What He Wrote

Laura Marling

They look at each other across the pond. The snow is carpeted by newly fallen snow and they look each other in the eye. Two reindeer. Then they wake.

The dream lingers as they travel to work, human again. Heading to work in the slaughterhouse.

They have a difficult relationship, she just started, a quality manager, not happy with the meat. She’s also probably somewhere on the autistic spectrum and he seems terminally depressed. They don’t really know each other despite working together. But there is some connection, a connection a work psychologist discovers by chance, they keep dreaming the same dream.

This is the premise of a recent Hungarian Oscar nominated film On Body and Soul (Testrőlés lélekről). And when they start getting to know each other in the real world he hands her a CD.

That’s where we find our Friday song, by a young English folk singer, Laura Marling. “What he Wrote.”

They write each other across the sea. Or at least,she writes. The song is based on letters from a woman to her husband during WWII, only her letters were found, not his – and hers are the letters that inspired this song.

She calls out for Hera, the Greek goddess, at the beginning, they are both broken beings, trying to connect over the distance. He asks her to come for him. Wherever he is. She has lost her tongue, is not happy with this war.

And now, a lifetime later, this WWII couple from long ago has become two reindeer who meet in a dream.

Text: Ásgeir H Ingólfsson