Slip #2: Classon & St. Johns Pl.
Word count: 365
Paragraphs: 4
We present the second iteration of Tess Michaelson’s “slips,” an Edwin Denby–inspired series of micro-meditations on the accidental choreography of the street. Following the rhythms of attention and happening, she reports on the minor and miraculous non-events of everyday dances.
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I take out the camera and begin filming the buildings as if they are faces—a face disfigured by anger, a face reading. I wanted writing to be like this: the elongation of description rather than vertical event. I must get down to this rocky place, I think. Drag my finger along its terrain, describing merely the spurting up of eventfulness in the horizontal plane. And then I think of the sea, as I have been doing for a while: the shore as if drawn by a trembling hand, the debris that had been flung out from what I called the undifferentiated mass, that heaves all day and recoils, that is the body breathing, the undulation of that edge that indicates when one has gone too far, the buoys bobbing like toy seahorses some distance past the break, the chain around his neck that curves briefly into a snake across his collarbone. Now the sirens finally pass, the squawking of pigeons, their wings rhythming the air, the voice of that man behind me still talking on the phone. That’s true, that’s true, that’s true, he says. Innovation, technology, new things, he says. It is here that language accumulates, foaming up where the shore meets the sand into strange and unfinished syntax, small kingdoms similar to those you see sometimes into the clouds. Now the kids across the street hurl out from their headquarters for recess. The clatter of their voices weaves into the familiar lap of traffic, the blare of construction a few blocks over. There is this bunching of fabric as I begin to understand now the folding of years, the endless looping of conversation like a dog circling its bed preparing to die. Now there are the air conditioners in their oversized cages, the pigeons who puff their chests and pursue a smaller bird. Now there is the blind man who, walking alongside his companion, calls out, that’s another motif.
Tess Michaelson is a writer and multidisciplinary artist based in New York who works at the intersection of text and performance. Her writing has appeared in motor dance journal, the Brooklyn Rail, Cost of Paper, and Chicago Review, among other publications. Tess studied English and Aesthetics at Stanford University and earned her MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. She is currently at work on an improvisational novel.