Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I just finished this book.  It's the first book I've finished digitally, I'm more of a paper and ink reader, but I thought I'd give this a go on my phablet.

The narrative is based on a man and his son doing a cross country trip on a motorcycle in the 1970s.  The story focuses on that quiet mind you experience as you make miles on two wheels.  While some people's mind wander while riding, the narrator of this hefty tome starts with an examination of the basic mechanics of motorcycle maintenance but quickly wanders into a philosophical deconstruction of Greek philosophy and its effects on Western thinking.

If you've got a background in philosophy it's fairly easy to follow, if you don't you're probably going to be wondering what the hell is going on in places.

The book is full of some real gems in terms of how we approach basic mechanics as well as life in general, but it can get pretty full of itself as well.

To further complicate things the author is battling with his alter-ego as he recovers from electroshock

therapy.  No, this isn't an easy read, though it's worth it if you can get through it.

Last year I read Shopclass as Soulcraft, which I'd recommend as a much more accessible read if you're interested in getting philosophical through the lens of motorbiking.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a classic, and it has attained a kind of cult status in philosophy and motorcycle literature.  I'd recommend reading Crawford before you take a run at Pirsig.  Reading a review of Western philosophy wouldn't hurt either.

Mechanical Empathy & Human Expression

I've enjoyed machines since I was a child.  My father is a mechanic and engineer and his fearless approach to maintaining, repairing and operating machines amazed and intrigued me.  With that fascination I always found it easy to empathize with machines, not necessarily in the anthropomorphic give them a name and talk to them kind of way many people do, but to suggest a machine has personality expressed in how it operates isn't strange to me.

In the last post I talked about how a MotoGP rider was a much larger piece of the equation than a Formula 1 driver is.  That expression of skill through machinery is what interests me about motorsport, the high tech frills are just that, frills.  What I want to do this morning (it's 5am and the world is silent and dark, the people are all asleep and the mental static is at a minimum) is to unpack what machines are and why they are worthy of empathy.

Machines are our thoughts given substance.  When I get on the Ninja and go for a ride I'm experiencing a confluence of thinking, dozens of engineers and designers who pieced together a rolling sculpture that best expresses their ideas of efficiency, beauty and inter-connectivity.  You seldom get to experience the mind of another person is so intimate a way as you do when operating a machine that they have created.  It's little wonder that many engineers and designers feel that the mechanical devices they produce are like their children.

You can approach this from a couple of interesting reads.  Matt Crawford's Shop Class As Soulcraft focuses on the understanding you develop from laying hands on your machine yourself.  As a treatise on the value of hands-on mechanical experience and the development of that mechanical sympathy Guy Martin mentions above, it is priceless.

Melissa Holbrook-Pierson's The Man Who Would Stop At Nothing comes at it from the riding experience and how motorcycles in particular can reach into you and animate you in a way that many other machines cannot.

A deeply personal look
at how motorcycling
can emotionally
charge you

There is a virtue in motorcycles that is also why so many people don't partake of them.  They demand so many inputs from the rider that they make driving a car seem like running a washing machine; merely the operation of an appliance.  This is so endemic to driving a car that every opportunity to interact with the vehicle is being diminished, from manual transmissions to parking.  In a few years many will flock to self driven vehicles and become forever passengers.  The vast majority of people have little interest in how a machine works or how to express themselves through it - perhaps because they have nothing to express.

The Naked Bike, in all
its glory

That motorcycles are so demanding is a virtue from the point of view of a mechanical empath.  The more interaction you have with the machine, the more possible it is to inhabit it with human expression.  There is something pure in the mechanical simplicity of the motorcycle, it is bare, naked, not covered in sheet metal designed to conceal and contrive; its function is obvious.

That this naked machine demands so much from its rider creates a giddy kind of connection in those willing and able to make it.  This machine connects to your hands, feet and whole body.  It demands inputs from every one of your limbs as well as your entire mass.  Being naked on the road, the rider's mind isn't isolated from their activity and is as engaged as their physical body.  Inhabiting a machine this completely is an intoxifying experience.

The thrill of inhabiting a machine isn't limited to motorcycles, though they are one of the purest expressions I've found.  The satisfaction in fixing, maintaining or operating any machine well offers some degree of satisfaction.  In inhabiting the machine it empowers us, giving us abilities that would seem magical to non-technological people.  We can cover ground at great speed, communicate across the world with the push of a button, fly, even slip the surly bonds of Earth and touch the sky, but not if we don't inhabit the machines that enable us.  

When machines serve humans instead of enabling them

If we remove ourselves from this equation machines become limitations rather than a means of expression.  The thought of a human being interacting with a responsive, demanding and complex machine offers us a future that is bursting with opportunity for growth.  The alternative is stagnation and ignorance.  You can guess which approach appeals to a consumerist culture intent on selling to as many people as possible.

That a machine should place demands on us isn't a bad thing, especially if it leads to a nuanced awareness of our own limitations.  The machine that can overextend you, challenge you, stress you, is a machine that can teach you something.  We fool ourselves into stagnation when we design machines that do more and ask less from us.

When I see human expression through a machine, the machine becomes a magnifying glass for their achievement, how can that not deserve empathy?  The only time it wouldn't is when the human is a pointless addition to the equation. When this happens machines become oppressive rather than enabling forces in our lives.

Too Far Gone

Bike Magazine had an excerpt from Todd Blubaugh's Too Far Gone in the last issue.  The excerpt was so moving that I just got up and purchased the book on Amazon.

My favourite motorcycle reads have been the philosophical ones that dig deep.  The 'I rode very far every day' travel trips don't always get to the why's of the trip, often getting stuck in the trivial details.  The result ends up feeling like a travel advertisement rather than showing the real power of a journey.

Alternately, you have the books that aim directly at motorcycle culture but end up being dimensionless descriptions of it, hyping up the excitement of the ride without making any attempt to understand why people would take these risks and identify with such a divisive cultural icon.  

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was one of the first books to go deep, showing the depths to which some motorcyclists dive when out in the wind.  Anything by Matt Crawford does the same thing for mechanics in general, although he comes from a place of motorbikes.  Deep thoughts while flying through time and space on two wheels are kind of the point for me.  If I just wanted to go fast, I'd do it in a car or a plane.  There is something elemental about motorcycling that zens you into the moment.  The immediacy of it makes you honest.

After reading a few pages of excerpts in BIKE, I'm looking forward to reading not so much about Todd's travels but about his insights.  The motorcycle isn't the point, but it's one of the best vehicles for taking you to eureka that I've found, and I'm more willing to follow an author to those moments of enlightenment on two wheels because I believe in the medium.

Party Time_3LG from Todd Blubaugh on Vimeo.

They're all trying to kill me, even when they're not

It's a sunny Friday afternoon in April and I'm pootling down a residential street in the town next to mine on my way home from work...

There is a kid, maybe nine or ten years old with a basketball in his hand, standing on the grass on that corner to the left.  A white, ludicrous-sized SUV (maybe a Tahoe?) is in the lane approaching me.  I'm doing about 40km/hr towards this seemingly innocuous scene when the kid (who is looking the other way and hasn't seen me at all) decides to throw the basketball out in the street right in front of the SUV just to see what it'll do.  You could see him standing there doing the math before he chucked the ball.

The Tahoe driver has that vacant I'm-in-a-giant-box-and-don't-need-to-pay-attention look you see in a lot of SUV drivers.  Generally, the larger the box they're in, the less they seem to care what happens outside it.  He suddenly keys in that a basketball is going to hit his precious status symbol, so he swerves out of his lane and right at me, except I'm not there.

A couple of things inform my ESP on the road.  Firstly, Conestoga's Motorcycle Training courses did a great job of getting me to threat assess and prioritize what's going on around me.  For less than the price of a decent helmet you get experts with decades of experience getting you started.  Motorcycle training courses should be mandatory for anyone wanting to ride on the road.  They give you the best chance to survive the often ridiculous circumstances you find yourself in.

The second piece is something that Matt Crawford mentions in one of his books.  He has a mantra he chants when things get dodgy, and I've found that it helps remind you to never, ever depend on the skills or even basic competence of the people driving around you.  When things get sticky Matt mutters in his helmet, "they're all trying to kill me, they're all trying to kill me."  It's the kind of gallows humour that most motorcyclists would find funny, but it's also sadly true.

A few weeks ago a kid made a mistake in school but it was excused as an accident by one teacher because the kid wasn't intentionally trying to hurt anyone.  Another teacher pointed out (rightly I think) that not properly preparing for a task, or doing it half-assed isn't an accident, it's incompetence, and that person's intentions are irrelevant, they are at fault.  The word accident removes blame and makes everyone feel better, it covers all manner of indifference.  No where is this more true than on a motorcycle.  Any experienced motorcyclist will tell you that it doesn't matter if you have right of way when you pull out and get clobbered, or whether the distracted driver that side swiped you while texting shouldn't have been.  You'll loose any physical altercation you have with a car (or a 3 ton Tahoe).  It's on you, the rider, to avoid these idiots.

On a quiet back street in Fergus, Ontario I could very well have ignored the abject stupidity unfolding in front of me or spent my energy assigning blame, but I didn't.  The child's profound ignorance and vicious curiosity (great job with that one parents) along with the Tahoe driver's distracted, indifferent approach to operating a six thousand pound vehicle could have very well ended me (80km/hr closing speeds between two vehicles won't end well for a motorcyclist).  As it was, I'd pulled over to the curb and was stationary as the Tahoe went by in my lane, looking surprised and freaked out that his precious truck almost got hit by a basketball.

I could have gesticulated, but I just stood there at the curb shaking my head as the freaked out driver rolled past.  You're not going to convince someone like that to be better than what they are.  The kid ran out into the street (he still hadn't looked my way), and grabbed his basketball.  I could have talked to him, or eventually his parents, but there'd be little point to that either.  Blame is a waste of time.


Even when they aren't trying, they're all still trying to kill you, keep your head up.

Café racer

I've been getting a handle on café racer culture recently.  A good place to start is the documentary below available on youtube:

A motorcycle phenomenon that combines DIY backyard mechanics, customization, restoration, links to British post war culture and a focus on pure two wheeling?  I'm in!  When you also factor in the old RAF inspired bike gear café racing only gets better.


What first got me thinking about it was It's Better In The Wind, a beautifully shot and music themed short art piece about friends on their classic café racers.  As a mood piece it captured a lot of the gritty romanticism in motorcycling.



Last summer I was reading Shopclass As Soulcraft, and in it Matt Crawford described motorcycling as 'a beautiful war', which captured the risk and reward beautifully.  That book is mind expanding stuff written by a guy who walked away from academia and the magical thinking of the thought economy to open his own independent bike repair shop.  It's a must read, change your life kind of book that will make you want to get your hands busy again; just the sort of thing that racer building encourages.

I've tried my hand at restoring old cars or just keeping them on the road, but that tended to be a make it work to get to work kind of situation, lots of stress in that.  This is a hands on project that may very well lapse into a piece of rolling sculpture.  Mechanics, electronics and sculpture? I'm in love with the idea!

So, I'm on the lookout for an old bike that needs to come in out of the cold for the winter, one that's looking for a new lease on life.  It can be rusty and rough, the more it needs changing the more I'll want to change.  The end result will only enhance the feeling of oneness I've already felt with the Ninja.

There are many café racer links that will catch you up online:
http://rustyknuckles.blogspot.ca/2010/03/cafe-racer-magazine.html
http://www.caferacermag.com/
http://www.caferacertv.com/
http://silodrome.com/triumph-cafe-racers/

1964: The 'leather boys' later generation rockers on modded cafe racers

Rocker style, 1950s England

One of the genesis locations for Cafe Racing culture ACE CAFE

The leather jackets, boots and gloves, the helmets and googles, RAF uniforms
were an obvious inspiration for the cafe racer look