“The character of the steel is only partly set by its formula and the mill in which it was made. It’s finalized by the processes of forging and hardening, of heating the steel and pounding it, making it not just into the form of a knife, but into a substance that wants to be sharp.”
When I was maybe 14 years old somebody I hated told me to go play in traffic so I did. It was a good decision.
There’s a Japanese term, “kireaji“; it’s often translated as ‘sharpness’, a diminishment. A literal translation is “cutting flavor”; the angles of grind and bevel are less important than the particular experience of cutting, than its owners’ participation in shaping that experience. Suggesting a higher order, holistic concern that numbers might inform but can’t create.
Odds are good that my ride is not your ride; I’m not particularly invested in optimizing my cycling experience in a way that’s easily communicable. I’m not particularly moved by grams or watts, I don’t share routes and they probably wouldn’t make sense to most people if I did.
A few weeks ago, I got a chance to visit New York, the first time I’ve been there as an adult.
It’s hard to really feel a city, offboard urban mobility’s middle child; to really understand what a city offers and expects of and how it imposes and threatens its latecomer invisibles. Stepping outside the false dichotomy is necessary, and brings a clarity you’d never expect. It’s not something you can understand in a car.
I learn more in those negotiations than any guides or rulebooks; Manhattan is an absolute joy for that.
It was physically startling how much of the New York Tough you’ve seen on display seemed to burst out into a shared, unspoken collaboration, a translation in translation. Manhattan’s compressed traffic has a very different flavor from the twitching autonoxicity of Toronto, and flowing through Manhattan – even on one of those janky, ubiquitous citibikes – the stark differences of pulse and porosity paint a perfect picture of the navigant anticipations of each city’s kinetic zeitgeist, the emergent negative spaces of shared reflex. The spacing and cadence of Toronto’s traffic is radically different.
The purpose of a system is what it does, as true for culture as any process, and the avarism of inertia in Toronto traffic is evidence. Functionally it’s suburban tourists from distant countries where highways are culture and walking sidewalks are strange foreign affectation, flexing an astounding pettiness on their way back to their tiny exurb bourgeoisies. With the help of a spiteful province form has fast-followed. The entire exercise stinks of the envious impotence of wide roads, afterthought pedestrians and gasoline-powered entitlement, but on a bike modulo the occasional kinetic excitement it doesn’t matter; at 4 PM an SUV is a beetle on its back.
But where downtown Toronto has mass, momentum and rules for other people, Manhattan is all subtle tensors of intersecting purpose. Both cities move, for sure, but in Toronto destination is mass-segregate. The comical half-efforts littering Toronto’s core are innumerable; bendy-straw barriers, bike rentals all over but bike lanes from nowhere to nowhere, laws ignored and enforcement non-existent, only reinforce the ground reality of the primacy of mass and velocity, the intolerable inconvenience of the Other between the driver and their highways. The impression residual is that New Yorkers have places to go, they’ve got shit to do, but those places are also New York; when they get there they’ll find more New Yorkers. That’s not Toronto; for most downtown motorists their destination is “away”; that absent baseline empathy that keeps our pedestrians on the curb is the cost, viciously culling back that beautiful New York push.
The cops don’t live there, don’t give a single fuck and park anywhere, so both cities have that in common at least.
“Knife sharpening, then, is a quiet, entirely private way of actively participating in the creation of the world we inhabit. A knife with good kireaji will both react and reply when you pass it over a whetstone. Such knives are made to be sharpened, to be modified by their users. There’s a sense in which they come to us unfinished, because we have not yet changed them – and they invite us to change our world in ways that only we will really know.”
Odds are good that my ride is not your ride; the sensation I’m after – the kireaji no shigaichi, the particular flavor of cutting through the city – is unique in every city I’ve visited.
I made that term up just now, by the way, in a language I don’t speak fluently. There’s a very real chance that I just said “I’m looking for a shortcut through flavortown”. But you get, I hope, the idea. The intense negotiation of flow, the microdoses of empathy distilled from shared expectations transformed into an effortless motion. On the days I can muster an understanding sharpened to a point the city is completely porous, on the best days, moving through it like the breeze; not always on well-marked paths, but that would be a strange thing to ask of the wind.
It is perhaps my favorite experience in the world, the closest I’ll get to flying.
I have to go back to New York in a few weeks; I’m looking forward to it.