HERMES ON TWO WHEELS - Kevin Wehr

Cassandra Castillo

My friend Kate (Our Kate) has lived in Manhattan for thirty years, to which I attribute her ceaseless migraines and her myriad and metastasizing allergies, but she has a thousand friends and a thousand people love her, and soon she’ll come into a retirement package, so for the present, she leaves the Great City only on the weekends, for bucolic settings in Connecticut, most particularly, the exquisite milieu of Stonington.

She is the sort of person who will have honestly come by her right to contemn and execrate the bicycle couriers who have suddenly frightened her many times and have run over her sweet toes, but I recall that as a college student, she loved to see the scruffy kids in Ithaca cadging coins on the Commons, and even the bums picking up discarded butts, as signifiers of autochthonous and transgressive liberty (intuitively aware that her colleagues being milled through the university were forfeiting their qualifications for even an approximation of true bohemianism).

Kevin Wehr is a professor of Sociology and a former bicycle messenger who has intelligently explicated the culture of urban couriers, relating particularly to their oppositionalism, outlaw status, risk-taking, tribalism, punk-formalism, and general remove from the social arrangement. Wehr claims for himself a few especially elucidating words, including “effervescence,” “liminal,” and “valorization.” These imputations elevate the grungy couriers to a level of virtuosity that the proficiency of their cycling demands. One might sociologically analogize couriers to Paris Apaches or gypsies, who are expert at minimizing the visible manifestation of their malfeasance.

Those with eyes to see will detect within their deep memory a numinous recognition of the messenger’s allure, a form of metaphor that can remind them that if they were not quite altogether capable of repudiating their 44th floor monotony and buying a fixie, they were among the few who were at least capable of appreciating truly the seductive spell and charisma of the wild and rebellious cyclists.

Empathy, like memory, can be perfected, with practice, training, and sublimely heightened intention. Many Ithacans will have savored the no-longer-strange grocery store frisson of turning over the tomatoes to see which might be bruised while standing next to a monk from the Dalai Lama’s Namgyal Monastery (a Victorian house on North Aurora Street.) He stands, a placid, voiceless, and bald Tibetan in flowing carmine robes (handing over his store-discount card). And in his breath-cloud and presence one presumes a sense that your tomato neighbor spends hours in the very deepest of repose and concentration; unlike, shall we say, thyself. There are reflective persons in New York City who, on their errands, like the colporteurs of medieval eras who paused atop a mountain pass to experience stillness, stand in one spot and watch New York and its bits and pieces swirl in its hurricane. Yet exceeding even those ferocious winds are the bike messengers, each become alive as “locomotion” and savage ferocity itself. The cyclists look like big black trains steaming across the 19th Century far mid-western American plains, storming through the oceans of grazing buffalos.

In transcendental universalism, observing the bike-messenger pictured above, the accomplished empath and intrinsic dharma-bum experiences time-travel and transubstantiation, converts the fleeting aperçu into the alchemy of blood nerves and breath, and becomes (for a time) the iron horse.