Previously, I talked about T.S Eliot and his love of tracklocross, particularly in the poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky, we speed on bikes
Like a patient etherised upon a table we dream of single speed;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted tracks,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in bivvy tents
And sawdust restaurants with pale ales:
Skids that follow like a seditious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our skids mark.
In the room, the women come and go
Talking of gear ratios.
Like all great trackocross riders, he renounced his American citizenship after he discovered how much better Britain was for riding his bike offroad. I should warn you now, this post is back in my old style of zero research, and I am simply digging about in my rusty brain, so please be aware that nothing I say may be correct.
After the above love song, Eliot composed what many feel to be his ultimate tale of cycling, The Waste Land. Much like tracklocross, The Waste Land is considered difficult, rather than the accessible and rewarding experience that it truly is. Our school system is again trying to collude with Big Bike in its conspiracies to stop you having fun.
Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi super birotam incurvatam, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω.
Like all good rides, The Waste Land is split into five parts. It begins with The Bidon of the Dead, a look at the hardship of leaving the house to go out on a cycle in spring, a time when you never know what the world will throw at you. It quickly, though, moves on to the most important part of cycling: having a coffee.
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
From, here he moves back to the city of London and deals with the many cycling deaths that have occurred.
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
The second chapter, A Game of Gear Ratios, begins by looking at how Big Bike tries to sell cycling by reimagining Cleopatra. As they say, sex sells; it would be great, though, if the bike trade stopped with the Carry on Cleo level influencers. Eliot was way ahead of his time by being against Instagram influencers. Amazingly, Big Bike treats this bit as their idea of high class, which just shows that if you throw in a bit of Shakespeare, you can fool anyone into believing you are intelligent.
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent
The woman is then compared to Philomela, a woman who was raped by her brother-in-law and then had her tongue cut out to stop her talking. I’m sure this can be a statement about our current porn habits. I honestly have no jokes or witticisms for this section; it is brutal. The woman is ultimately unable to share her inner thoughts; yes, she had aesthetic value, but it is ultimately meaningless. I said it was brutal, and this shows up well in modern advertising; it looks pretty but ultimately tells us nothing.
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