Hidden Ball Inside a Song

Ben Marcus

MUTILATED STEPHEN on horseback chased into the forest, a game referred to as the "hidden-ball game" or the "bullet game" by the analysts. It is known that certain figures will chase circular objects when a song is played; the wider the song's structure, the longer the person will hunt for the ball, stone, or bullet. Built into each song's melody is a capacity for mutilation that can only emerge when the lyrics are excluded (the melody's force is often muted by nonsensical words rattling at the surface). In hidden-ball, when the lyrics are forgotten (due to irretrievable dance steps that erase the memory for words), the melody slips unbridled to the foreground and crushes the horseman's torso. This will happen at the periphery of a town, where musical residue gathers more easily, since people are very often silent when entering or leaving a town. Chatting naturally decreases the music's power; therefore, the activity is performed with silence. Efforts to cheer are suppressed into dances or other occupations that distract people from speaking. Hidden musicians dot the landscape and emerge from the sand with boxy stringed instruments as soon as the riding Stephen is encircled. As previously seen in the ARKANSAS 9 series, games of musical mutilation last as long as musicians can sustain the song's repetition, inventing songs within songs when the need arises. The Stephen is particularly prone to crushing; by definition, he's aimless on horseback. The technique is to get him thinking ball when there is no ball, to surround him as he's mutilated by the song and just beginning to search for a bullet, a pebble, a walnut. The forest should have been previously scoured of all things round, yet it should remain as the only possible field of search for the Stephen. This is achieved easily. He'll be devoid of thought, crushed, a bloody man. Circular decoys (not actually round; inflatable, made of straw) should be littered in abundance at the edge of the woods so he'll race there with a greedy mouth. Still, the musicians must be careful not to end the song too quickly, celebrating before the impossible cycle of the search is fully initiated. There is the further danger of drawing other horsemen into the fold by overamplifying the music and externalizing the lure. Teamed Stephens can easily find roundness where others cannot, so guards can prevent the intrusion of extra horsemen by dampening the field of sound with water skins, enclosing and further strengthening the one Stephen's playing area. As the song escalates, skinning down around the forest like a horizon squeezing up the land from all sides, the only roundness is the mutilated Stephen's eyes circling freely inside his boneless head like a voice behind a wall. He is horseless on his knees beneath a whirl of pitches and tones in the center of the forest, looking for something he already has, and the song opens up further and closes and opens and shuts down closed and open in a circle of noise around him.

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