anthem such as Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” to the laid-back cinematic exhalation of the 1969 film “Easy Rider”; from a backroads philosophical ramble such as the classic memoir “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (1978) to the crisply understated cool of a TV series such as “Then Came Bronson” (1969-70); from the film “Ghost Rider,” which opened last week, to the forthcoming “The Wild Hogs,” motorcycles long ago burned a one-way track straight into the American psyche.
Even when the works are, or will shortly reveal themselves to be, tediously mediocre — kindly refrain from way-too-easy “slop” puns when referencing “Wild Hogs,” if you please — the fact that a motorcycle purrs anywhere in the vicinity is enough for a film, novel, comic, TV show, poem or ballad to be sideswiped by immortality. No matter how bad it is, the presence of a motorcycle means it will be beloved by somebody. Maybe millions of somebodies.
“Easy Rider” star Dennis Hopper, pitchman for an investment fund targeting Baby Boomers, doesn’t even have to ride a motorcycle to milk its symbolic magic; the TV current ad is all about the winding highway and a perpetually revving engine, regardless.
Motorcycles mean James Dean and Marlon Brando and Steve McQueen. They mean noise and forward momentum. They mean exhaust fumes and attitude. They mean power and passion, with no strings attached. They mean sex, speed, beauty and the constant possibility of messy and appalling death — all of which constitutes an obvious and irresistible cultural come-on.
Motorcycles, in short, may mean too much. They’re too visible a symbol for their own good. They exceed the recommended weight limit of metaphor. They’re such crucial and familiar icons that we tend to shy away from exploring them anymore, because we’re convinced that it has all been said before. You stop noticing what’s right under your nose. It all just seems too simple: Motorcycles equal freedom. Equal expansiveness. Equal rugged individualism. Equal Emerson and Thoreau and Kerouac. Equal a ticket to ride to a new life, a different road, a grander fate.
More than freedom
So it’s more than simple freedom, most likely, and more than the mystical allure of risk, and more than the moody, chip-on-the-shoulder, loner’s sensibility long stapled to motorcycles, that give these machines their designated parking spot in the cultural firmament. Robert Pirsig, author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” the book that launched a thousand cross-country, zigzagging journeys on motorbike In Search of Truth (the cap letters are a must), toyed with the reasons why in the opening pages of his perennially best-selling classic:
“In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.
“On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”
That’s it, at least partly. The freedom is undeniable. But you can escape the frame, too, by walking, and yet a film titled “Ghost Walker” would hardly resonate the way “Ghost Rider” does.
Thinking about motorcycles and why they matter so much is probably best done on a long road trip, but here are a few housebound ruminations:
A motorcycle is a unique synthesis of two hugely important aspects of American thought — Nature and the Machine. Typically, these two show up separately; in fact, they’re virtually antithetical to each other.
Nature is the idea of the pristine and unadorned and starkly pure. It’s the Edenic myth of originality unmarred by pretension. In the 19th Century, Americans watched as the Western frontier vanished in the dusty wake of homesteaders, boomtowns and that subversive little word “development.” Since then, we’ve been awash in our yearnings to return to the “real” world — the one you can touch and smell, the one that’s about dirt and trees and mountains, the one that existed long before shopping malls and telephone poles, back before wadded-up Big Mac wrappers outnumbered pine needles on the forest floor. The pioneer novels of Willa Cather and the river chronicles of Mark Twain are shot through with that longing, with the sense that we’ve left Nature behind in our mad haste to tame and clear-cut and industrialize and leave our crude stamp on the landscape.
The Machine, though, is steel-plated progress and smokestacks and assembly lines and the iron imposition of human will. It’s the bright flurry of red sparks from a welder’s torch.
One, but not the other
Nature and the Machine are not supposed to coexist. They’re supposed to cancel each other out, like a perpetual game of Paper, Scissors, Rock: The Machine smashes Nature; Nature banishes the Machine. You can pick flowers or you can work at a meat-packing plant, but you can’t do both — can you?
Along comes the motorcycle. It combines the tender beauty of Nature with the brutal toughness of the machine. Athwart a motorcycle, you can feel the delicate fingers of the wind, but you can also feel the tremendous power of the engine just barely under your control, like a lunging metal leopard.
A motorcycle is the ideal embodiment of that faint grayish-blue spot on the horizon where the highway meets the sky, where there’s no more distinction between human and machine, just a loud amalgam of artificial power and natural wonder.
The best roads for a motorcyclist, Pirsig writes, connect “nowhere with nowhere.” Ah. Now we’re finally getting somewhere.
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jikeller@tribune.com
