(1) Harmony and its significance to the theory of the Unified Living God-Organism (ULG-O). This important aspect of Lye mythology was first named by Prof. S A Leach in reference to comments made by Kiran Leonard in his analysis of LPA210.045.42 (the Husband folio). The term ‘ULG-O’ has since become a catch-all for a number of widely-held beliefs which recur throughout the Lye artefacts. Together, they made up a foundational framework of sorts for the inhabitants’ conception of the world; of their position in relation to the planet and in relation to other living and non-living things; of their use of language (see Semiotics); of their own selves; and indeed of all space and time, life and death and everything else besides.
As Leach’s phrase suggests, Lye inhabitants conceived of their planet as a living organism which encompassed, and was comprised by, the world and its constituent elements in unison. This included themselves: inhabitants are regularly described, and even self-describe, as ‘limbs’ or ‘stems’, protrusions from the world-organism like all other beings. No meaningful distinction was drawn between living and non-living ‘stems’, besides recognising that different ‘stems’ ‘perished’ in different ways and over different durations (by slow illness; by sudden accident; by heavy rainfall; by erosion). It was held that physical matter, after having perished, would re-emerge (we might say ‘reincarnate’) in another place on the planet’s surface. Thus the world was understood in this sense as a self-perpetuating, immortal, closed system. [1]
Perhaps the most well-studied aspect of the ULG-O is its role in shaping individual identities; naturally, the belief that all individuals were extensions of one inter-connected being had a huge impact on how Lye inhabitants self-expressed, on notions of individual authorship, and on narrative perspective. Its relevance to conceptions of time is also of key interest to the LPRU; Leonard’s aforementioned essay on the Husband folio, as well as Gousiari and Leach’s research into LPA209.227.00 (the Lower Wetlands vat), are two of the most revealing works on how these cultural norms were challenged from without when, at the onset of the Decline, the ecosystem which sustained them began to radically transform.
Lye inhabitants’ view of their world was hardly utopian in the pre-Decline era; they did not hold the planet to be in a state of perfect, simplistic unity, and we should be cautious to avoid certain ‘new age’-style misreadings of the ULG-O. ‘Harmonic’ does not necessarily mean ‘consonant’, and while the unity of the planetary ‘body’ was universally agreed on, a significant minority of thinkers disavowed the idea of a body which could be both infinitely complex without being hopelessly dissonant and chaotic (for a later development of this, see LPA104.290.02). Even artefact-makers of a more optimistic disposition were in no denial of the world’s propensity for unexpected and random violence, as Reinhardt’s work on the history of disease has shown: none espoused a ‘world order’, and understood that their well-being was often subject to unknowable (though not explicitly ‘divine’) forces. Leach is however correct in stressing the importance of a balanced, self-regulating symbiosis in this belief system — in the ‘reciprocity between equal elements of the world, such as in biological processes, craft, or farming’—as well as one-ness: ‘’different’ aspects of the world […] as parallel statements of a single phenomenon’. This is a hugely important narrative and poetic concept. One such example from the Husband folio shows how Lye texts were keen to stress the reciprocal bonds between the world’s various components:
The wood of the frame, rushes that we lie on. Rushes underneath, our skin cloaked by fur. Breath meeting breath, gales circling the crops outdoors.
The Lye inhabitants did not worship their planet, but simply lived and wrote as individuals invested in its existence and deeply enmeshed within its living networks; it is the activity of this network, its beauty and its chaos, which forms the basis for Lye planetary harmony.
(2) Musical harmony; music in relation to the ULG-O. The kind of textual structure quoted above was also common in musical structures such as the ‘ceremonial’, a dense, often improvised, fugue-like form intended to mimic the chaotic, simultaneous operations of the planetary body. The ceremonial is explained further here.
Of the ‘lyrical texts’ and ‘musical scores’ recovered from the Lye Planet, there is some dispute as to whether they are compositions for ensembles of individuals, ‘transcriptions’ of natural symbiotic processes, or a mixture of the two. Lyric texts including the Husband folio often stress the similarities between musical activity and the activities of nature, particularly through the image of ‘breath’ (of the wind and of wind instruments) and repetitive/cyclic dance forms.