My mind is pleasantly disabled by the rhythms of autistic poet Christopher Knowles’ libretto for Einstein on the Beach. There is an amusing scene in Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap & Out of Control in which an animal trainer demonstrates how a lion stalking him is mentally overwhelmed and pacified when a chair is put in front of his face; the lion cannot focus on the four legs of the chair and immediately loses track of what he’s doing, sitting down happily on the floor.
Perhaps the combination of iterations and permutations in Glass’ music -additive rhythms, threes and fours and fives, subtractive rhythms!- and in Knowles’ words overwhelm and pacify my mind. It’s like having a migraine without the pain. This transcription is in error in some places, but it’s interesting nevertheless.
