1–22–12 10:06am

I read “The overman: How Fredrich Nietzsche Inspired and Provoked His American Readers” in the Time Book Review of last week, and it has me thinking, as book reviews often do and Nietzsche always does.   First off, I was wondering if you have to understand or agree with someone to write on a a subject? I know the philosophical journals will frown on it. However, the misreading could be as important and meaningful as a more grounded piece.

First off, much of what Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen inspired me to remember my undergraduate philosophy class.  My mind was on fire and full of ideas, but like an impatient easybake cook, many were half baked.  At that Time I was also taking Spanish lit and reading Jose Ortega y Gasset.  I heard resonances between Nietszche and the Spanish philosopher in the review, though I don;t remember them from 89. Ortega y Gasset’s argument that The Masses were, essentially, spoiled and too self important, sounds a lot like the snippets of Nietzsche in the article.  Though this seems to moderate the idea and suggest a way forward.

The true task of the overman was to overcome himself, not others, and to do so by sculpturing his impulses and thoughts and inheritances into a willed unity that could be called “style.” (11)

If I can keep this straight in my head, and it is getting messy with Cake playing in my ears waiting for the kids to wake, Nietzsche wants to celebrate anybody willing to step forward, in an almost transcendentalist gesture. Of course, he has been appropriated by all sides of most arguments, consciously or unconsciously.  I guess this is the problem of paradox and relativism.  Everything, in this world without absolutes, is a Rorschach test.  We all fill the Nietsche stuffy with our own fluff.  And, I guess this is what he would want.  That we feel empowered to be our own “overmen.” Of course overmen who want to evangelize a particular view are fascists.

I was taken by her description of the nuance of “overmen” as opposed to the more common understanding. There is a good wiki page on this, here. What was most interesting for me was the links towards the end of the review on Nietzsche’s debt to Emerson:

the man [Nietzsche] himself regarded as “the most fertile author” of his century — Ralph Waldo Emerson. Indeed, one can show that Emerson anticipated many of Nietzsche’s most famous utterances. There is a direct line from Emerson’s “oversoul” to the “overman.” Several decades before Nietzsche wrote, “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” Emerson wrote, “In general, every evil to which we do not succumb, is a benefactor.” More profoundly, Emerson foreshadowed Nietzsche’s concern with the ubiquity of flux and power, and the value of overcoming the past. “Life only avails,” Emerson once wrote, “not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transitions from a past to a new state.”

I think it is clear that Nietzsce was a better writer, in a copy-writer sort of way, with more-ZING. I have to say Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil are much more fun to read than “Representative Man” and “Nature.” But as I think of it, I see a thread that a better writer than myself would be able to clearly argue. Nonetheless, all three philosophers state in paradoxical “find it for yourself” ways, how to look at the world with amusement and joy (albeit somewhat cynically). Emerson’s non-religious transcendentalism dovetails nicely with Nietzsce’s assassination of God (actually, a rejection of religion) and  Ortega yGasset’s vilification of the capitalist deification of the (un-reflective) common man. Looking for goodness in structure might be the thread I was looking for.  Order, while necessary, is highly over-rated and fits in with my distrust of centralization and mass-production (I have to post those haikus someday).

10. Self-Righteous bullies/
Rarely understand how to/
Adapt to others/
#haiku

11. Our Military/
Wants social domination/
Vexing the locals/
#haiku

12. Hegemony of/
Global capitalism/
Causes these problems/
#haiku

http://nyti.ms/wfRbcY

McVie and another were both blind. Their eyes scarred over with skin as if from Some horrible procedure (it didn’t look like a burn). His eyelids were mostly sealed, and pulled out from the eyes, though when the light was right you could see within. Atrophied eyeballs, milky blue with cataracts set back from the lids. A jailhouse tattoo of a crown floated between his eyes, on the skin that seemed pulled tight by the missing or damaged eyes that peeked from the incompletely fused eyelids.

The next guy I called “Patrick” was leaning against a city lamp post. He was also blind, with a sparse goatee. His skin looked like it came off a 3000 year old mummy. That, his greasy down jacket and his white pony tail all told me he was a methodonian. His face was skin-grafted over his eyes, with little tears where I could see enormous eyes with cataracts, like he was an alien. He could sort of see and he moved his head to point the tears towards me to look.
Carlton, suddenly not his name, was black, thinnER and, well, “wrong” in some way I can’t named. He has pepper and salt hair, in a blown out Afro. His sparse goatee was white like revenge. It grew from his chin like moss or mold. Parts of it looked like it grew from his soul, stout and meaningful. Other parts ( the mustache on the right) looked like algae from a ships rope, except white.
I woke up in horror when it occurred to me this is what became of the true believers. They had all committed themselves to street-corner revolutionary philosophy. Had I not stopped smoking pot and hanging out on Sixth Ave selling Buttons, this would have been my lot. I was too lazy and selfish to be a Marxist of their ilk.
I was looking for Jason, who was a leader or catalyst for us. We’d all meet at his stand where he sold tiny Stalin and Marley pins to the people walking around the village in the early 80s. Virgil said he would not be there. I met the scarred survivors who made me look young. Besides “Carlton” I didn’t remember any of them.
They were like R. Crumb comics left in a basement or on a roof for two decades. I guess, like an inversion of Dorian Gray’s portrait, the images grew older faster than the immature souls the people had. The physical wreckage was visited on a bunch of old guys who wanted to have the peter pan syndrome. Never growing old emotionally made them rot physically.

There were two men delivering oversized sandwiches on bikes that day, a convoy!

It was a really rough two weeks teaching two classes. I have some exciting, but demanding, administrative work, but I am not really clear on how I feel about all of it.  I should say that I am so tied up in things to do that I cannot see the “meta” of my life.  Or, if you prefer, I can’t see the forest for the trees.  But here is the latest on Kiko, and I did a good hour, or two paragraphs at the end, where he has won the race and some observations. (it started here, and was last published here)

That weekend, when Mike and Kiko rode Croak wasn’t there but Kiko was stronger and more able to use the bike Mike was lending him.  The brakes, gears, ride and fit all became more and more comfortable.  In fact Kiko now realized what a bad fit (and bike) he had on Sra Choi’s bike that he had been riding out to Jamaica and back every day for the last few months.  Bent over the impossibly light “bicicleta de papel” as he had named it in the awkward carnero cuerno (ram-horned) handlebars week after week became more comfortable.  He could feel the resistance that his upright work-bike had been subjecting him to and he looked forward to bending down out of the wind.

One weekend, so convinced of the superiority of the lowered position, he went back home and took the handlebars off of a kids’ “racing bike” he found in a vacant lot and replaced the mountain bars on his bike.  Where was a whole sunday of problems to solve concerning the basket, brakes, grip-shifters, but when he had finished they all -,ore or less- worked.  Of course it looked like the eccentric 3rd world piece of engineering that it was, but Kiko was proud of his handiwork and excited about not having to fight the wind everytime someone wanted bacon and eggs delivered to their home.

That same Monday Croak rolled up with his bolsa mesengero pulled tight across his chest like un bandolero de Pancho Villa and laughed at Kiko’s handiwork. “Man look at that, you look like you’re gonna ride back into the 70s with that time machine!”

“I liking the drop bars so I get me some,” explaining with pride, “the gears and brakes they no fit so well, but I make them work just fine, like new as long as I pull forward when I turn.”  In order to get the new handlebars working he had turned the basket sideways, modified some of the hardware with washers, nuts and bolts, used zip-ties in other places.  The handlebar tape that covered the wires from the ill fitting twist shifters and mountain bike brakes was silver.  Kiko had cut the strips in half so that they wouldn’t gather and bubble, but this had caused lots of threads to form like dashboard  hula dancer’s skirt or science fiction cobwebs.

Croak rode with Kiko until his delivery weaving in and out of traffic.  They rode side-by-side in some cases and one or the other would zip in front when they needed to go single file.  Who would take the lead and who would follow was communicated and agreed upon silently with little more than muscle tenses and shrugs.  In these short rides Kiko learned about drafting and pack riding in ways that years in a club pack can never teach.

“Garbage,” Croak grumbled, the smile contrasting with his assessment.  “We gotta get you a better bike to work on and a good one to race on.”

“Este bicilacleta la Senora me compro,” he said slipping back into Spanish because of Croak’s tan skin “funciona adecuadamente.”

“Yeah it works OK, but you need to get better and you can’t as long as you’re outperforming your bike” he said animatedly as they remounted their bikes and rode back towards the restaurant.

Kiko wondered how his funny little hat stayed atop his head. When he got back he went right into work and gave the money to Sra Choi saying a perfunctory “bien entonces” to Croak as locked up and he walked in.  Croak rode on with a nod of his capped head and a crisp salute from the upturned peak.

Later in the day at another delivery (Monte Cristo, deep fried sandwich) Croak was there with a dull silver derailer that was all curves and shine.  “While you go in I’m gonna put this on your bike, it won’t take but diez minutios” his Spanish as bad as Sra Choi’s.

“But I need to go back, now it is the time for french fries to 13^th floor at 120 Water street,” he explained knowing that this was a good regular order with a commensurate tip.

Croak kneeled down and got right to work ignoring Kiko’s plea. He pulled a tool out of his back pocket and started removing the cheap chinese derailer that hadn’t worked without extra twists of the shifter since it was a week old.

When Kiko emerged from the skyscraper Croak was putting a socket wrench under the logo on his bag-flap and pulling out a three pointed allen key to adjust the new component. Holding the rear wheel of the bike off the ground by the chainstay he tinkered with the gunmetal derailer and cable.  Before he was done veins were snaking across his wiry bicep like a science fiction movie, pulsing and dancing.

When Kiko got on his bike shifted like it never had.  Croak rode along side of him, hat perched like a pirate’s parrot, explaining the nuances of shifting in the pack: “and if you’re riding up on someone too quickly in the pack upshift and rest a little before you cut out in front.”

But, as best I can tell, here is where I am up to in Kiko.  If anyone’s interested in reading the master draft I will consider posting it on a separate blog all alone.  Teej on Twitter and ELO and Lovina in the comments section all gave me important help. Please weigh in so that I can  keep this going and finish this 1st draft of my 2nd bike story (did I tell you I found the incomplete Bike mystery?).

Every year is made up
Of those seemingly endless
Trivial little minutes.
Each and every second
And thought that visit us are
Uncontrolled, wild and feral.
They come like last winter’s snows,
The stars of the summer sky:
Leaves from Autumn’s evictions.

If I was lucky enough
To sit with you and talk some
I’m eternally grateful
For those brief precious moments,
Those fleeting meaningful words,
Those thoughts that we thought we shared
And problems we thought we solved
Became golden memories
That eternalize this year

The brief moments of a year
Are all that remain to us
The narrative arc is lost:
Each moment a bright tile
In the mosaic portrait
That the wider world observes.

Each of these random moments
Bright and unique together
Created this special year
That we were able to share.
I wish I could collect them
In a mix-tape of our year
To remember you by.

Kiko liked winning, but the attention was strange.  He had lived in New York for almost three years and he had been anonymous the whole time. He had stayed focused on working and the things of life like getting an apartment, paying bills, sending money home and the rest. Besides that his world was tiny: Mrs. Choi, Santayana, Mr. Duggan (the landlord), Gopi (the upstairs tenant who drives a cab), the Aldebot family (who have one of the other legal apartment in the building), and the Peruvian woman at the envios office where Kiko sent at least $100 back to his family every week (he never knew her name because he was shy, but they had stared and smiled foolishly every week).

The secret to success as a Mexican in New York was to be invisible.  Look as much like every other Mexican as you could: avoid personal attention. The average New Yorker, of each and every type, categorizes people into broad types.  This is both a method of taxonomy and navigation as “threat assessment.” Mexicans, to most Americans are just “hispanic.”

However, even to other Latinos, Mexicans fall into the indigenous tribes of their ancestors, so Kiko, being from the south, looked like Guatalatecas y Hondureños (o Catrachos). He had not assumed the city ways of the more cosmopolitan Mexicans, and so was never mistaken for the Salvadorans or Mexicans from the north.

The truth is Kiko is a New Yorker, shopping at the clothing stores of Jamaica and Corona, wearing the vaguely hip-hop inspired gear of the broad swath of Queens immigrants.  Indeed Gopi’s friend Ali had the exact same outfit (a vaguely Hilfiger-ish jeans and Armani-Exchange knock-off shirt, with an pair of fake Timberlands) last Friday after he had gone to mosque. Needless to say he had worn it in the manner befitting all Bengalis, with no Latino flair.

Where does assimilation end and camouflage begin?  All across Queens, from Jamaica to Astoria, men and women come from other parts of the world and try to adapt their personalities and styles to their new surroundings.  They imitate the happy well fed youths of Manhattan (where most of them work), their co-workers who serve as guides to this new world of New York, and any friends that they may have known back home (provided they respect the “friend”). They want to look like someone who belongs there, but not as if they are trying too hard.  Oddly, the best model for this camouflage is tourists from ciudad Mexico, Sao Paolo or Cartagena: wealthy children who have looked north on Television all of their lives. They adapt the MTV styles to Telefuturo realities back home and field test them on the streets of Manhattan.

I really like this, though it is a real distraction from the Bike Racer story I set out to write.  It strikes me as true in a way that I have not really read or seen anywhere else.  If I digress like this Kiko’s story will be a novel.  It has the outlines of the rooming house story I want to tell separately mixed in seemlessly with Kiko’s story.  In fact the only discordant note is the Peruvian love interest.  (I want to deal with inter-latino dating as a way to highlight most [gringo] New Yorker’s ignorance of the differences between the nations of the continent of South America).

The Irish American Landlord who didn’t flee immigration and multiculturalism to his Queens neighborhood will also be an interesting lens to look at Queens through.  His profiteering by subdividing his home into cells should prove an interesting examination of the freemarket and who benefits from it.  The question is do I make him an alcoholic or more of a conscious agent of change?

Gopi the cabbie (hindu?) and his friend Ali (muslim) could be an interesting arc. Indeed, as I write this the idea of making them lovers in the brokeback mountain vein strikes me as provocative.  One of them could start to be better assimilated and start to go to gay bars, while the other might need the approval of the home community.

Then we can heal the south asian muslim-hindu rift as well as explore the freedom that a megacity offers. Hindu-Muslim tensions would be a perfect metaphor for Arab-Israeli strife, just jettisoning the eurocentrism in most examinations of these problems.

Kingston, the West-Indian with a city job is a wild card.  He could be anything from “Slim Nate” the addict-dealer of “My Belletristic Bottom” to a hard-working yardie hustler who knows what to do in a huge unruly city like New York.  Indeed his Caribbean  experience with lawlessness and bureaucracy (what if he has a London back-story) might make him the ultimate trickster figure in a seemingly civilized but really ungovernable New York. Maybe he can know a slim Nate, an amoral petty addict and dealer who has a similar job with the City.

I guess What I’d like is some votes on which way to go with this from any of my regular readers (though I am hardly a regular writer).  Do you think I should spread the Kiko story out, or cut this from it.  Since it is out of sequence, and there are pages and pages of plotting and writing between where the last place I left Kiko and here after he wins his first race, where this is from, I submit to you what I should do, stay focused on Kiko’s racing, OR, spread it out to his life as a New Yorker.

Please vote.

Even the lighting is better

I have been writing in the paper journal and re-reading things I’ve written before on line sparingly.  I have also rekindled Kiko’s story (I have a lot more to add, though I am no where near finished).  “My Belletristic Bottom” yesterday, a copy that I worked on in the late 90’s or early double aughts I think. It had some good points and refreshed some memories. I wrote more in my graph paper journal, but I want to remark here that there were some interesting turns of phrase and salient moments.  I also happened across the “Bike Messenger Mystery” which is too long to read on line or print at home. I saw promise there.  I need to revive that, but first I have to finish Kiko, just to finish something.

This morning I wrote a series of Haikus about the reunion dinner of a bunch of old friends from New Jersey (Linda, my wife among them). I think it sums up what I saw:

Dear Friends by proxy/
I learned I married my wife’s/
Pemberton High School/
# haiku

Dinner with old friends/
That I just recently met/
Was a time machine/
#haiku

The teens that once were/
Bubbled through the surfaces/
At dinner last night/
#haiku

Seeing these old friends/
Re-kindle their youthfulness/
Made me love her more/
#haiku

The youthful spirit/
And “teen cynicism” made/
Wifey years younger/
#haiku

Reuniting friends/
Rekindles youth’s best aspects/
On some perfect nights/
#haiku

Thanks both Joe and Paul/
For arranging this dinner/
This fountain of youth/
#haiku

I learned about some of the history of Fort Dix, adjacent to Pemberton.  It reminded me of the South End I grew up in, where mixed couples were not a rarity.  I also saw the best side of old friendships and the improvement of our country and culture over the decades since I was young by realizing all the changes that had come since they graduated from High School in the 80s.

Yesterday also included a visit with the McPhersons.  We met at Dos Toros on the East Side and then the kids (well, not Mason) and Hunter went galavanting about Manhattan, while I went back to the Museum with Sean and Naemi to look at Old Japanese Paintings.  Not my cup of tea, but looking at them taught me some things I liked about the stylized depiction of folded fabrics in these scrolls.  Also there was one scroll where some demon was serving samurais human flesh sushi and blood for tea or wine, pretty cool for Edo period drawings.

It makes me want to make an illuminated manuscript, which is what I do, sort of, with my photo-haikus. But I have been working on paintings and collages of late and I want to keep doing this because it packs a power that photography and photography collage just do not carry.

There were two men delivering oversized sandwiches on bikes that day, a convoy!

Reading old Journals/
Reminds me of the richness/
Of this life I live*/
#haiku
*love

Yesterday was a day of extremes. I will write only about the Surprise party that Chandler through for Linda.  Having friends in the house, especially the McPherson’s of Rhode Island and Albany Village fame reminded me of all of the good times I’ve had just sitting around chatting with friends.  Seeing Olga and Terrence, Sharon, Tony and Laura, Sean and Naemi, reminded me of how much we lose by not having friends visit.  It was like a perfect trip down memory lane. No, it was a look down a few different Memory Lanes, that gilded a today in the golden light that sunrise and sunset bring to our worlds every day (too belletristic).

We, as New Yorkers, don’t spend enough time just talking and hanging out.  The subtle pleasure of conversations with friends is often lost in the rush for more widely recognized diversions and performances: restaurant meals, fancy decorating, public performances and beautiful venues like museums and parks. Sitting and laughing with old friends, making new ones, or simply creating new connections with old friends, is like the potato salad at a fabulous barbecue, rarely raved over, but comforting and reassuring.

I have been reading old works over the last two mornings.  Yesterday I started to re-read my bike messenger mystery, of which there are about 30 pages (single spaced).  I think there is something there, but I have to print it out and re-read it.  When I was searching for something yesterday I came across “My Belletristic Bottom,” a fancified version of the events of 1986 in my life, written as a parody of Moby Dick.  It was only 12 pages long, double spaced and had some gems in the mud of my personal vision.  I’m glad I’ve never shared it with anyone.  But there were truths and beautiful turns of phrase (my favorite was a riff on Wilfred “Dulce et Decorum Est…” “An ecstasy of fumbling” describing the theft of a friends drugs from his messenger bag).

What I think I have learned, or am learning, is that I need to slow things down and revisit my past more thoughtfully, to truly appreciate my life today.

After they had each led for 20 minutes they went back the way they had come.  Once they had returned to their starting point they rode over to a Persian market and drank bottles of pomegranate juice labled in Farsi, Arabic, Russian and Hindi.  Croak, his lips glistening red, like blood said a few things to Mike that Kiko couldn’t follow.  He then turned to Kiko and said “You are the real deal.  Let’s teach you how to race and go win some prizes and give some surprises.”

“They’ll be shocked to see his stamina, and depressed when they see his sprint.”

“Watching his ‘brown eye’ cross the finish line first is going to erase a lot of smiles over in Central Park.”

Kiko listened and smiled only half understanding the import of these words.

On Wednesday of the next week when Kiko was back on Sra Choi’s bike two days into the week of bringing food to Manhattanites, as Kiko was rolling up Church Street with six scrambled egg sandwiches on rolls with bacon and cheese when Croak was suddenly riding beside him with a yellow messenger bag.  The bag had a logo that was peeling off that looked like some sort of a snake eating its tail.

Looking down at Kiko’s bike, another colorful cycling hat starched into an impossible series of arcs and points, he said “so that’s what you train on,” cracking into a wide toothy smile that looked like the bottom half of his front wheel.  The laughter that followed was infectious even though Kiko really hadn’t understood what he said.  They rode to the apartment just below Houston on the West side laughing.  

When Kiko came back out Croak was there holding the rear wheel an inch off the ground with his left arm and adjusting the rear derailer with a multipurpose tool.  He smiled as he stood up taking a small can of aerosol oil (WD40) and spraying little puffs two places like perfume samplers in a department store, giving the crank a sharp little twist that sent the rear wheel spinning for the second before he put it down.