Lament

Lament (for narrator processed through Kyma) The voice of the narrator serves as the source material for this word-painting of a poem by Alice Thorner:

Watch a video of a Lament performance

If it is true that in our universe, nothing ever disappears But is transmuted into new arrangements of neutrons, electrons, genes That a scientifically explicable process intervenes between the loss and some new incarnation

Even though we ourselves can only slowly, and then not in all cases Recall the names to go with the faces of old friends, detested colleagues, of times and places where things happened

Can the hoard we have painstakingly amassed be stocked somehow as bytes on floppy disks? If not to last forever, at least to disintegrate by successive halflives over several millennia?

How nice it would be to believe in a collective unconscious A kind of electronic attic where entropy holds no key and our chosen heirs have access

Rather it seems more likely that our missing synapses will resurface as dust on a windowsill, spirals in a DNA chain, or interplanetary static