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.
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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.
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Absence and Chaos
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.
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?
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.
