Eric Leonardson (springboard) and Eric Glick Rieman (prepared Rhoded piano), AV Aerie, Chicago, 8/15/08

Glass curves. Thick, dense, semi-opaque, they yawn, slowly overlapping in our vision as we crawl tentatively through the offered opening. The smooth, cool rim of the portal opens out onto a similar surface. The floor blends, curved, into walls that rise and slowly fold to form a variably sloped ceiling. All inside now, we stand in awe, in silence, in stillness, just past the entrance. Unbelievably, we find that while our bodies stand still, our thoughts begin to crawl along these glass surfaces, inching themselves along the floor at first, creating the most extraordinary auditory vibrations as they advance. These vibrations, we realize, subtly begin to oscillate our bodies as we stand.

Realizing that our inner thoughts play now for everyone to hear, we instinctively try to stop their production. This stress and tension only amplifies the thought-sounds, as they skip and stutter wildly across floor, walls and ceiling. Frantic to contain our innards, we mentally chase after each idea, each fragment, only to create an echo effect, a trace of vibration that trails behind each targeted one.

Like the thick glass roaring of lions, our intensified thoughts now reverberate across, around and through the enclosure. Sonic safari: we are confronted by our yawning, toothful thoughts, staring "into" our own terrifying mouths even as they skip and glide beyond static form.

Like snakes now, sliding across the rising side surfaces of our enclosure, a slow squiggling produces surprised, slight groaning: like plastic rubbing on plastic, our thoughts groan in spite of themselves as they involuntarily spread into wider, surface-covering snakes, like strips of thick, dreadfully exposed-erotic clay being gradually pounded against the walls.

Our amplified attempts to stop our own thoughts begin now to smooth out as we force relaxation, as we begin to move with, not against, our consciousness. Once relaxed and malleable, our meditation turns slowly to play, exploring the jungle of vibration that constitutes our collective cognitive existence, that vibratory viscerality in turn shifting our listening organs, muffling our hair, kissing and scratching our skin as we withstand its advances.

Our dusting of skin-hair raises and waves now, slightly, in tune to cognition reflected-echoed, our epidermis shifting in response to thoughts rendered vibratory. A kind of transcendent equilibrium results, with the occasional rogue idea dashing madly across a curve, creating stuttered, plastic sensations that tickle our otherwise focused thought.

As we slip-stand together, staggering with the drunk pleasure of transcendence, violent sounds appear slowly in the distance, sounds that could not possibly be caused by our own amplified minds. Looking around, our mouths drop as one by one, the massive glass walls, seemingly forming a full enclosure, begin to straighten. Like a giant focused flower opening, each wall erects itself loudly to reveal, crack by crack, a view of sky. We are overcome now by the violence of seismic sounds and come to the edge of tolerance, on the brink of breaking-- when all sounds suddenly cease. We stare, ungodly, upward, in a turned-sound-proof chamber of glass, violated now only by this floating piece of heavenly externality which gazes down on us.

Involuntarily speechless, now thoughtless, we watch what enters slowly through this revealed hole, but cannot reflect on what comes to pass, nor can we articulate it. Soundless ourselves, we stand dumb, in dread, in recordless witness.

No comments: