Attention and Ideas

After reading Sven Birken's article "The Art of Attention" I was reminded strongly a short story I read several years ago. The story was called "Stationary Bike" by Stephen King and was published again in his recent book Just After Sunset. The short story is about a man named Richard Sifkitz who was told by his doctor that his cholesterol is too high and should begin exercising. The doctor uses and analogy to describe his metabolism as construction crew cleaning out the junk food he is eating. When the metaphorical crew gets tired the junk builds up causing his heart trouble. To combat this Richard buys a stationary bike. He places the bike in his basement facing a wall where he hangs a map of the United States so that he can imagine traveling across the country on his bike as he rides. Richard becomes obsessed, consumed by, the idea of these men cleaning out his arteries and after several of his workouts he paints an eerie fantastical landscape containing the workers in place of the map. While biking Richard falls in to a kind of trance watching the landscape change and the workers move around like a movie. The exercise helps him loose weight but the story takes a bizarre twist when Richard watches one of the workers commit suicide in front of him. Now thoroughly confused and afraid of what is happening, Richard decides to dismantle the bike but finds himself taking one “last ride.”  He is thrown back in to his trance world where his directly confronted by the rest of the crew after nearly being hit by a truck. The crew threatens him, saying he is running their lives by putting them out of a job, and convince him to be less strict on his diet and exercise routine.  Richard then steps back in to reality with little memory of the weird visions he was experienced.

Though the King’s short sort has little to do with actually learning to pay close attention to the details of life or better yet, learning to let our attention be captured, I was struck with the similarities between the two. Richard’s attention was captured by an idea and it consumed him. He became so captured by it that his mind created an entire world around it (even if it was a dark and eerie one).  The idea became his reality.

 

 To quote the movie Inception: “She was possessed by an idea, this one, very simple idea, that changed everything.”  Ideas, as we find out in the movie, are an extremely powerful thing. In Inception Mal kills herself for an idea. In “Stationary Bike” Richard creates a world out of an idea. In Vladimir Nabokov’s short story the boy presumably kills himself over an idea as well. 

I am at an advantage having already read and discussed Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” so will not give any spoilers as to what it can be traced back to. Instead all I will say is that the idea that consumed the poor boy with referential mania is that he wanted “to tear a hole in his world” and fly away.