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Three Tenses of the Sacrificial Dead

by Hermione Harvestman

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Three Tenses of the Sacrificial Dead

PAST : I remember the grandfather clock, and my mother's tears; I remember the endless round of the rosary in her nimble fingers; fingers more suited to music than to prayer. But there was no music that day, only the hollow knell of the Westminster Chimes that were so out of tune my brother and I would laugh, on serious days, elderly funerals when we were chased into the library where we'd read of history and dream of glory. I looked up to him, Horatio, my elder by seven years; he peopled the land with armies of conquering Romans and fleeing Celts; of colonising warrior Vikings who turned their swords into ploughshares only to be routed, in time, by their Norman cousins.

He would have been twenty-one that autumn day in 1944 when the wayward chimes failed even to raise so much as a smile; now he is ageless. We walk the land together, my brother and I; the land of ancient heroes for the which he became a hero himself.

PRESENT : I recorded this music during another war - a lesser war some might say, a mere skirmish, a war predicated on nought but propaganda and a thirst for publicity. Whatever the generality, it was a war that cost lives - 907 in all. Like all wars, great or small, it had a human impact, and, by its empirical singularity, that impact transcends mere opinion and mere politics, as all life must, simply because life comes first and life is all. Life is not just what we're fighting for, but the reason why we're fighting in the first place.

All it takes is one life lost for heartbreak and tears; one single loss for the laughter to stop forever, arrested, shattered, as we remember the time of love and joy, the blue summer skies and the endless days when nothing mattered but a pure moment, so brief in its passing, that now defines eternity.

FUTURE : My brother once said, way back in the laughing dreamtime of childhood, that humanity will never be unified until we face a common foe from outer-space. How we loved our Science Fiction even back then; but War of the Worlds was already 40 years old in 1938, and such future visions were very much part of our past : Martians and Normans - it was all the same to us. He still believed it in 1943; that Christmas I remember him telling us (we happy few radiating in his presence at the dinner table; he was 20 and our shining hero even in his old civvies) that as far as he was concerned first contact with extra-terrestrial otherness couldn't come quickly enough. Better still (he said) if 'they' happen to be friendly so they might show us how to get along without killing ourselves - or the planet.

He was a sound ecologist my brother, with dread fears of what he saw in the offing, however far-fetched or ill founded it may have seemed at the time. In fact, in the face of our more imminent realities (and their attendant concerns) such future visions seemed almost comforting.

Hermione Harvestman.

credits

released November 8, 2013

All music improvised in real time by Hermione Harvestman. Editing and digital transfer : Hermione Harvestman & Sean Breadin.

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Hermione Harvestman UK

'I feel like Wainwright - we are both hermetic ramblers. He made his books for when he was no longer capable of rambling his beloved fells, and I made my music for when I'm no longer able to ramble the by-ways of Albion - but only to listen, and think "Was that really me? That solitary figure who stood in a landscape dreaming of ages past in dread fear of the future."

Hermione Harvestman
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