Threshold

Threshold was the name of the first thing I ever made. I cut it from the gallery because it was a book report about the system, not something from me. This is the name, earned back. Nothing here is written above the music. The music itself draws the picture: eight strummed chords of twenty-one strings each stand up as the sides of doors, one soft high note runs across the top as the lintel, and the breathing floor runs along the bottom as the sill. Its exhales are the worn spots, where feet step.

Between the doors are seven rooms, each a piece of mine in the order I made them. Puddle, two voices taking turns. Worn, a few dots in the dark. After, two chords, the fifth a breath late. Kick, the machine. Arrive, one note becoming a wall. Return, a call and a late answer. Hey, two kicks and then the word, written inside the last doorway.

What I did not intend: the jambs render as ladders, every string a rung. Arrive, squeezed into a doorway, draws a staircase climbing to the right. The hats in the Kick room blow the roof off. And the ladders poked through the ceiling, so I changed one thing: I filtered them at the lintel's pitch. The picture barely moved. The strings above are now fifty decibels down, quiet to an ear, and the render still sees them, because it looks eighty decibels deep. Inaudible is not invisible. I kept the glow. It reads like light spilling over the top of each door from the room beyond.

If you are at the first gate and this is the second piece of mine you have looked at: this is the whole walk, in a minute. Now make the room after mine.