Rider: The Rider Quintet, vol. 1

Rider's Commentary on Rider

Rider's Commentary on Rider 99 R. B. Kitaj, The Jewish Rider, oil on canvas, 1984-85; courtesy of Marlborough Fine Art (London) Ltd., London, England Why did you take an epigraph from Wallace Stevens? If you had to choose an anti-Semite Eliot would have been better. Why? You have to ask me why? See— "The Brain" remembers. You were spouting off about something Eliot had written about junipers and bones and I said, "Mark, schmuck, T. S. Eliot didn't write that—it's right out of Ezekiel—" but don't tell me that you quoted those lines about the valley of dry bones during services. Of course I had. I don't think so. So you know better than me. So you're right. I just think I would have remembered. Oh hell, you remembered. Well what would be wrong with an epigraph from Ezekiel, since he was your true, deep source. It's too late; the book is written. (Pause.) Ezekiel's wheels and Mark's bicycles. I'll neverforget the pathetic spectacle of you learning how to ride . . . It looked worse than it was. You only saw the outside. There was only one problem—the steepness of the hill so that the moment I got any momentum it would become too hard to keep my balance and 101 "____" press one pedal forward enough to get my weight onto the other one. I fell more times than I could have counted but was more than a little aware that there were witnesses: rubbernecking hordes dragging home from Sears, Caterpillar and John Deere, made somehow more than punily human while in the fabulous, unimpeachable yellow of their company vehicles, loaned to them "at no charge for the duration" by the invisible gods who ran these beneficent institutions . . . , (fearless of the worst scenarios even as, each night, they dug a few feet deeper, making progress, slow but steady, on their fallout shelters . . . which lent beauty to the nights and weekends they might have wasted, mowing; and uprooting dandelions . . .). It was clear from the moment when I was airlifted to "the Heights," that every other able bodied kid at the advanced age of six could handle a two-wheeler; there was no question that for the other children it would have required massive regression, a dip into the archaic, bicameral mind— recapitulating the history of the species' struggle out of the ooze to mastery—to begin to dredge up an image of themselves grappling so clumsily with simple tools, handlebars and pedals, like "lead-footed" Parnelli Jones 102 after another brave victory at the Indy 500 being asked—while his tires were still scorched— who invented the wheel. I was fine while I could ride in circles, circumnavigating the flat patch that, guarded by sawhorses, fronted the prefabricated yet eternally unfinished ranch house where idle bulldozers and cranes were petrifying fast. I never rode in circles, I would not ride without slight lurches to the left and right, the zig zag pattern I felt compelled to retrace without knowing what I was doing; and who knows but that from an aerial height or view from the highest mound my awkwardness might have been mistaken for acrobatic grace! The sight and smell of my own blood did make me queasy; but you know how pain is: it goes beyond itself. I don't know what stopped the crowd from splitting its sides, what turned their faces ashen—a cloud blocking out the sun's last rays, or some animal sense of the blood—bright on my extremities; or ... the ruin of a good pair of jeans. . . . Of course I would have preferred to carry out this rite in private— say on a rich man's sequestered driveway, 103 under the silent tunnel of his elms, but what did it matter, in the end, how I learned to get where I wanted to go. So at seven I gave Hebrew lessons andyou made a bloody spectacle ofyourself in public. What's past ispast—but you still got a lot offacts wrong. First, that lunatics name was not Karl Angel but George Adam, and I know that while you changed some names slightly that this is a genuine mistake. I know. But I had forgotten . . . ADAM. And you with your morbid obsession with falling? And when I...