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The Bicycle & Us

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We don't need to slide past the mysterious veils time trails in her wake to a point before the human diaspora out of Africa; we don't need to unravel mitochondrial DNA or compare haplogroups; and we don't need to page through history books half-eaten by woodboring beetles in order to find touchstones which can connect us across oceans, continents, and experience.

(Gorey 7)
A touchstone like *insert dramatic pause here* THE BICYCLE!

The bicycle is a pretty excellent invention. After some interesting iterations—namely the dandy horse and velocipede—this modern two-wheeled pedal-driven machine took the 19th century by storm. Its efficiency, convenient size, and reasonable price tag have contributed to making the bicycle the most widely used form of transportation around the globe (Keoppel 63). 

My point here is that when someone says the word 'bicycle' in whatever the local language is, a two-wheeled machine powered by pedals is the object we'll imagine. We may each have a million tiny memories, associations, and feelings about that object; but it isn't parallel memories that are important here. Instead, the bike is the small and glowing island to which we may all build bridges using our separate memories. On the island, we can nod our heads at one another and smile, none of us need speak the same language, because a bike is a bike.

Unless it's a metaphor for revolution.

In Marjane Satrapi's critically acclaimed graphic novel Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, the bicycle is just that: a metaphor for a revolution which must move forward or fall over. With this single object, Satrapi names both what is familiar and what is foreign to my life experience. Clearly, as children Satrapi and I each had a bicycle. We both understood the unspoken laws of physics which either kept us speeding breezily along or earned us skinned shins and elbows. But for me, the highest level of emotion that I associated with the bicycle was born of the movie E.T., or of one of my favorite books, The Epileptic Bicycle, by Edward Gorey which is featured at the top of this post. Satrapi's emotive connection to the bicycle is righteous and passionate and born of something altogether ...foreign.

The bridge that I build to that island of understanding doesn't look like yours. Maybe you have pink and lavender streamers flying from your handlebars. Maybe your have a large metal basket above your back wheel that you use to carry your french horn home. It doesn't really matter as long as our bridge gets us to the island.

(Satrapi 10)

Works Cited

Gory, Edward. The Epileptic Bicycle. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997.

Hayes, Sophie. "Persepolis Reliefs." Iran Odyssey Day 9: Shiraz (Persepolis), 9 April 2016. https://pompei79.wordpress.com/2016/04/09/iran-odyssey-day-9-shiraz/.

Keoppel, Dan. "Flight of the Pigeon." Bicycling, vol. 48, no. 1, Jan.-Feb. 2007, pp. 60-66.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. Pantheon Books, 2003.

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