Tim Krabbe - THE RIDER

Bobbling in the seiche of immanent pigments

Tim Krabbé’s book THE RIDER suspends a reader’s disbelief that prose can believably convey the characteristics of a chiefly physical experience – hard cycling, in this case – that is the orchestration of breath, blood, and biochemicals. This is achieved mainly by reducing to a minimum the technical references to bicycling in the book, and by lowering a dense and obscure cloud of interior connectivity upon a reader that makes the text seem like a personal dream one may have had. There are just enough referential details in the prose (race tactics, gearing, colorful descriptions of pain) to allow familiarity with the bicycle race frame from which the fuller sense depends (gnostic querying, Spinozan/Cartesian ontology, reciprocating S/M, drowning in the mind’s daisy-chaining objective correlatives, parallel half-truths, time-travel, and the ever-dissimulating metaphors of processional memory. Striating through this soup are strands of the purest Krabbétry, masqueraded and zippy-mutagenetic, that will perforce remember his novel HET GOUDEN EI (film title: Spoorloos). This may not immediately invoke the international title of the movie that contained the most horrible horror of any cinematic depiction, The Vanishing, in which bicyclists are finally able to convey the real last thoughts of excruciation accompanying the scaling of Mount Ventoux, iterating both being buried alive and the scalping one’s soul takes when trampled by an entirely insouciant and bored Jose Raul Capablanca.

Peter Cummings’ god (in his book BICYCLE CONSCIOUSNESS) renders the cyclist’s blood pink in Denmark and imposes upon mortals the promise of essentiality, but like all other gods, delivers instead a pathetic foundering on the shoals of eternal equivocation. Those who love bicycles are perfectly amenable to the idea of taking their velos into Henry Miller’s café and conversing in such a hearty and gay timbre as his (MY BIKE AND OTHER FRIENDS). Even Krabbé in DE RENNER omits the souplesse that forms the formal redemption of the unhappiness one has inflicted upon innocent paramours, the swing of which oarsmen speak, the endorphistical cocaine bliss of elevating the heroes and knights of the blood’s chemicals, the met him pike hoses of sleep-deprivation, the moments of otherness that accompany the transition from living to dead, and the harmony of rhythm and materiality in the nuptials of cadence and will. Also absent, after a cruel ride, is the animation that is vampire-bled from the rest of the world and its people, paths, and sad ways. A three-dimensional game of memoir (as in the future) will send falling forth the fundamental figures that emerge from abstractions (William Morris’ chrysanthemums), pavements of molasses, waterfalls to climb, or lawn mowers that will not start. Such mirthful departures are the books I eat, moistening the pulp with, let us say, the coffee possessing such a love almost as grand as Audrey had identified in Agent Cooper: Markson, Henry James, Richard Price, Nick Tosches. Eight young Vermont scouts ramble toward a skirmish with eight Georgian scouts in a hayfield outside Vicksburg. Some years after riding Paris-Brest-Paris in 1987 in eighty-seven hours, I finished eleventh in a subsequent edition of the event, a position with which I was surprised and pleased, as I had supposed I might have been fiftieth or seventy-fifth, some two thousand positions better than the 1987 placing, in the dream from which I often like to prefer I have not waked. People process everything that is not oneself, and the imposition for which I feel a probably-confected tenderness speckles across Brittany the semantic and rhetorical character gravities that reside most particularly in novels of Francescan wile. Not least, Andree from Balbec, who leaped across and humiliated the entirety of human history, one lovely summer day, launched as never to land, in quite the way one dreams of flight. English-language bookshops and bookstalls in Paris are rabbitholes. To mothers are we born; archers to remote affectation, the flatted fifth, celestial greens, to woes diseased. Cadence quondam, cadence futuris, the topography and geology of the glacial lakes of upstate New York.

Tim Krabbé immerses himself in a entirely conditional interiority from which Kafka and Poe prohibit his escape. His escape is also prevented by Degas and Brubeck, and the very idea of escape is barred by his selfsame soul ringing at its very best. Riding the Tour de Mont Aigoual in the Cevennes, which is to say, riding in what is sometimes called training, which is to say, riding on any day meaning to go faster, he might have been gliding toward memory or fear, though which it was he could not surely tell. There was no pain beyond the col and no dread or joy he had not known before; all that differentiated time from place was this new melody of hating loves, and the bond a scrap of pavement bore from the sun. He could have been a wheel, and how hath execration come to mimic a vitamin deficiency slaked? Advanced velocity is a choir of exultation that resides in the veins and arteries. Perfect pitch, hissing tires and air disturbed chorally by spokes, calling out to one's receptive mind like a loon on a dark lake.

Innate systems position themselves globally (in some birds), creating the one true church that implicitly obeys, simulates, and becomes northness within. An extra Y chromosome and eight nurses perish in Chicago, and Nicole Barrett becomes by concrete attribution a genuine femme fatale in a Utah convenience store restroom. 1) Some persons integrate only a portion of all available technological advancement, 2) seek a taste of environmental variance chasing elk across the plains and river valleys, 3) hurt themselves just to assure themselves that they’re alive, and 4) kill an elk in some imaginative representative way to astound the girls back at the cave by the fire. A well-named blog notes that STEAMBOATS ARE RUINING EVERYTHING. People move west like lemmings, until they are finally proceeding toward the east. Hunger pangs, sunset dew, and a sore butt rescue reverie from madness by way of induced physicality. They give us chocolate doughnuts, repair for the damage of our vanities, and supply tender buttons. The current saints of the bicycle are the urban punk bike messengers, for whom their velocipede defies materialism and boats them ‘cross raging torrents. A half day’s ride dips into the Pleistocene, Mongols, zootropic discrepancy, thermal conductivity, and aquatic manifestations and facades. Walker Percy: the only treatment for angelism, that is, excessive abstraction of the self from itself, is recovery of the self through ordeal. Let us say: lactic acid, depletion, and wear. How do we know we were here? Because we deposit authority in the only people who can clone our cowardice and give it one more try to mend its feverish and chickenly ways. Bicycles make it possible to be a fundamentalist in a closed universe, for an explicit period of time, in a benign autocracy, without ever quite lapsing into our darksome taste for hegemony. Without the burden of getting out of our skin, the foreign prison cell was damp and mean, and Jean Seberg gave us a Trib and joined me for coffee (then whiskeys) on Avenue Foch. Hydration and respiration make of me a merry jingle. And Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns hinan, and Robert Briffault’s matrilineal source pot. Tim Krabbé mines the vortex of Tim Krabbétry, skipping along elements of the Cevennes, a mortal fig leaf of water, immortally beloved. Literature is fiction, but nothing is not metaphor.

In the memoir THE RIDER, two forces militate against one another. As any cyclist knows, rides of any length have a beginning, middle, and end. Anti-spiritualists like Krabbé also know that rides of any length consist of an only putative duration, during which blends, loops, inversions, and ballparks conspire to fuck time, immersing it mostly in dove sta memora, but also in madeleines, furtive kisses, and aspiration of a fabulous number of stripes. Just past the bars, and just past the forwardmost curve of the front wheel, a periphery of limelight contains all ye shall ever know of the days of your life, and the thing to which it might have seemed you were paying the very most attention – the unraveling of the race – is the first to recede, curated then by instincts too immanent to usefully discuss with oneself. The rider’s calculations were formed in earlier eras, when, not invited to a party, or having heard your pallie tell you she was seen speaking with the chappie stronger and cooler and smarter than yourself, their survival was more awful and consequential than the subsequent years of despair and mediocrity had ever permitted it to forget. Since penny farthings and diamond frames, cycling has defied binary conclusions. Liberty was vaunted, and for the first time, horses’ wills were nullified. Bicyclists could roll down roads into valleys, parallel the rivers, and ride the roads pushed along by gales blowing in one’s own direction, in the same way one remembers a beautiful dream.