The surface of the Earth is covered with overlapping racetracks. Take the wrong turn, & a jockey is likely to find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, sometimes not even on the continent they started off on. & often lost from sight, until a convenient cave opening allows the invisible to regain some visibility, even if in a parched & foreign land.
What people see is the title, not the subject. & the subject contradicts the title. “I was inspired,” said Magritte. “The subject to be painted: a bicycle on a cigar.” Or to put it even more bluntly, a bicycle riding roughshod over another object — no state of grace in that. Ex- cept . . .The objects float, & perhaps a belief hovers that the laws of gravity are defied when things are in a state of grace. Which brings in Simone Weill, who wrote: “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.” ‘Analogous to’ is the escape clause that allows St. Thomas Aquinas to come on board & point out that grace builds upon, not contradicts, nature. Then, once all parties are on stage, lined up like ten pins in a state of grace, Magritte reappears, wearing his bowl- er hat, & with a solid verbal cast, scatters the skittles with his addendum: “A bike sometimes runs over a cigar down in the street.” No gravity, no grace inherent.
This what we set out attempting to do, the catching of a bird in flight. So fast, so hard though. Requires practice, patience, per- sistence. Means starting in one domain, which, if we fail with its mode of manual dexterity, must, then, move ahead to another, leaving some familiar forms be- hind. Ironic, though, since many of those are classed as futuristic, but the intention must be there to move forward, to invent the fu- ture or re-invent it before our one arrives. Observation: the painter on the road, bowler-hatted but yet to become Mr. Everyman, still in the future. But the pre- sent striding on toward the peaks & villages. & the past, Vincent van Gogh. The Road to Tarascon.
