a poem for will

Will (neat thing about the interwebs: not knowing people, you still begin to refer to them by first names, as if you knew them) had a scary run-in with a driver the other night while riding home on Fourth. Please read his story, but his encounter seemed to speak to a poem I came across the other day. It’s by Mark Doty, and comes from Doty’s recently published Fire to Fire. The poem is called “Citizens” and speaks, at least in part, to how we find meaning in our lives. Will’s written about why he bikes, and my sense – without talking to him at all – is that biking is very much a civic (civilizing?) act. And the moments of shock and violence like the other night really challenge that.

But without further ado:

Citizens

The light turns and I’m stepping
onto the wide and empty crosswalk on Eighth Avenue,
nothing between the white lines but a blowing riffle

of paper when this truck –
all unnecessary red gleam – roars on the avenue from 20th,
the driver turns his wheels inches from my knees

even though I jump back
out of the way, and before I’ve even thought I’m yelling
what are you doing, act like a citizen

though it’s clear from the face
already blurred past me he’s enjoying this, and I shout Asshole
and kick at the place where his tire was with my boot.

If I carried a sharp instrument
I could scrape a long howl on his flaming paint job
(just under the gold and looming logo: DEMOLITION)

and what kind of citizen
does this thought make me, quivering and flummoxed
by contradictory impulses: to give a speech on empathy

or fling my double latte
across his back windshield, though who knows what
he might do then. He’s stuck in traffic and pretends

I’m not watching him looking
in my direction, and people passing doubtless think who is
this idiot fulminating to himself,

or probably they don’t;
they’ve got trouble of their own. Here’s a story:
two pilgrim monks arrive at a riverbank

where an old lady’s weeping,
no way to cross, and though they’ve renounced
all traffic with women, one man hoists her on his shoulders

and ferries her over the water.
Later his friend is troubled: How could you touch her
when you vowed not to? And the first monk says, I put her down

on the other side of the river,
why are you still carrying her? Midday’s so raw and dirty
I can’t imagine anyone here’s pleased with something just now,

and I’m carrying the devil
in his carbon chariot all the way to 23rd, down into the subway,
rolling against the impersonal malice of the truck that armors him

so he doesn’t have to know anyone.
Under the Port Authority I understand I’m raging
because that’s easier than weeping, not because I’m so afraid

of scraping my skull
on the pavement but because he’s made me erasable,
a slip of a self, subject to. How’d I get emptied

till I can be hostaged
by a dope in a flaming climate-wrecker? I try to think
who made him so powerless he craves dominion over strangers,

but you know what?
I don’t care. If he’s one of those people miserable for lack
of what is found in poetry, fine.

It’s not him I’m sorry for.
It’s every person on this train burrowing deeper uptown
as if it were screwing further down into the bedrock.

Heavy hands on the knees,
weary heads nodding toward the floor or settling
against the glass. When did I ever set anything down?

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century!

All joking aside, my 2009 mileage just passed 100 miles somewhere Mid-Wilshire this evening. And, to be fair, Will’s mileage already stands at a healthy 246.771 miles. And finally, my layman’s understanding of a century is that one is supposed to ride it all in one go (I, on the other hand, took 8 rides and just over a week).

But still. It’s cool to see mileage tick upwards.

In other news this evening, Steelhorse LA decided to flyer my bike again (does this mean that you don’t care if I’m not riding a fixie and just look like it sometimes?). And I had to laugh a moment at a battered Toyota Camry that pulled poorly into traffic on Burton Way on my ride home tonight: In the back windshield, a faded sticker read, Proud to be an American. You tell them, my friend.

ethics and aesthetics of biking

Some while back, I wrote a little bit about trying to work out an ethics of biking:

Very simply, and perhaps naively, a possible ethics of cycling might begin from admitting a shared vulnerability. Of course, as Kirsten noted, looking at some of the people who do ride near us, there’s a occasionally masculine and oftentimes aggressive image at work, an image which wouldn’t seem to be all the amenable to arguments about a common vulnerability. It is, again, a valid point, but working in the realm of the hypothetical, if you do posit a shared vulnerability (shared between cyclists, drivers, pedestrians, people), then one broad ethic might be: Don’t act in such a way that harms another. As a cyclist, this means that I expect drivers to give me space, to recognize and affirm my right to the road; but it also means that I ride in such a way that drivers can predict my actions and don’t feel pressured into making a rash decision. And when it comes to making choices about the stop lights and street signs, I can take a long moment to wait at a red light late at night, long enough to realize that the road will not recognize me nor the weight of my bike, and as such, there’s no issue with my crossing of Sunset at 1 a.m.. On the other hand, taking the time to stop at stop signs during rush hour traffic is a gesture to other cars.

I bring it up because the opposition of aesthetics to ethics has come up a couple of time in the last week, and I spent a little bit of time on the ride home mulling some things over. To make a long story short, one particular way of thinking about the difference between the ethical and the aesthetic is in terms of universals and particulars. Ethics, then, is that which should be universal to everyone. Aesthetics, in contrast, is the cultivation of an individual identity or style.

In a strange way, it might bear on the cycling world, or at the least cycling in Los Angeles: Ethics is asking whether cyclists have an obligation to yield to traffic at stop signs; aesthetics is color-coordinated bar tap and toe clips. Ethics is asserting a right to the road; aesthetics is asserting that right while riding a tall bike.

I suppose it’s possible to work through more than this, but two stories stand out as something neither about ethics nor aesthetics. The first is Will Campbell’s story about an orange soda and a Jaguar; the second is BikinginLA’s story about why truckers should never argue with cyclists while leaving their truck unlocked and idling on the side of the road. Not really sure what to say to either, but maybe this: If I read those stories and think, I wish I could have done that, the stories might be about an ethics of cycling. They may just be great reads.