Allan Hunter

Ever since I put up the picture of my ancient FN motorcycle (coming up for its 100^th birthday next year) I’ve had questions about why a man who writes on literature, the spirit, and the psyche would be interested in motorcycles.  Shouldn’t I be more like Nabokov, who collected butterflies, or Henry James, who loved antiques? Those who write tend to equate motorcycles with Harley-riding beer-swilling Hell’s Angels or with road rockets of a very sleek modern and Japanese look.  It’s a natural enough association.  It just doesn’t happen to be correct. One look at the FN will tell you that.

So let me explain.

As a young man in England I grew up needing transportation, the cheaper the better.  Since at that time I couldn’t get a car license, even if I could have afforded a car, until aged 18 or so, well… it had to be the cheaper-to-buy, cheaper-to-run two wheeled option.

In those days I could buy a working bike of a decent size and dating from about 1940 for $10.

This meant I had to be able to do a certain amount of repair work along the way.  So I learned , mostly beside the road, when something malfunctioned.

Traveling became a bit hit and miss, and it was always an adventure.  Sitting in a car travel had usually meant mental vacuousness, a mere case of this many minutes until I arrived at wherever it was I was destined to arrive, whereupon my life could start again.  This was different.

And what I learned as I repaired old and worn-out machinery was that after a long day of reading, of wrestling with concepts and ideas, it was immensely restful to work with my hands.  It became a form of meditation as I problem solved, a way to drop myself into another world of detail, facts, technique, and sequences that had to be followed precisely. Old, neglected mechanisms had to be treated with love, understood.  In a world that was more interested in throwing away items that were no longer fashionable I felt like an archaeologist at times, revaluing the trash of bygone eras. From an abstract world I was forced into a practical world.  It was as good as a vacation in a foreign land.

This balance of mind and body, head and hands, led me to consider how important it is to be able to utilize both aspects of one’s self.  Now, if I have a writing problem about how to put a particular thought into form, and if I feel stuck, I may just take a break and go and fiddle with some piece of machinery that’s been on my workbench for a while.  I find that in my time away from the bench my Unconscious has been working, unobtrusively, and I can now find the solution I need as to why the particular item won’t work.  And while I’m dismantling and reassembling I keep paper handy, because I know I’m going to find ideas bubbling up that will help me solve the writing problem I’ve just walked away from.  The solutions don’t all arrive quickly, though.  Sometimes I have to let my mind have enough freedom so it can tell me what I need to do.

As a result my early drafts are sometimes smeared with the greasy residue of my other hobby.  The 'ink-stained wretches' of the eighteenth century would understand.

Wallace Stevens (I think it was) said that when writing a poem the truth sometimes depended upon a walk around the lake.  I don't have a lake handy.  For me, sometimes it depends upon making a cup of tea; and sometimes it depends upon picking up a wrench.

When I’m restoring I find that I can slip into a state of immense concentration.  Hours slip away.  And my mind does what it needs to while my hands are busy. Nabokov found butterflies fulfilled roughly the same function for him.  Perhaps it’s not what you do that matters (for what ever hobby chooses you, make no mistake, it chooses you) but rather what it does to you as you are engaged in it that we need to be alert to.

My kind of technology -  my 1931 Matchless motorcycle.

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