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I am riding with speed on the rail trail to Warburton in the late afternoon at the tail end of summer. It is oppressively hot. Not far off 4pm. As the sun is still high, the landscape is luminous, but I am unable to take it all in. The roof of my mouth feels like sandpaper. My t-shirt is heavy with sweat. My bike tyres struggle for traction on the bright white gravel trail. I feel like Iām riding in an open-air sauna.
About halfway to Warburton, I stop at Yarra Junction to buy several cans of beer, a miniature bottle of Fireball, a bag of crisps, and green grapes.
On the final stretch, the shade begins to reclaim the trail, and I feel my body settle. I find a bench with a view looking out over the main street and the mountains that are greenish blue and radiant in the falling light.
I drink the beer and eat the crisps and grapes, finishing with a fireball and Guinness combination. It is after six and the golden hour is fast approaching. When I get back on my bike for the return journey, I am lighter. Iām loose.
I almost float along the downhill stretch to Millgrove, a former timber-milling town. The water from the Yarra sparkles beneath a canopy of trees on my right. On the stretch from Millgrove to Yarra Junction, I realise that Iām right in the middle of the golden hour. The last rays of sunlight cast everything in an ethereal glow. Vast green paddocks surround the trail, where heat-weary cows call to one another and small flocks of sheep graze under the watch of a solitary alpaca. As I pass a dam that mirrors the darkening blue sky, I sense the weight of a mountain range on my right. There is no one else on this path. It must be about 27 degrees. Everything feels boundless and beatific.
I turn on my portable speaker and set it to a playlist I made some years ago. As I ride along a flat stretch of the bike trail, Weird Fishes by Radiohead spills into the warm air around me. I realise I am pedalling in sync with it. When Thom Yorke begins to sing, I almost skip the track. I donāt want to think about death. But I feel myself falling into the song. Deep into it. I remember a recent conversation I had with a friend about depression and the inherent futility of life. As each line of the song passes before me, I think of that conversation and how much this song meant to me during the long COVID lockdown.
In the deepest ocean
The bottom of the sea
Your eyes they turn me
Iād be crazy not to follow
Follow you to the edge
And fall off
Listening to this song, I find myself trying to make sense of what I am feeling. To āfollow you to the edge,ā to āfall off,ā is to imagine what it would be like to escape what Schopenhauer described as the Will: an endless striving that keeps us restless, desiring and unsatisfied. This has not disappeared in our current neoliberal culture where struggle is internalised as individual failure and wellbeing is measured through productivity and performance, often in crude economic terms such as Gross Domestic Product. Over the summer, Iāve spoken with friends who are struggling. They see themselves as the exception. The failure feels personal. Although our current culture has not invented this Will, it has organised, measured and monetised it. What was once metaphysical is now institutional.
As Byung-Chul Han puts it, we live in a āburnout societyā in which individuals measure themselves against ideals of constant improvement that remain just out of reach. The injunction is constant: āJust do it!ā The image is familiar: laptop open in a cafĆ©, expensive coffee in one hand, podcast in our ears, getting ahead. Even rest is absorbed into this logic as recovery, mindfulness and self-care become ways of sustaining output. What is lost in the process is the capacity for immersion itself. The reflective and spiritual dimensions of experience are reduced to therapy or dismissed altogether, leaving a restless form of life in which striving is constant and rarely questioned.
From this perspective, the undertow I feel in the music is countercultural. Itās not ambitious. Itās not progressive. Itās not self-improving. It is the temptation to stop striving altogether.
As I glide towards the encroaching darkness of the twilight, my legs slowly move in time with the song. I feel the Will begin to loosen its grip. My human needs are no longer part of the equation: hunger, career, status, anxiety, none of it exists. The sky shifts from gold to bronzed charcoal. The mountains recede into shadow.
The lyrics of Weird Fishes paint a picture but ultimately itās the voice and music that pulls me in. The guitarist Ed OāBrienās high counterpoint cuts through Thomās voice just as the meaning of the song starts to reveal itself. The keyboards descend into deep tones. The guitars spill and splatter. The tempo quickens. Then Thom sings in his lowest register:
Yeah I, Iāll hit the bottom
Hit the bottom and escape
Escape
I think of the friend I spoke to. Would they recognise this shift? Would they hear āhit the bottomā not as collapse, but as release? Not suicide, but a loosening of the Willās grip. A desire to stop striving, to reach the edge of things and simply let go.
Most of us recognise this sensation: when colour saturates the landscape and seems to pulse with its own metabolism. The Van Gogh effect. In his paintings we see not representation but immersion, as if inner and outer life collapse into one another. This is where I am now. There is only motion, music and the deep colours of the twilight.
I reach a long wooden bridge that crosses the lowlands of Woori Yallock. No roads. No houses. Only paddocks and the bubbling river below.
The song fades. I stop and step off the bike. Itās Friday night. I am alone. Far from outdoor tables on congested city streets and packed pubs. I stand on the wooden bridge beneath a crescent moon. I feel both immense and insignificant, intimately connected to everything that surrounds me.
In religious language, something must be relinquished before connection can be experienced. Dante must lose himself in the dark wood. Faust must abandon the sterility of his study. Christ must endure rejection before resurrection.
But what did I relinquish? A Friday night? Companionship? Comfort? This is a modest form of lostness, but the two-hour ride to Warburton in oppressive heat is inseparable from the revelatory return. The connection comes through exertion and temporary dislocation.
We do not live in a singular material dimension, though our secular economic culture often pretends that we do. Human beings have always lived in multiple dimensions at the same time. Even when doing something as uneventful as a bike ride.
Think about the many ways in which I could describe this bike ride to Warburton: one, that I rode there and back; two, that I endured heat and fatigue; three, the intensity of the changing light; four, the brief encounters along the trail.
And then there is what I will call the fifth dimension, something that rarely enters normal conversation and is difficult to convey. We hesitate to call it spiritual, but that is what it is. Itās the moment when the flaming intensity of life begins to loosen the grip of the Will, so that we are no longer organising the world but are immersed in it.
The most meaningful and paradoxically life-affirming part of my ride occurred in this fifth dimension. To leave it out of life would be disingenuous. What shifted was not my circumstances, but my sense of what matters. The demand to strive no longer feels self-evident.
When this dimension is ignored, the Will turns destructive. It is recruited, harnessed and kept permanently in motion in our burnout society, ceaselessly urging us to be more productive. It is recognisable in the heightened anxiety and depression I have witnessed in those around me. Itās something I often feel myself.
In this sense, the ride is not about getting from A to B. Instead, it provides a way to subvert the Will and temporarily ignore our cultural need to succeed. I found a dimension where the Will was given rhythm and the darkness was inhabited in an elemental manner.
The fifth dimension does not remove us from life. It returns us to it, but without the constant demand to measure, optimise and perform. It makes it possible to move through the world with others, not as competitors or isolated individuals, but as participants in something shared and immediate.
For a brief stretch of that ride, nothing needed to be improved or achieved. The Will fell silent. And in that silence, the world did not disappear. It became more real.