A lone cyclist, disappearing into a wild landscape--brave, free, engaged
with the world. It's the kind of image that sells bikes, magazines,
clothing; a romantic image that all cyclists aspire to. For cycling is
an activity deeply and intimately involved with landscape. The bicycle
allows us to explore, to engage with wild places, and return in time for
dinner. It also allows us to investigate our surroundings closer to
home.
It is an activity which, for most of us, happens at a speed that allows
a great deal of voyeurism. We peer into houses and shops, gardens and
farmyards, fields, and hedgerows. What we see may be familiar or alien,
but for the creative mind it is always stimulating. Yet--unlike with
walking or swimming--the connection between cycling and creativity has
only been explored in fragments.
On a bicycle, as one is exposed to sights--new or otherwise, through
chance or purposeful searching--the repetitive physical actions of
cycling work on the mind in a different way to those of walking. The
shape of a long ride can become the shape of a novel; the atmosphere
imbued by the weather, the hills, the physical exertion, can all
influence a writer's tone. Our memories have a dialogue with the
landscape; we remember rides through the landscape, and the landscape
shapes our thinking. And for writer Paul Maunder, cycling and creativity
have always been interlinked.
In The Wind on Your Back, Maunder takes a journey from the most dense
centers of population to the wild places; starting from cycling in a
major city, then moving through suburbia, the edgelands at the periphery
of the city, then into the managed and pastoral farmland, and beyond to
the sublime mountains.
He explores the experience and history of cycling in these different
types of place, and seeks to understand how cycling has played a role in
his own creative life as well as that of other cyclist-artists,
musicians, photographers, writers, and painters. Played out against the
backdrop of the British countryside, and drawing of elements of
psychogeography and human geography, Maunder seeks to understand the way
the outside world interacts with the creative mind, and the way our
surroundings help to shape who we are.
