Letter from Mexico

Introductory Haiku:

Bicycle Nomads
They're post-oppositional
Not docile bodies

"... the lyricism of marginality may find inspiration on the image of the "outlaw", the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile frightened order."
-- Michel Foucault

They move about in god knows what numbers, in antic, vanguard brigades of traveling informational protest parties and parades, in groups that emerge like mushrooms overnight then vanish into the demos. They are “post-oppositional,” inclined to throw parties instead of rocks. They embrace an entire mode of being that requires of its practitioners a lifestyle devoted to subversive theatricality, with the hope that, by riding around on a bicycle that has been painstakingly decorated to look like a giant butterfly, for instance, we all might, at some fantasy tipping point, run off and join the circus, too. They are wonder actuators, joggling those who pass them by in automobiles. It’s full-time dream work, yet it requires knowledge of practical skills. It helps if you are able to weld with a torch or sew costumes, for instance—to juggle, to play an instrument, to read the schematics for commercial or household electrical circuitry, to modify bicycles, to spend long hours outfitting them so that they might appear like fantastic bugs. To ask them what they do for a living, as I did a few times out of nervousness or habit, is to provoke from them an awkward silence, to betray, in effect, what seems like an unbridgeable divide between my work-a-day life—saddled with its burdens and deadlines and vistas of deferred happiness—and theirs. An ocean exists between the New Bedouins and squares like me. They don’t do anything for a living. They live for a living.

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