Skin against skin blood and bone
You're all by yourself but you're not alone
You wanted in now you're here
Driven by hate consumed by fear
Let the bodies hit the floor
~Drowning Pool: Bodies

Silent Wave
By: Shauna Brock


3000 people crammed into the dark room.  Focused on a central point, they pushed toward the stage. The stage pushed back.  They surged, bodies in one wave, the energy pulsed around and through them, breaking against barriers, dragging, creating undertows and whirlpools.  They were everything they had learned in 8th grade physical science. 

She moved, slowly. Faceless bodies and bodiless faces bobbed around her, creating ripples. Together they lunged and pulled. A whirlpool opened, forces of energy driven by the sound waves of music and the pain of emotion. 

In experiments such as this one, emotion is the variable that can never be predicted.

As one the crowd raised arms in rebellion (and unison).  Back and forth they moved, and as the waves bounced off the walls so did the sea of bodies, reacting in time to the music. The sound waves changed as the song shifted.  Pits opened and the waves collapsed into tide pools. In these cyclones, bodies of energy bounced off each other; knees were kicked, punches were thrown, hair was pulled. 

The energy from the stage stopped.  The crowd was left to its own devices. 

Energy dissipated but needed to go somewhere.  It settled into the massing, pulsing bodies, and they shifted, restless. As with hurricanes and tornadoes, one small thing can change the course of the wind, so can it in a mass of restless bodies.  One shove, one push, one stumble and the bodies go down.  A chaotic wave of whispered panic raced around the room.  They reached for each other, helping.  She fell, looking up into the sea of bodies that pressed upon her, and a set of hands pulled her to safety.  She was not frightened.  The energy from the bodies reached the stage and with nothing to counteract it, they pushed forward, closer and closer, chanting.

The wave began again and the music fed the crowd’s energy.  They pushed and pulled yet moved in tandem.  They shoved, they danced, they raised arms in devil's honor.

Someone changed the patterns.  She reached to hold up another, to keep him from becoming lost under the mass of bodies.  The wave of bodies came back toward them.  She fell forward but rough hands grabbed her hair and pulled her back.  That time, she was frightened.  Suddenly exhausted, she could not handle the next wave that washed over her.  Her knees buckling, she slipped.  Bodies rolled over her in one wave and then back in another.  Before she could lose her footing all together, someone broke the pattern and pulled her out.  She knew she was hurt; she did not feel it.  She left the center of the pit.

Pushing and shoving her way through to the edge of the mass of faceless bodies, she leaned back, feeling the pulse of the sound waves through the wood of the building.  People moved around her.  She closed her eyes and let the sound take over.  The room vibrated and shimmered. 

Breath suddenly returned to her body. 

One step, then another, back into the ocean. She joined the masses, her own energies again meeting those of the showman. He fed off the crowd’s energy.  He fed and fed and he built and sent the excess back; the crowd gobbled it up.  She pushed her way back into the pit, now firmly in front of the amplifiers, and fed off the bass.  Song by song she waded deeper, never fully returning to the epicenter, but close enough to quake.  Her arms raised, she rocked with the crowd, pulling and pushing, shoving; her energy again matched the music around her. 

In the dark room, she became one with the faceless bodies and the bodiless faces.  Outside of the crowd, the faded light gave enough sight to show the stone face of the security guard who stood there, staring at the aisle, making sure that in the event of a meltdown, some of the crowd could make it out safely.

The rule is unwritten but no less powerful: sign your life away at the door when you enter a show.  Once inside, crowds become creatures.  They watch for each other, they keep each other alive.  If they do not, the energy is deadly.  But the risk is the participant’s alone.  She was aware of this rule.  She embraced it. 

This rule is what separates those in the pit from all others.  The energy gives birth to a single entity who understands that the rules of physics are not all that apply in this room.  The rules of humanity apply.  Emotion is that deadly, unknown variables.  If the person behind does not hold up the person in front, if energy is not respected, then all is lost.  That is the reason for the wave and the push and the fights and the motion, the constant motion.  They are but one, as the showman is one.  They are waves battling for dominance and finding equality.  They are faceless; they are dark.  They remember each other's eyes.  They do not go simply to enjoy the music; they go to experience it, to live it, and to be changed forever by it.  Their lives are not their own.

She has whiplash from the second fall and bruises on her back.  To her it is a lucid dream: something half-remembered but fully experienced.  She cannot talk completely about it to people who have not felt it, who have not lived it.  But to those who have, a simple shrug is enough.  They have been there.  They have survived.  They move to the next one.  They single out and they protect and they fight and they die. 

When asked, she smiles and says she enjoyed the show.  She gives basic answers to simple, unscientific questions.  But, in truth, it was beyond description; it was amazing and wonderful and of course she had a good time.  But if one has to ask, one cannot truly understand her answer:  I lived it.   


(c) March 2008