A question was raised this week and referred to the desk: if there isn't an audience watching a man doing superman on a bicycle, does the man do the superman on a bicycle?

For readers who have not seen one, the superman is performed on a straightaway. The rider lies flat along the top tube, arms out ahead, legs trailing behind, and the bicycle rolls on underneath him while he holds the shape. It is done where the path is straight, which is also where the people are. It is not done in a driveway.

The question has a lineage. In 1710 Bishop Berkeley proposed that to be is to be perceived, and the version everyone knows — the tree falling in the forest — was invented later to make him easier to argue with. The paper notes the difference between the tree and the man. A tree that falls with nobody there has lost nothing; it was not falling for anyone. A superman is for someone. Take the someone away and the question is not whether it happened but what it was.

The desk referred the matter to Sister Compassion of Plum Village, who is a wedge of gouda, and asked her to fathom it. A fathom is six feet. To take a sounding you drop a weighted line and wait for it to stop, and the lead carries a plug of tallow that brings up a sample of the bottom, so that you know not only how deep it is but what it is made of.

She dropped the line.

What came up was interbeing, which is the Plum Village teaching that nothing is by itself — the sheet of paper contains the cloud that rained on the tree it was cut from, and the logger, and the logger's breakfast. The superman contains the watcher. This is not a poetic claim; it is in the shape. The arms go forward because something is ahead to be reached toward, and the legs go back because someone is behind to see the line of them. Remove the watcher and the arms and legs stay where they are, but they are now a man lying on a bicycle, which is a thing that happens for reasons, none of them this one.

So the answer is that he does the superman and nobody sees it, and it is still the superman, because the watcher is in it whether or not the watcher came. He is doing it for a person who is not there. That is most of what people do.

Sister Compassion said this and then said nothing further, which is the teaching. The teaching of the gouda is held at Whale Academy and was not consulted.

The paper went out to the straightaway to check. Nobody was there.

Flubber Pangs is at the Enormous Question desk.