Notes from 'The Book of Never' score

NOTES FROM THE SCORE The Book of Never lasts just more than a half of an hour. But it took one thousand years to make. It began with the Novgorod Codex — a wooden book of psalms from 999 A.D. believed to be owned by Isaakiy, a formerly Pagan priest baptized in (now Ukrainian) Kiev and sent to the village of Novgorod to convert the town to Christianity. However, when word of Issakiy’s use of Pagan ceremony and liturgy in his worship reached the church elite, Issakiy and the entire village of Novgorod were excommunicated for heresy. Through destruction of sacred icons, texts, and any associated writing tools, such excommunication would have almost certainly meant a complete erasure of any written records of the village, its language, and its religion. And so, Isaakiy set out to retain what was left of his dualistic liturgy, his dialect, and the collective memory of Novgorod. Using his wooden book as a writing tablet, he poured layers and layers of wax over the psalms carved into its pages, marking each layer with text, and making multiple paper rubbings of the words he was attempting to preserve — his dualistic prayers, numerous instances of the Rus’ alphabet, sarcastic and scathing commentary on his banishment, even visions of the apoca-lypse. Issakiy’s paper rubbings are lost to the decay of time, but scratches on the surface of the wood itself remain, made when the wax layers were pierced while making the apocryphal texts. There they stayed, out of sight, until they were discovered in 2000 A.D. (exactly one millennium later) among the ancient remnants of Novgorod, perfectly preserved in mud, with thousands of tiny glyphs scratched into a mass of hardened and broken wax. The codex was quickly taken to the world’s foremost Slavonic linguist, Andrei Zaliznyak, who meticulously parsed through the overlapped writing to find letters, then words, then phrases. The writings from the Novgorod Codex used in The Book of Never include iterations of phrases like “and you bow down to Beelzebub with your tongue” in an entry titled The Law of Moses; dozens of semantic variations of the statement “I am the truth and the law and the prophecy” in The Law of Jesus Christ; or a satirical list of platitudes from the Spiritual Instruction from the Father and Mother to the Son in the form of “the world is a town in which are excluded from the church” where the blank is repeatedly filled in by descriptions of Issakiy’s congregation in Novgorod…to name only a few. The resulting text created by Isaakiy is somewhere between liturgy, the chanting of a vindictive spell, a recitation of sins, and a grammar lesson. To put all this in a more contemporary context, The Book of Never combines text fragments from my own English translations of the Novgorod Codex with individual words and phrases by twentieth century writers in various states of exile.