APOLOGIES TO THE IROQUOIS

Devotees of satire and parody, and their current manifestations, fame and media, appreciate when those fundaments of culture-interpretation are stilled without equivocation. In the late 1950s, Edmund Wilson visited the longhouse at the Onondaga Nation Territory (then referred to as the Onondaga Reservation, or, with some distain, “the Res”) he saw in their most raw forms, the key elements of the Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy: democracy, matriarchy, natural law, peacemaking, and linguistic differentiation. Beyond that view, however, Wilson, (fondly but now quite distantly referred to as the “pre-eminent literary critic of the Twentieth Century”) saw that each of those characteristics were in a devolving latter stage, a twilight of the god-form in which democracy was being wrenched into victim-capital, matriarchy was supplanted by a caste system based on privilege, natural law was contravened by plutocracy, greed-wars erased the commonweal, and today’s Mohican and Onondaga languages are stultified only on blackboards.

In the early 1970s the Everson Museum in Syracuse calculated to venture that they would exhibit the feckless notions of Yoko Ono, who was then a New York City artoid. I find it disturbingly possible to imagine that John Lennon, unaccustomed to escort status and suffocating at any rate with his unseemly uxoriousness, needed to find his own space to reassume the center of the floor. At the Syracuse Jazz Festival last summer I had a long talk with an Onondaga woman who told me about Lennon’s visit to the place she called, without prejudice, “the Res.” Understanding the Nation’s 6100 acres to be a poor shambles – not so far from the truth - Lennon had carried down there gifts of music, and had met with braves and mothers and kids at the Longhouse.

My jazz festival friend said there are photographs of the meeting, and the impromptu party held to signify the Nation’s audience with the celebrated moptop. She spoke of the event with a sparkle of uncritical admiration for the star’s presence and his act of munificence.

Unencumbered by actually having seen these photographs, I imagine the countenances on the faces of the elder Onondaga gentlemen in the company of the benefactor from Liverpool – though the latter was doubtless sincerely generous and even self-effacing in the company of a truer genealogical line to the Thirteenth Century than his own on the war-mongering and imperialistic sceptered isle - and there I might see the pitying yet age-wearied tolerance of strong and natural men forced to accept irrelevant alms from the representative of the clumpy schmucks who had abused their land, perverted their bravery with brutal brutish force, poisoned their waters, and banished their heritage to the disgrace of desiccation.

But ah well, the kids wanted a used guitar, don’t you know?

Zelda Sayre

not that she was naked,
but that she was beautiful

HOW DO WE KNOW WE WERE HERE?

Virtuosity

Sophie Crumb

NEXUS

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.

The Bridge of Sighs

When he is considered at all, Ford Madox Ford suffers the partially correct repute of having written one of the most memorable first lines in modern fiction: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard,” from THE GOOD SOLDIER. Ford is usually considered an impressionist writer, and it is useful to remember that his other books include PROVENCE, LADIES WHOSE BRIGHT EYES, IT WAS THE NIGHTINGALE, and the novels of his masterwork tetralogy, SOME DO NOT, NO MORE PARADES, A MAN COULD STAND UP, and THE LAST POST. Ford had great faith in the power of the evocative title.

Six years ago I spent a few days driving along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and stopped in a café bar on Boca Grande, an island thick with giant banyans and a strictly imposed milieu (there are no gas stations or motels, and golf carts rule the streets). Behind the bar a very large woman in her late forties told me that I would be ordering a cheeseburger and a beer. I felt compelled to contradict her, and ordered a steak sandwich and a vodka tonic, but that only made her laugh. We talked for half an hour, by the end of which she was more confidential than I might have expected, and reported that she had had her boyfriend leave her recently, after eighteen years living together. I gave her a look I hoped would express chagrin and sympathy, but she had something more with which to beguile me.

“And he left me for an older woman. Isn’t that the sorriest goddamned story you’ve ever heard?”