An early draft of Kiran Leonard’s arrangement of ‘Song of the Husband’ was performed at the Manchester International Festival in July 2017. From left to right: Francesca Forristal (voice, prepared guitar); Dan Bridgwood-Hill (violin); James Heathcote (cello); Andrew Cheetham (percussion); Margo Munro Kerr (Bb clarinet); Kiran Leonard (voice, acoustic guitar). Excerpt recordings of this ensemble performing the piece appear throughout the essay; we're currently hoping for an official, full release of Leonard's arrangement in the first half of 2021.

Song of the Husband: Complete Lyrics

Introduction: Family

The manuscripts were found preserved in the crawlspace of a residence some miles from the centre of the settlement. The house, modestly sized by the standards of the area, consisted of a network of five circular wooden buildings set as much as six feet into the soil. There are also traces of a sixth rectangular structure around thirty feet from the family root cellar, possibly used for carpentry work, but its contents were lost prior to the extinction in a fire. A winding path of long river stones led from a dirt road up to the front entrance, another out back towards a small field where the family’s crops were harvested, and then down the side of the hillock to where a brook once passed through a cluster of trees. This was likely the source of the thick, resilient timber used to construct the house; as well as partially obscuring their quarters underground, the architect had lined the walls’ interiors with turf to keep out the violent winds of the country. Surrounding all this was nothing but forest and uncultivated grassland. Even now, from the easternmost building at the rear of the site, the remnants of the nearby settlement remain hidden somewhere over the grey horizon. It was here, underneath an artisanal work desk, that members of the expedition team uncovered a folio containing a composition for voices and musical instruments. The folio itself was untitled; researchers have named it Song of the Husband in reference to its subject matter and likely author.

Until the abandonment of the house, a single adult and two children were its sole occupants. Excavation work undertaken in both the crop field and root cellar indicates that the family enjoyed a far more varied diet than the average member of the community, and that the head of the household was a skilled cultivator. The house was left fully furnished and adorned with the day-to-day possessions of its inhabitants: clay vessels, a sharpened farming tool, small jointed figurines. The only objects tidied away were placed inside a rudimentary box, and consisted of a selection of pebble bracelets, written fragments, and various items of ‘maternal’ clothing, which were identified as such by the large and brilliant circles woven into the fabric, a visual motif related to birth in a number of Lye Planet cultures. Along with the narrative perspective of the composition, these items have led the team to conclude that this was once the home of two adults and their offspring, but that one of the household members, a figure we may perhaps identify as Mother, had left some years prior to the rest of the inhabitants. However, the details and exact timeline of these events are very difficult to prove, given the tendency within this community to bury the dead anonymously in the wild and remote extremities of the landscape. [1]

Song of the Husband remains the largest complete work of art discovered from the period. Not only offering us a glimpse into the domestic life of a rural family, it can also be argued that this composition provides a detailed, wide-reaching overview of the Decline and its geographic and mental impacts. To expect reliable historical analysis from a work of fiction – one with numerous elements of the fantastic, no less – is, of course, a route to be embarked upon with some trepidation. It is highly probable, for example, that much of the darker details of the period are not dwelled on in the text at length. Nevertheless, in both its verse and musical structure, the composition reveals much about contemporary myths and philosophies in relation to nature, death, and the spiritual world, drawing from and contradicting popular wisdom in equal doses. That being said, its central themes – of love and endurance, tried and strengthened by an uncommon circumstance – are in no way bound by context.

Music, Community and the Spirit

What we know about music from the planet comes mostly from preserved instruments rather than manuscripts. Many of these sound when blown into, and resemble flutes or large ocarinas; the expedition has also recovered clay gongs, tuned and untuned hand drums, and sets of diatonic wooden mallets. A handful of recovered illustrations also attest to the predominance of singing and poetry in musical performance, and even instrumental compositions were regularly accompanied by descriptive verse. In a small and busy home near the centre of a village, team members discovered a written extract on the virtues of musical sound, perhaps intended to provide such textual accompaniment:

Waves of a drum press towards us like rushes in air. Breeze from her steps; wind within hollows revealed and then hidden by our fingers. The hills flourish and bend. The town emerges and the body gathers in dance. Significance without words. Spirit song of the world, deep and unspeaking.

The nebulous concept of a musical ‘significance without words’, and its relationship with an ‘unspeaking’ wisdom within nature, recurs in many poems, diaries and musical texts in the collection. The instinctive common denominator for these beliefs is the wind. Breeze from the hilltops; breath from the voice; the sounding of a flute; the quick flutters of air from a dancing body: it is the image seized upon and extended in several of these works, including Song of the Husband. What’s more, this is but one example of a widespread desire in planetary art and mythology to establish ambitious parallels between highly disparate elements of the material world. Poets are regularly eager to stress that their world is singular and indivisible, and that its living constituents are unbroken extensions of a wider whole, like limbs from a universal body. There are echoes of this perspective to be found in the above extract.

The principle of an undivided and egalitarian world-organism also influenced schools of thought on metaphysics. Like interdependent bodies which comprise a singular Body, their respective spirits were regarded as sub-divisions of a worldly (and infinite) Spirit. The Spirit exists outside of the micro-cycles of life and death, much like a cloak that shifts and realigns itself over a constantly undulating texture of bodies (this explains the absence of ghost folklore in these communities). It was the opinion of many authors that music provided a conduit for this shapeless Spirit, summoning it through multiple bodies at once without resorting to dissatisfactory, approximating words. Naturally, these beliefs greatly impacted the concept of death and its relationship to the individual body, which came to be of immense relevance in the final period of the civilisation. [2]

Though there is no shortage of visual and poetic odes to musical performance, written documents of what the musicians themselves played are much scarcer. Expedition members discovered a handful of simple ‘ceremonial’ pieces (which are discussed below) and some vocal works, though few of these have been successfully translated, and none approach Song of the Husband in length. In general, it seems that music theory beyond folk traditions was at a nascent stage at the time of the Decline. A standardised form of notation had yet to be developed: Song of the Husband uses some symbols consistent with manuscripts discovered in other homes, but also incorporates oblique and irregular language which researchers have had to interpret with some creative liberty. This is possibly due to its structural and harmonic peculiarities: a standard wind instrument of the period would no doubt be challenged by certain passages. What’s more, although documents in the folio make explicit that the work is for voices accompanied by an ensemble, there were no musical instruments discovered in the author’s house. All of this indicates that the piece was likely assembled in the composer’s head and never performed subsequently.

The Ceremonial: A Private Development of Form

Song of the Husband is roughly divided into three sections, each beginning with a piece known as a ‘ceremonial’. Ceremonials played an important role in the commencement of village festivals, akin to an overture. Their structure allows for the instruments of an ensemble to introduce themselves one by one, highlighting each musician’s individual contribution before showcasing the sophisticated interplay of the whole group. The concept of ‘interplay’ – a system of bodies which, as in a fugue, complement and overlap one another in different timings and combinations – is another musical feature with parallels in planetary attitudes to the natural world. Compositions of all kinds from these communities stress the importance of interplay, but it is most thoroughly expressed in the methodical exposition of the ceremonials.

They begin with one short sequence, no more than nine beats long and usually performed on a melody instrument. After a few iterations, this is joined by a percussive line, which crucially lasts for a different number of beats. Both of these parts are played without variation until the end of the ceremonial; they continue to fall in and out of time with one another, and in doing so create a lengthier and shifting polyrhythm. The sequences in combination provide the ceremonial ‘drones’; once the drone performers have demonstrated the ingenuity of their interplay, the ensemble’s leading melody instrument begins the main section of the piece. This tends to follow an AABAB structure. First of all, the primary instrument plays a sequence lasting around thirty seconds, then plays it again, this time accompanied by other instruments in the ensemble. While the lead instrument plays a second melodic sequence and then performs them both, what began as the primary focus of the piece soon falls into the background, as the accompaniment develops in complexity, incorporating and modifying phrases from both the drones and the melody line. By the time the piece reaches its coda, no instrument has dominance over the other: the drones, lead melody, and accompaniment become barely distinguishable, showcasing a developed network of interplay without hierarchy.

Researchers believe that the gradual development of a ceremonial involved extensive improvisation; the piece continued until the audience was suitably bowled over and the ensemble could transition into a vocal piece. As Song of the Husband almost certainly originated in written form, rather than as a public performance which was later transcribed, improvisational passages are limited; the musician can choose from a selection of notes for a fixed number of beats before returning to the written material. Because of this, the three ceremonials found in this composition are far more detailed than the examples recovered from the hasty transcriptions of festival plays. Another distinguishing feature is the author’s involvement of each ceremonial in the narrative arc of the work. This is a departure from their usual intention: when not acting as a flashy introduction, ceremonials only make appearances as light interludes, detached from the mood of the drama preceding them. The use of the form in Song of the Husband is unique in this instance, and the differences between the three chart the challenges and ambiguities of decline.

The first ceremonial is the most similar to the other examples recovered: high-spirited and consonant, it resembles a march in a parade, and builds in the recognisable steps of its contemporaries. Eventually the instruments convalesce around the same sustained notes prior to transitioning. The second ceremonial is faster, and its dense hurried drones would have appealed to the village audiences of the time, but it is written in an uncommonly volatile key that has been transcribed by researchers as a dissonant minor. Its angular rhythms evoke the polar opposite of a joyous festival scene; the ceremonial’s coda, rather than conveying the harmonious network of the first, is destructive and lacks resolution. The third, while much quieter than the second and in a gentler key, is certainly not a return to the levity of the introduction. It is unique in that it lacks a percussive drone, built instead on two repeated melodic sequences which allow for greater space in its texture. Sparse and muted, the lead melody and accompaniment interact with one another but largely refuse to evolve or crescendo. While interplay is present, it is subtle and slow-moving. It is telling that of the three, it is here where chance operations play the most prominent role, particularly as the coda begins. The question of unity is not threatened, but rather cast aside; the musicians drift on their separate pathways as vessels through a thick mist.

Other Types of Piece – An Introduction to the Voices – Home

Following the first ceremonial, the ensemble transitions into what has been termed a ‘ground’. Like ceremonials, a ground begins with a short, repeated sequence that lasts for the piece’s entirety, although here it is a single part performed on one instrument, or two instruments in tandem. Interplay is therefore confined to the accompanying instruments, which perform harmonic variations and responses to the primary sequence. Grounds also invariably feature voices. Generally, a singer and a small vocal accompaniment describe a series of idyllic natural scenes; phrases are inverted and sung simultaneously, representing the complex and manifold natural world. This technique was also used for comedic effect in festival plays, often to recount a number of mishaps befalling a local figure of ridicule in a single instance. One such work, ‘Ril the House-Sitter Affronted by an Unfortunate Occurrence’, describes a number of rather crass happenings which the vocalists proceed to narrate at once:

Ril the House-Sitter, blinded by a harsh breeze full of sunlight. A furious spouse pulls the left arm. Cattle-hound pulls the right arm with its teeth. Young cattle-hound gnaws and soils a trouser leg. Children strike back with lances. Nose stolen by a bird. Arse struck by falling cauldron.

Eventually, there are eight vocalists singing multiple variations of these phrases over the top of one another. This is not the case in Song of the Husband, which besides featuring very little in the way of humour, was composed for two voices, whose co-dependent though distinct identities are crucial to an understanding of the work’s themes.

Due to the different vocal ranges required for each part, researchers have differentiated the two voices as ‘male’ and ‘female’. The textural prominence of the voices is roughly equal, but there are many points in the narrative where the male voice takes the lead, addressing the female voice from his perspective. This occurs, for example, in the opening lyric of this first ground, which researchers have entitled ‘Meal Scene’:

In the family home, swaddled by the sun and air, we eat at the table you built from the body of a tree.

Their identities throughout the work’s first section are stable. For the most part they sing as a common ‘we’, as figureheads of a family, rather than addressing one another. The female voice does not address her counterpart at all until later on, at which point their characters have shifted and the situation is uncertain.

Making up for the limited means available to two voices, the interplay of the melodies is echoed in the text, which emphasises not nature’s diversity but the extent to which its components are linked. This ranges from the ‘natural world’ as we understand it to the incorporation of its material into community life. See, for example, the lyric quoted above. The home is represented as an offspring of the elements, blanketed in their light and their breath. The world outside of the home is a perfect reciprocal system: ‘Trees give out the air; sun rears the trees’, etc. [3] Everything that enters the house – trees which become tables, seeds which become food – is a gift, remodified by the members of the household for their benefit. Furthermore, these are not simply gifts which are given by one separate, benevolent body to another: instead, the piece depicts a natural system sustaining an extension of itself. In essence, to paraphrase the closing lyric of the ground, it describes the respiring of the world, centred around the congregation for a meal and the natural machinations which feed into it.

The home in which the family eats, plays and sleeps is not offered in contrast to the world, but instead described like a synecdoche. The home is not a shelter. In a subsequent ‘recitation’ – a very loose form defined only by its lack of repetitive structures and the predominance of lyrical content – a bedframe is as much as the wood the mother has used to construct it. Rushes stuffed inside a mattress remain rushes. The mother and father rest under the elements, at the level of soil and trees and the moons. As we have seen, this cohabitation is by no means straightforward, but it assures a stability which allows for the firmness of the couple’s identities and the lack of a significant boundary between the house they choose to live in and ‘home’. When this sense of belonging begins to falter, the home as a poetic concept becomes unsustainable, and it becomes necessary to search for other images.

Absence and Chaos

Houses were not always left in the immaculate state of the author’s family dwelling. Many buildings, understandably, were left in total ruin and disarray, either due to the neglect of their long-time inhabitants or a bad run of temporary lodgers: in the initial stages of the Decline, it is believed that many former family homes became transient resting stops for an increasing number of solitary nomads, who took to journeying from village to village in pursuit of knowledge or enduring distraction. Others still were deliberately transformed in mysterious rites. The team reports discovering empty shells of buildings, surrounded by the buried remains of their contents in methodical but indiscernible patterns; homes condensed into smaller constructions of re-sculpted possessions in metal and cloth; domestic walls lined with interminable hieroglyphs, diaristic recollections and confessions bearing little relation to historical events as researchers understand them, nor to objects in the house found inexplicably mangled and charred. It is far less common to discover houses which have been preserved with such unnatural attention to detail, like a museum. Unlike the ritual re-contextualising, or collapse, of other homes in the face of enormous rupture, it initially suggests a reluctance to recognise chaos.

Although the existence of a unified Body was an accepted fact of life among writers and thinkers, there was always a minority who challenged the supposition that a natural system could be both infinitely complex and harmonious. Instead, they saw a network doing constant battle with itself, permanently grappling with its own violence and incoherence. In a one-person shack at the foot of a steep remote valley, the team uncovered a vat of disorganised philosophical musings. The author took as their subject the troubling brutality of a world in supposed perfect order. They wrote almost exclusively in rhetorical questions:

Congress of animals; flesh hunt, starver. Why does a plant commit violence to its own stem? Does the river that spills from hound-neck spill toward thirst? Water from a hound’s eye.

[...]

And from where does the brandishing knife arrive: a flinch from the other face of the world?

The question of chaos only became more urgent as the Decline progressed. In Song of the Husband, the concept first rears its head at the end of the first section in a ground known as the ‘Evocation of Marriage’. The word translators chose to render as ‘marriage’ also appears in other texts to describe profound or reciprocal bonds, such as the relationship between trees’ roots and the soil. This is relevant because the marriage described in the piece is not entirely romantic: ‘You above the world, as a stem, outgrowing the whole’, reads one lyric. To us, perhaps the female figure resembles a sort of guardian angel, though in this culture there is no tradition of angels, only spirits inseparable from the fabric of other living organisms. We know the perspective of the statement from context alone; the duo sings these words together in a blur, twisting syntax out of place. The confused, restless structure of the ground anticipates the nervous interplay of the second ceremonial, summarised in the text by a conjunction of phrases: ‘Unseen certainties of the world billow’; ‘Forever, hidden in the silent rotations of chaos’. The composition and the world with it become a question of these forces. The two images do not contradict each other, but they presuppose a struggle that threatens the fundamental stability of life in its entirety.

By the second section, the ‘mother’ no longer appears to be present, and the female voice begins to speak from more abstract and ambiguous positions. The text focuses less on communality, and more on distance and disembodiment; the male figure sees his partner’s branches, perceives her in echoes and shadows. The landscape to which she has become attached is nothing like the refuge of the house. Its contours are increasingly barren and threatening. Towards the end of one recitation, the male voice declares that ‘our home is come upon’: such a defensive standpoint earlier in the composition would have been impossible. But it is no longer coherent to position the house as an extension of nature, nor to identify the deteriorating family body with its comfort. It is telling that this recitation is the final piece of the composition which makes any reference at all to the home. The voices are gradually drawn from their habitats and the land as it was, becoming vaporous figures above an alien and moribund planet.

In a sense, this makes the condition in which the house was left an even deeper riddle. It is not simply that chaos was ignored, as we know from the composition that it figured prominently in the author’s imagination. Within these communities, chaos was surrendered to or banished through ritual; although the path undertaken by the author bares closer resemblance to the second method, there is a baffling defiance in his precise maintenance of the home, irrespective of the events unfolding on the outside. From our own perspective, the state of his house and the folio together resemble some kind of ‘legacy project’, his existence immortalised by the precise arrangement of his possessions as if pre-empting the arrival of some future discoverers. But to think this – to project the concept of ‘legacy’ onto a community in which art was produced mostly in private and exclusively without accreditation, whose culture strongly discouraged hierarchies and individualism – is to make a totally anachronistic presumption of character. The author does challenge certain cultural reservations in his work, but from a completely different standpoint. As he writes, for an audience of no-one, the indeterminacy of a worldview thrown into catastrophe finds its stability. The creative act becomes a way to seize control of the present.

Flowing Visions of Ruin

Earth poets are used to negotiating the boundaries between personal and public, individual and collective. They call back to the writers of the past who have wracked them with torturous influence; they seek the approval of readers of the present day, even if they themselves deny it; they look to establish an oeuvre that will have influence and admirers in the years to come. This has an enormous impact on how we analyse art and literature, how we contextualise it, and how artists themselves choose to self-express. It has no bearing in this reality. The reasons for this are, in part, sociological: it is difficult to articulate the concept of the ‘artist’ within a mythological framework that does not view beings as wholly separate, for creative works are then common property of the Body. What difference does the particular vessel of a poem make? It is only during the Decline that we see the concept of autobiography emerge. The fact that Song of the Husband and other likely recordings of unique experience are invariably shrouded in metaphor, as well as being firmly grounded in the context of the natural world, demonstrates how undeveloped the concept of the artist-individual was in their society. Nevertheless, many were driven to transgress, to try and rationalise their specific trials and tribulations in self-expression. This desire to affix certainty to his own identity and life offers one explanation for the author’s defiant preservation of his house.

Another point to consider is the difference in our understandings of time. We like to tell our history as one of individuals, millennia comfortably divided into generations and single lifespans. But if, as previously noted, an individual’s life and death – a microscopic segment of a universal organism that will regrow as a separate stem – is existentially insignificant, and their consciousness a fragment of a wider spiritual network to which the individual conjoins after the passing of their body, then we lack the framework to think about the importance of specific creators and lives, so closely associated is our own with an overwhelming cultural affixation to death. This was the dilemma faced by communities of the Decline, by increasingly rudderless casts of pilgrims and anchorites: to articulate meaning on a planet which lacked both the culture to recognise spiritual isolation and the circumstances for belief in a total harmonic infinity to persevere. It required, among other things, a thorough redefinition of time. In the context of all this, our author, as Song of the Husband transitions into its final section, finds a perspective resembling neither ours nor theirs, and its exposition returns us to the home.

Initially, in the ground preceding the third ceremonial, it could not be further from view. Entitled ‘Night’s Invitation’, the female voice takes on the personification of night and beckons her partner into the darkness. Specific references to geography have fled, along with any fixed metre; it begins, in fact, with a specific invocation to ‘take your sights off the land;

place your hand in mine. Errant circles of the world are ancient and smiling. […] Hear the breeze unfurl, nightfall is singing. The fields grow darker, our shadows are shrinking. The body gently rows, our spirits untethered. […] The sleeper lying still, as if unending.

It is a clear metaphor for the acceptance of death, albeit one uninfluenced by any notion of afterlife. That is to say, the voice becomes divorced from the Body to willingly venture into the dark where nothing is promised but lack – of fields, bodies, shadows – and lie still there, ‘as if unending’. But what is meant by ‘unending’? The ground posits a timelessness quite distinct from the immortality of the Body insisted on in pre-Decline art, as the perspective has now switched to a realm outside of time, a truly spiritual domain unencumbered by the business of bodies. It is all making way for the subject matter of Song of the Husband’s third section: a reflection on the transition beyond the instant which all mortal individuals have up to now inhabited their whole life.

Narrative fittingly returns to the land in ‘Life in the Body’, the first of two recitations which close the composition. The language is quite generalised and primarily written in what translators have rendered in the past tense, but the question of verb conjugation in a culture dominated by ideas of natural self-replication and immortality is not straightforward. Events occur, and occurred, but the debris of the past is always repositioned, forever re-emerging as new stems. Nostalgia is rarely invoked without some wish for the same circumstances to be generated in some future alignment. This is extremely common in poetry of romantic betrayal, for example: you no longer love me, but in some thousand years perhaps our bodies and our spirits will be drawn to another once again! Or, that in this all-encompassing network, perhaps we are already one! But what the author is attempting to describe is the death of an immortal cycle. How can you describe a circumstance which exists after time?

Although he is writing in the past tense, he is inevitably trying to inhabit that past through both the text and the mummification of the home, whose maintenance will be integral up to the moment in which his fantasy is no longer sustainable. Beyond that, into a darkness that cannot even be described as the future, the subject does not know what lies there and they will not be cognisant to question it. In a strong demonstration of agency within a collapsing society which took no interest in such autonomy, he has chosen his ‘instant’: the instant of a burgeoning family, of trees leaning in to hear whispers, of the ‘threads of a moon’ reflecting across a lake’s surface. It cannot be contextualised in the cycles of yore, nor can there be the suggestion that this configuration will return. The thinkers of the past confused infinity with instantaneity. Perhaps, then, we will jump towards another instant and reconfigure, like a binary.

The author is only able to negotiate his resistance to the Decline through song. The home is not enough. The piece closes with a short, possibly unfinished, recitation known as the ‘Song of Being’. There is only one other occasion in the whole of Song of the Husband where creativity is referenced as a component of the natural framework. This is in the ‘Meal Scene’:

Without them, we cease to exist. Without us, their virtue is unwritten, destined to vanish.

The mutually beneficial relationship established there is clear. But all virtues and records, along with time itself, are undeniably vanishing, and this very typical defence of artmaking is discredited. In ‘Song of Being’, the author instead justifies his self-expression in inventing a past that is, at least temporarily, inhabitable in the present. Arguably, the principal difference between Song of the Husband and its predecessors is this steadfast desire to create a habitat, a tolerable way of being. The Decline produced this desire in several works of the period, in fact. It is like a praxis of the imagination. The song mercifully disjuncts its author and subjects from time to carry them we know not where.

Conclusion: Arranger's Notes

In mid-2015, I was invited to join Dr. Linden and her team in studying a dead planet of brown dust and wreckage orbiting a dimming star. Since then, my position within the project has become firmer, and my research now incorporates a wide range of aesthetic and historical lines of inquiry into the enduring traces of these communities. Initially, however, my invitation was to help arrange for Earth instruments a painstaking translation of the Song of the Husband folio, the result of extensive cross-analysis and educated guesswork. The score does not refer to specific instruments, distinguishing only between the vocal duo and a wordless ensemble. Under these circumstances, my rendering of the piece is inevitably a liberal interpretation of the team’s findings. Although I did my best to uphold a certain degree of fidelity (I have not reorganised the order of the work’s different sections, or imposed radical variations on the source material, and I have deliberately limited myself to acoustic instruments), some aspects of my arrangement retain a set of personal and cultural biases: its organisation around the guitar (my primary instrument), for example, as well as the decision to utilise pre-existing instruments rather than attempt to incorporate or re-build ones as they were discovered on the planet. In the future, we hope to re-perform Song of the Husband and other planetary musical pieces with greater historical accuracy, but the team also believes that something has been gained from this cultural cross-semination, to span such a giant sociological and physical distance and show that the former is not so great.

By and large I have maintained the straightforward translation with which the researchers first provided me (alongside an unwieldy and highly literal unpacking of certain lexical and grammar points which aided me in a fuller comprehension of the text). This is not the approach preferred by everyone working on the project; while some have sought to preserve the exact, original meaning of these artefacts with an almost anxious literalness, others feel that our distance from this civilisation necessitates more creative renderings of the texts at hand. I cannot emphasise enough, however, the sheer simplicity of these lyrics in their original tongue. For a long time, I was under the impression that all writing from this planet was as sparse and plain, but nothing could be further from the truth. The author simply did not care for complicated diction. In my view, the text was already sufficiently sentimental and direct at its most prosaic. Given that the piece as a whole charts a process of coming to terms with grief in two forms – moving towards the definition of a clear, incorruptible instant – I figured it appropriate to more or less leave the skeletal version by the research team as it was.

Given the years I have now spent inhabiting the mindset of the titular Husband, I am often misled into feeling that I am acquainted with him. I feel as if I can perceive and reach towards an individual with no known physical remains, who in turn is substantiated in song to reach out to me from another time. In fleeting moments like waking dreams, I see myself as him, sat by the window of my study perched over spurious interpretations of his recorded life. The trees in the park over the road fall into ash-heaps; the voices of parents with their children die out, and a still day fills with the echoes of a deafening alien wind. I look out towards the figure of a woman I have never met nor seen, who when I attempt to describe her in my mind’s eye also becomes ash, sinking through the gaps between my fingers like sand granules. The whole of the world is a flat storm of fire and dust and still familiarly mine. The face of a stranger that I cannot grasp appears from a far-off void and the universe takes on a new and troubling form that I do not understand. In these instances, the material of all things is obscured in shifting pyramids of real and invisible dust. After a moment, I return to myself and recover the outlines of my room. But when I am there it always seems as if it will never go back to how it once was.

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