Mudmind 2023: A concave space transcript
By Ama Josephine Budge
A text for three voices
Commissioned by Sam Smith for A concave space

Voice 1: 
How do you mourn forever? 

Voids 
Vats 
Vastness 
Veneer 
Velocity 
Viscous 
Vicious! 
Veins 
Vents 
Venting 
Vented 
Gone 
Gone 
Gone 
Gone! 
All gone now ... 

All echoes 
Echoes 
Echoes 
Echoes 
Echoes ... 

Only 
Empty 
Eery 
Erring 
Eddying 
Endless 
Endless echoes 

Echoes 
Echoes 
Echoes 
Echoes ... 

All 
Gone 
Gone 
Gone 
Gone! 

Gone now 
Now gone 

How do you mourn forever? 

Voice 2: 
A lifetime mourned not in centuries 
But by the unhurried languor of mountains 
Stretching into grass, 
Plains exhaling into oceans 
Seas acidifying into salt flats 
Clusters of life becoming deserts 
The dead commemorating their lives 

  
(intercutting) 

Voice 2:  
Dead matter. 
Voice 1: Life commemorating its dead. 
Voice 2: No matter. 
Voice 1: You thought we were dead. 
Voice 2: But what does that make you? 

Voice 1: 
That is how I have loved you 
As black holes love a star 
Completely and without hesitation 
Liquid blacknesses coagulating 
Making and unmaking worlds 

(intercutting) 
 
Voice 1:  
Deaths taken and chosen 
Voice 2: Mattering matter  
Voice 1: We have welcomed them all 
Voice 2: Bones, blood 

Voice 1: 
And under the crushing weight of your embrace 
They become more of you 
More! 
More!! 
More!!! 
Endless reverberations 
gone 
gone 
gone 
gone ... 
Gone now. 
Now gone. 
Forever. 

We said forever … 

Now forever is a tomb. 
A concave space 
Where ____ once was 
And a question 

Voice 2: 
The only question 
 
Voice 1 and 2 together: 
Why? 

Voice 3 (overlapping with Voice 2 below): 
<birdsong / birdvoice / voidvoice> 
<birdsong / birdvoice / voidvoice> 
<birdsong / birdvoice / voidvoice> 

 
 Voice 2: 
Hello again 
We‘ve met before 
Do you remember? 
 
Well that wasn’t quite us – not not us 
We’ve just been here longer 
Our memory of you is older 
We remember when you breathed underwater. 
Did you know that if you slice a human being open and display the meat to the light just so, you can still see the ocean rippling? 

Voice 1: 
If you could remember yourself, 
Would you tell me what you can see? 
We know of course, no matter truly dies 
But even you can forget ... 

Voice 2: 
Can be made to forget 

Voice 1: 
You loved to stretch to your limits 
Lapping and lolling at the rocks 
– that was you as well but not – 
Frolicking at the edgeness that was so very delicious 
You shared it with us 
we’d feel with the boundaries of your body 
playing the game of borders for fun 
because sometimes forever is a long time 

Does the wave know the wave from the ocean? 

Are you plastics now my love? 
Engines? 
Radiowaves? 

Aeroplanes 
 
Wonders – they say – of that world. 
 
Voice 2: 
What do they know of wonder? 
 
Voice 1 and 2 together:  
When have they paused to behold it? 
 
  
Voice 1: 
Have you transmuted into gas? 
Into air? 
Are you flying? 
Are you everything? 
Everywhere? 
Even in them – in their breasts and their bowels and the part of the brain they use to dream? 

[Pause] 

Voice 3: 
We came here in liquid pools like vegetal eyes, or translucent excrement. 

Voice 2 (overlapping with Voice 3 below): 
I 
I won- 
I won’t 

I 
I can’t 
I 
I mi- 
I mi- 
I miss 
Please … 

Voice 3: 
We came, in liquid pools 
like vegetal eyes, 
or 
a mossy embrace 
after aeons 
alone 
in the dark. 
 

Voice 2 and 3 together: 
Apologies. We are slippages. 
 
Voice 1: 
Please 
please 
please 
please 
please ... 

Voice 3: 
We confessed – once – to be quite fascinated with your edge-ness, no, your edges, your boundaries, your binaristic distinctions between self and other, here and not here, alive now and alive once, or soon or always. 

It is not so with us. 

We thought this made you very beautiful, with ruinous tendencies. 

Voice 2: 
Now all we see are endings, 

Voice 1: 
All is ruin. 

Voice 2: 
and those clutching with ragged nails to the  
corners of oblivion. 

Voice 1: 
No. 
That is too far. 
Is that too far? 
Is it far enough? 
Have we already gone there? 
Over the edge? 
Are we speaking back from after your apocalypse? 
Ours came long ago. 

Gone now. 

Now gone. 

[Pause] 

Voice 3: 
What you hear now is an echo of all you think you should hear. Well perhaps some of you will hear differently. You are so different, cell to cell, mind to mind, shape to shape. It is not so with us. 

Or we will say it was not so. Or perhaps it will be so. Or better yet it might be so. 

On Earth, we have become fractured, fractal, grieving. 

But still there are seeds here too … 

(simultaneously) 
Voice 1: Seeds for when? 
Voice 2: Seeds for who? 
 
(simultaneously) 
Voice 1: For where? 
Voice 2: For what? 

(simultaneously) 
Voice 1: Why?! 
Voice 2: Why?! 

(simultaneously) 
Voice 1: When so much has been lost! 
Voice 2: When so much has been taken! 
 
 
[Pause] 

Voice 3: 
We spoke before of your spilling out, of your divulgence. Do you know yet that all life is interconnected, across species, ecos and even worlds? 

Voice 1: 
Are you trying to get back lover? 
Back to the coral? 
Is that why you spill out so? 
Or are you trying to get back lover? 
Back to me? 

Voice 2: 
Or perhaps you are just trying to get out? 
To get away? 
To dive overboard? 
To have some say in the species with whom you dwell? 

Voice 3: 
We came to offer safe passage. Proof of another way. 

Voice 2: 
That way now is closing. 
Clo- 
sed 
clo- 
closed 
closing 
now, 
very soon. 

Voice 1 
Take me with you lover 
With you through that sucking mouth 
Into the void of possibility 

(simultaneously) 
Voice1: They say – into the future 
Voice 2:  
We think – into the end. 

Voice 3: 
We struggle to be only here, 
only now. 

Voice 1, 2 and 3 together: 
We slip away from ourselves into everything else. 
 
Into you. 

Voice 2: 
Your soft, wet openings. 
Your leaky moral highgrounds. 
Your casual atrocities. 
Your tender belief in change. 
Your atonal refusal of it. 

Voice 1: 
You promised me forever ... 
forever 
forever 
together ... 
forever ... 
forever ... 
forever ... 
forever ... 
forever together ... 
together ... 
forever ... 
together ... 
forever ... 
forever ... 
together ... 
together ... 
forever together ... 
forever ... 
together! 

Voice 2: 
Forever together 
now. 
And always. 

Voice 1, 2 and 3 together: 
I promise.