Bike Odyssey 2014 – Day 7, contd. – With One Giant Bound…

…We were free. The weather suddenly relented, and we were once more underway, out of North Carolina towards Tennessee, where the storm caught up with us again, and I experienced my first hailstorm while aboard a bike, the hail rattling and banging and bouncing off the frame and the engine and my helmet. We kept going, and 220 often exhilarating miles later we reached that elusive campsite at Raccoon Mountain, outside Chattanooga, TN.

Joe is not only a fine and devoted cook but a miraculous one. A visit to a nearby Walmarts, where we staggered around a little woozily, provided the basics; then Joe produced, in the pleasantly sordid surroundings of the campsite and our own grime and weariness, a meal of steak and potatoes and salad glorious enough to please the demanding nostrils of Olympus. It was 10:30 by the time we’d eaten; 11 pm now; Joe is snoring happily; I’m less sure, with a still very noisy Memorial Day campground crowd making a rumpus all around me, when or whether I’ll sleep. It hardly matters: I had a remarkable day’s work, on the bike. Not biking work, but writing work. In the space of 15 minutes the whole of my next, alarmingly extensive project arrived, complete enough to leave only the details to be filled in (at length!). The project is a 1500-page novel (this much I knew, but it was all I knew) consisting, it transpires, of 5 300-page narratives, interleaved at first, and increasingly interwoven as the narrative proceeds; all five stories take place in different epochs and geographies distant from each other, but they start to bleed into each other as the work approaches a climax, much as memory, dream and reality bleed into each other in Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’; all are concerned, like most stories that possess me, with the commission, detection and (perhaps) punishment of crimes, and all are concerned with the ways in which violence inhabits a culture – the 5 cultures are, in turn, American, Roman, Elizabethan, my old stomping ground post-World-War-Two Europe, and a space probe, in the future; more specifically, the 5 tales share an investigation of the return of the repressed. The 50 chapters of the book (whose name is Where Every Stranger is a Ghost), ten chapters for each thread, will also be 50 radio plays, to be recorded once a week between summer 2016 and summer 2017, in and for (I hope!) the radio station where I currently host a Saturday show. Two days ago the opening chapter arrived in my head unprompted, with a link to a 2nd chapter. Motorbike travel requires intense concentration, which in turn sets free the dreaming mind. Today the entire weave of the work opened before me. None of this is of my doing, except insofar as I have petitioned the Muse, for fifty years, for her daily blessing.