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.

Proust in Raleigh

It is not widely known that Marcel Proust spent the war year of 1913 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Perhaps the place seemed - somewhat peculiar to him? So far as is known, the epically expansive writer and belletrist committed to paper not a single line describing his experiences there, or its unique functional ability to recapture some past or other. The feeling I have long-harbored in some backwater of my literary memory – relating to the fact that no Proust scholar or literary historian has ever made much of his passage there in the Carolina piedmont - is one of amazement. His genteel abode in Raleigh is well-known now, and it is a simple matter to imagine gracious teas on the veranda, caressed by the fragrances of jonquils and dogwoods.

You will forgive me for interrupting? Have you ever heard Victor Sangiorgio play Stravinsky’s Tango, For Piano? When you finish your Belgian waffle and café, you may wish to go into the Music Room and proceed to delight yourself immeasurably by playing the piece - on vinyl.

One might compile a list of painterly scenes from In Search of Lost Time that have never made their way onto film, foremost the Balbec beach scamp who both rudely and stylishly hopped over an old man in repose, and the following scene from Swann’s Way, as translated in turn by Scott Moncrieff and Lydia Davis.

“Marcel” has been matured by years of his close reading of what it felt like to realize he was becoming a writer, and by the eminent victory of Capital over Labor that had quite recently taken the form of the millions and millions of persons brought to death by the Great War. It is subsequent to these events that he is writing as if he were the boy subsumed into the electric zipzap that the scene describes, his marvelous conversion into the pure energy of ardor, self, and consciousness. (Predicate: Gilberte.) 3300 pages, over two thousand named characters. Have we not been too distracted by the author’s discovery that gender identity is merely one more means to rebuild emotional constructs in new and improved form?

Proust in Raleigh will have heard the trains at night. Night trains began their run in Philadelphia, and are on their way to the darkest pit of Minus-hell. Even as a neurasthenic who rarely left Oakwood, he will have remarked the black faces ubiquitous, and the midsummer humidity he can only have called opressif. Doubtless he had carried with him his habit of trying to retire to sleep shortly after sunrise. For a long time [in his life] he had a hard time falling asleep. There are thousands of oaks in Oakwood, Raleigh: massive botanical engines doing what they will with oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and other sorts of chemistry and material ghosts. The long quiet period before dawn is the moistest hour, conducive of mental and emotional stillness, a sort of manufactory of sole-self-soul, as the undifferentiated mind plays its peaceable games with its own infinitely fecund memory-maker.

Far from Paris, he will have been able to suppose that I arrived in Raleigh in 1977, after my thirty years of lakes and hills Upstate. After Cazenovia and Skaneateles and Aurora and Cooperstown, we had not known so many houses could be made of red brick, or that the earth itself was sand and clay unbound. Peace and Person. In the late autumn, oak leaves accumulate and gather like oceanside sand dunes. Brown snowdrifts of leaves, so unlike the indiscriminate congregations of leaves in the Bois, which he cannot have failed to see. I often spent the night with my girlfriend, at her home across from the Oakwood Cemetery; a little brook formed the path of the side-winding street. I worked at Rex Hospital, then on Wade Avenue – I was doing my residency there in Pulmonology, or I was a parking lot attendant – and I had to be at work at 6 A.M. [My specialty was hemoptysis, which, crazily, ten years later I was to suffer halfway to easeful death; these rhythmic rhymes used to be known as “coincidences”; sometimes parking patrons would emerge from the hospital utterly wracked with weeping, in the first new moments of having been tortured by the devastation that they have lost their beloved spouse of forty years, or child of seven years of age, and we would charge them 35 cents an hour for the time they on our prized homeland had parked their car.] I rode my bicycle everywhere those years, and did not own a car until my third year in town. In the dripping darkness of the streetlamps, five o’clock in the morning, there was nothing so smooth as the sound of my bike tires on the pavement of the streets. Many writers have done very good jobs describing this darkling aura of gloomy otherness and charm, and it would probably be useful for you to look up some of these writings, to bathe in the wonderment of those delicious imageries. A quite-isolated yellow-bulb porch light beacons no ship or soul; these moments precede even the squirrels and the first cheepy birdies, and the aroma in which one swims as a fish in a pool, is devoid of automobile emissions, and deeply reminiscent. On an occasion or two, I would see a person walking silently on the sidewalks, and I could only presume the shadow was a colored maid or cook directing herself or himself toward some sleeping plutocrat’s kitchen; but even these other human forms (other than my own, which swooped and sailed on my Bianchi) seemed more a part of the dim scene than a reminder of the teeming mobs that would soon enough trample dear Raleigh with tens of thousands of feet of woe. The silence was curiously amplified by the awareness that a large number of nearby citizens were making no noise at all, and the hush lay on me as heavily as the dark, dark dew. It put me in mind of lush instrumentation or complex orchestration, DeBussyian or Chopinesque ­­­, though it was the silences in the nocturne that my placid heart was hearing; the gentle aubade, the serenade. If my admiring and still dreamy thoughts ventured anywhere idiomatic or unusual, it was not until I had rather enjoyed the process of the conventional observation in this setting, that the scene was mystical and magical, profoundly dear, certainly precious, and evocative of balmy reveries I may once have had waking in Clichy (Henry Miller’s Paris), riding my bicycle to Longchamps, and then dawdling on the Champs Élysées. The Raleigh pre-dawn was an essence of loneliness, cats must have been home and warm and asleep, and I was glad to be, for those few years, far from home.

Apparently, Walter Ralegh did not spell his name as did the city that was attributed to his local investment, and my Jewish girlfriend pronounced it “Rolly.” Thirty years later I can but treasure the mise en scene of Oakwood, and of and Peace and Person, where the lights of the Krispy Kreme suggested fresh coffee and murderously beautiful and dangerously delicious doughnuts, (and krullers too, though in that part of the South they are known as “madlins,” pronounced “mallenz” or [ˈmælənʒ]: etymology unknown and spurious, if such a thing is lexigraphically possible). The gleaming milieu shining like a lone star in the night’s obscurity also seemed to promise pastry-waitresses whose pink gossamer-rayon costumes implied breasts like those of Tess of the D’Ubervilles, or Sue in Jude the Obscure, and whose insouciance and coquetterie signified a plain, singularly Southern ravishability, the actual prospect of which, by definition, resided somewhere between likely and certain. Vance Bourjaily has a chapter in his novel Now Playing at Canterbury in which he imagines the meek Scott Fitzgerald attending one of his fiction seminars at the Writers’ Workshop. On the author’s behalf, Bourjaily experienced the oxymoronic conjunction of “excruciating cringing,” as the workshoppies flensed Fitzgerald’s short story, the chosen subject of that day’s ritual lynching. It was that sort of mortal shame I experienced on Peace and Person, feeling the warm flood of indignity and dishonor within me as I sat at the linoleumed doughnut bar with my coffee and kruller, realizing that I was unable to say even one word of non-risible seduction to the woman behind the counter, because I was – it can only have been too obvious - such a craven worm of a man. Anyway, I doubt she would have much enjoyed the itinerary I had been unable to propose, that wild and opulent six-week shipboard romance around the intriguing back alley bars of several Mediterranean ports of call.

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.