Blagovesta Momchedjikova
 

Rollerblading
 
 
 

DOCUMENTING THE CITY     ***      A blur. A blindspot. An apparition. I have just swished by: roller-blades on, outside the picture and in it. The wind-whirl betrays me, and the glistening tracks from under my wheels, eight of them.  ***       To some, my blades look like ice-skates: white, black-laced, graceful. But they don’t belong to a rink. They are two toy-cars attached to my feet, helping me slip out of the grasp of the street; two flying carpets, cutting the skies; two huge needles, with which I’m constantly stitching the city; two pens, with which I edit the space: while in fluctuation, I give it punctuation. Dynamic, the city resists me but also assists me: we write and read each other at the same time.  ***        I know the city by its bumps, short-cuts, sudden slopes, tricky corners, puddles but also smooth lanes, flowing asphalt, sunny spots, perfect curves. On blades, I feel the body of the city: I know where the head is, where the hands, the chest, the back, the legs. Yet this body constantly moves, and I move on it, like a glass marble, roaming from here to there, rolling. I want to know the lips of the city, the fingers, the toes. But by the time I get to the toes, I find the elbows instead: the body has already shifted. I look for the head, but find the chest instead, or the calves, but never the head; never where it used to be. Whenever I look for one part of the body of the city, I find another. But I keep looking, because I know that whatever I am looking for is there, beneath me, moving.        Observation towers, panoramas, skyscrapers, bridges: they embody the desire to see the city; blades -- the desire to feel it. High points let us see the city as a totality; blades -- to feel it part by part. To blade is to know the city not with one’s eyes but with one’s skin. To know the city, you have to know its body. To love the city, you have to love its body. I love the city because of its bumps, because of its ramps. I feel through the wheel. Because through the wheel, you feel the distance from the body, the distance you need in order to long for the city, to desire it, to feel the pain of being away from it. That’s how you want to know the body, to learn how to caress it to make it happy. And because of that separation, the city too, learns how to long for you -- the one who are longing for it -- and love you, too.         To walk is to be captured, tickled by the hand of the street; to blade is to tickle that same hand, evading its capture, its clasp. Yet you are not raised above that hand, above its totality; you are on it, around and about it, neither too close nor too far, still able to feel it. To see, you have to leave; to feel, you have to stay.  ***        Blades on, I don’t belong to the side-walk. Blades are beyond side-walks. Blades belong to the street. Side-walks are for those who stride; streets are for those who speed. Speed is power. With blades, on the street, I speed and so does everyone else. And though I might be the slowest, compared to cars, vans, buses, I am the “free-est,” I am not trapped in a vehicle; my motions don’t follow the mechanisms of a machine, they are natural, because the blades are the extension of my feet. The street runs smooth, it helps me move, it helps me rush. It doesn’t stop me, the way the side-walk does, with rough pavement, trash-cans, pets, other people. Streets make me belong. Though there are no lanes for bladers, specifically, no one tells me my place is not on the street.        On blades, I experience the city in motion. That is, I experience the city while moving through it. I experience it as slow, as slower than me. It no longer envelops me when moving around me, thus miniaturizing me. On my blades, it is I who moves, which makes me taller, bigger, braver than the city. I’m a giant. What makes me a giant is my ability to move. Thus, then, the city is dwarfed before me, by me, because I move faster than it does. Now, moving, I can possess the city, not the city – me.        A vector, I constantly pass from somewhere to somewhere else, connecting the city. Yet I do so for fun. Blades, unlike bikes, don’t exist to give you a special function in the city: there are no messengers or delivery men on blades; there are no designated areas for roller-bladers on the street. Because they are function-less, blades are denied a particular place in the city. Even in parks (Central Park and Battery Park City), blades have to share lanes with bikers. Or rather, bladers invade bikers’ lanes. In other words, bladers constantly struggle to appropriate a space for themselves out of the places given to others.  ***       So, where am I in the city, while on my blades? I am in the street, yet this is not my street; I occupy the street of others. I don’t have a specific place that gives out only my location. Yes, I am here, somewhere on that body of the city, but where exactly? I don’t follow directions, I create them. Thus, I am constantly new, constantly unpredictable. I do move but I don’t follow a map and I don't draw one either. My coordinates change constantly; my topus is everywhere.        The geography of the city, according to my blades, is a geography of flux, of improvisation. When I have to go places, all I need to do is jump on my blades and they will take me wherever that place might be. There is no such thing as getting lost while on my blades. Every place my blades take me is leading to somewhere, somewhere where I want to go. Thus the geography of the city is never fixed, it is always in motion; documenting it means documenting its changes all the time and thus the map of the city, according to my blades, is empty, because no change stays long enough to show on the map.  ***       On my blades, my chronus is now. So, I don’t belong to a chronotope: I carry the unity of time and space with me; I give it to places, for a second, then roller-blade away, taking it with me.  ***      Blades allow me to linger, without creating the impression that I do so. I can look around without looking as if I look. I can easily poke my nose into other people’s business, while at the same time attending my own, sliding. When you walk, your activity is too natural for you to attend to a hundred percent, so, you look around and others know you do. It is not safe to not know where you are going when you are on foot. On blades, though, you can not know but you never look clueless or like a tourist. Because being on blades means that you know. It means that you are from here.       The blader then is the perfect postmodern flanuer. I, on blades, can observe the city and people around me, without looking as if I am observing. Because I am observing in motion. There is no particular reason for me blading, yet at the same time, I’m in the center of action: the traffic, the crowds, the shops, everywhere. And I can observe from the mini-distance and mini-height of my blades. Most of all, though, I observe from my motion. Though I look like a voyager because I travel on wheels, I am the perfect voyeur because I observe due to the wheels. I am not an accidental blader, I am an incidental one.       However, the flaneur on blades doesn’t remain unnoticed. Although you observe in passing, in passing you are also observed. I’m on a piedestal. I am on constant display. I am like a moving panorama myself, observing the panorama around me. The body of the city, composed of many buildings and other bodies, responds to me: it too, longs for me, misses me. It shivers when I pass over it, it laughs, it talks to me, inviting me to come back again, stop, linger, it stares at me. I know why: because in passing I’m different: I’m faster than it.       Instead of being mad or ashamed, I smile, sometimes even talk back, jokingly, to the city. The reason is simple: I’m on my blades. I don’t have to stop. I don’t have to stay. I can just roller-blade off, move on. And that’s how I’m remembered, as a passing image: sometimes funny, sometimes sexy. Maybe that’s why the city and its people talk to me, tease me: they are talking to the passing moment, knowing they can admire it only as it is passing by and because it is passing by. Capturing it would kill it.  ***      I like to hear the sweet-talk of the city. That is why I never carry a walkman. When on blades, I want to hear the street: the noise of the street is the music of the street. I like to provoke the sweet-talk of the city. I am naughty. I look for trouble because I can escape trouble. I am body-conscious when I blade. My outfits are tight, comfortable, sexy. I dress to blade. Because when I’m on blades, I’m on a date. I’m on a date with the city.  ***      Unlike cars, which you have to park, and bikes, which you have to lock at weird poles, roller-blades stay with you even after you leave the street. Roller-blades take you outside, but also come inside with you. They can carry you places but you too, can carry them: on your shoulder. You can’t do the same with a bike or a car. Though blades move on the street, they ultimately don’t belong to it, they belong to you. Though they transport you, they are also transportable themselves. Unlike drivers and bikers, you don’t stop being a blader just because you’ve left the street. You are a blader even with roller-blades off, and others can recognize that, because of the blades on your shoulder.       At the same time, there are regulations against blades inside stores, restaurants, schools. The reason is simple: walking people and buildings are afraid of blades because blades make them feel static, small, miniature. If the blader blades inside, she will make a giant building look like a baby, she will usurp the scale superiority of the building. She can be a giant only outside. There, it doesn’t matter, she is not a threat, on her blades, she passes by.       Because of these regulations, the blader is always equipped – with a pair of shoes. Our shoes are our cross. We carry them like suitcases: they suggest a different character, someone we have to transform into once the traveling is over. Our shoes are our constant reminder that we are, while not blading, civil, civilians, civics, citizens, civilized. On blades, we are deviants, who have to carry their own civilizing tool, the shoes. No shoes on, we are unpredictable, uncontrollable. We can go places without anyone being able to stop us. We can go places that are unwalkable, unimaginable. We are independent. We are disobedient of our civil society. We can’t be in the city with no shoes on. There are no places in the city for people with no shoes on. Public means shoes on. No shoes, no city.       To blade, you have to engage in a special ritual, taking your shoes off and putting your blades on. This ritual makes the whole activity of roller-blading special too. You don’t take your shoes off to drive or to bike. Taking shoes off comes to signify a certain kind of passage, a sacrifice, a purification. You never enter mosques with shoes on. Another place to take your shoes off is the skating rink but there, you have a designated place to roam about, skates on, it starts and ends with the rink itself. In other words, with no “city” shoes on, you can’t roam about. The city is afraid of the shoeless people.       The most common place for no shoes on is our home, sometimes also the park, or a friend’s house: places where our public guards are down but at the same time, places that are confined, places that keep us inside, shoe-less. When on blades (with no “city” shoes on), you can go anywhere, and what is even scarier, you can invade other public spaces. As if with blades on, I can destroy or maybe reconstruct public spaces. As if with blades I can destroy or reconstruct the city.  ***      There are places that are not bladeable. There are places that resist my blades and me knowing them.  ***      How do I know places that are unbladeable? Places that refuse themselves to my blades and me?  ***       On blades, I pass through places of fear: dark places, parks, streets and I don’t feel darkness creeping in on me. The uncanny shivers before my blades. I trespass the uncanny. Maybe that is why I blade, to confront the uncanny, showing it I’m bigger than it, by passing it by, by dwarfing it. Though I look alone and vulnerable and approachable, I am the untouchable. Because with my blades, I am never alone. Because with my blades, I carry my home with me. And the home defeats the unhomely.  ***      My friend wanted to take pictures of spirits. She took a picture of me roller-blading. When she developed the picture, I wasn’t in it.  ***      In the dark, on my blades, maybe I am the uncanny?  ***      When I first came to New York, I started writing a poem. I wrote about the sky hidden by skyscrapers, the huge billboards with models, who can fit you in the back pocket of the jeans they are advertising, the dusty air. It was a poem with an open end. I kept adding to it, from time to time, facts that made New York a strange, hostile city to me, and why I could never feel at home here. The title of the poem was “This is Not My City.” For a while, the poem kept developing, growing, expanding. Then it stopped. I went back to it a few times. The poem simply didn’t move. It didn’t move me. I didn’t move in it. Because I was already away from my poem, on the move, on my roller-blades. And my blades had made the city mine.  ***      People have documented the city in history, poetry, paintings, music but what they’ve done has been a decoding of old stories while at the same time encoding new ones. Documenting the city is impossible in the traditional sense of the word because it won’t be a fact on the page or an image in a film. Because those can’t capture what is undocumentable, the motion, flux, ephemerality of the city. Documenting the city is documenting a present that won’t be a past, that won’t give birth to a future. It is a present that lies under the text, outside of the map, in the wrinkles of the body, whose expressions and postures change constantly.  ***      Eight wheels – slightly used up, some dirt and hair from the street stuck in them; should rotate them in a month; eight ball-bearings – slightly melting away, should change them when rotating my wheels . . . I’m having a crazy affair – an affair with a city.

  (c)Blagovesta Momchedjikova 2002