Cyclokairos

I must stop reading T C Boyle. It’s not that he doesn’t write well – he does (he’s a favourite novelist, in fact). It’s that he has a habit of feeding my dread – the existential kind. I read ‘After the Plague’ around the time it was first published; must be going on twenty years. A collection of short stories, ‘Rust’ was the one that really fed The Fear. A contemplation of aging, it gnawed, and still does. Recollections of what one was once capable of, but no more. Deterioration towards the inevitable. Not that I don’t keep giving it a go. I do attempt to fill my life with kairos, rich experience, shunning the position of the nihilist and taking that of the existentialist, in fact, the absurdist – that although the universe lacks meaning it is worth creating meaning, even if it is ridiculous to do so. Bike stuff Chris. I came here for the bike stuff. I know, I know, but even if re-reading this blathering weeks later causes me to wince, it feels necessary in trying to figure it all out (even when there’s no fundamental meaning to the “it”).

T C Boyle’s latest novel, ‘Blue Skies’, is a current read. The Fear is being fed once more. Not the limitations of me being here that DNA glycation, oxidative stress, and telomere shortening impose, but the other stuff, you know, environmental collapse: extreme weather events, insect apocalypse, those things. As 21st century humans it’s easy to forget we’re a part of nature as much as the rest. We evolved within it, but it is so easy to live removed from it. Little else though makes me feel more alive than to be in it: pottering around the garden, cycling out and about in the sticks.

Mid-June and nature is going full pelt. Hogweed-towers edging the lanes.

Dog rose in flower.

Brambles being pollinated, blackberries to come.

There’s a been a lengthy dry and hot spell, and once-muddy bridleways are now baked dry.

The grass tracks near Norton Lindsey firm too.

Nice riding, but is this prolonged spell of heat and no rain normal? Is what I take to be the natural state of things in this part of the world to remain? Is the lifecycle of the typical flora and fauna shifting? This came in the post:

There’s comment on improved numbers of sightings for some species, but my eyes more often that not alight on the opposite: “Overall, Common Blue numbers were down by 20 – 60%…..”, “It was not a good year for the Small Blue…”, “It was another poor year for the Peacock…” and so on.

Jenny Odell ends ‘On Time’ with observations at a local tidal lagoon, “In the centre of me a muscle was beating, a series of creation events ongoing for now that I hadn’t started and wouldn’t stop. Under the rush of the water, I felt my heartbeats as words. They were saying what they always had: Again. Again. Again.” Live goes on, the flow continues. But is the flow changing? Will what was once commonplace continue to diminish? And crucially, am I facing up to the one true horror of ever drier and hotter summers: no practical justification for riding bikes with mudguards.