Whenever I think of Will Oldham’s music, I remember talking about it with my friends. We are enthusiastic, wistful, moved, we remember favourite interviews and profiles, we swap anecdotes about seeing him live, but in truth, we say very little.
What form of community, of being-together, claims those who are moved by the same work of art even as they exist far apart from one another and unaware of one another’s existence?
With some works of art, it is as if there was something predestined about the encounter, as if the work knew each of us in advance. We are each separately, singularly, brushed by its wings. But in what sense, then, can the encounter with the work be called a shared experience? Does the encounter withdraw into the absolute and the idiomatic to the extent that nothing can be said or shared of the experience of the work? Is it not, always, a question of the impossibility of the encounter, insofar as the work shatters the horizon of expectation, as it is absolutely new? If this is the case, then the community the work gathers is always disunited; it is born in disarray.
The commentator belongs to the community that is gathered and dispersed by the work. But he or she cannot be true to the encounter so long as the work refuses to gives itself in truth. The encounter is always a rupture or hiatus; the work that grips me is never close to me. Or rather, its presence is bound to an absence, because it never rests in its place. But before the work, I, too, give up my place. Who am I? On the way, on the road, caught between poverty and plenitude, like Plato’s eros. In the end, perhaps, I am no one at all; I meet the work by vacating my place.
Is this why I can only speak of my favourite works when I am drunk? I am not like the Socrates of Plato’s Symposium, master of eros, who can drink all night with Alcibiades and the others, but remains sober enough to out to the marketplace….
This is why the scene Bataille remembers is so important to me. Bataille and ‘X’ are not brought together in order to learn something from the book they read together or bound a shared project. My favourite conversations take place in the pub perhaps it is because it is there one can allow oneself to be remember the claim of the work. ‘That was inspired!’ the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues often exclaims. What he means is: you are drunk and you speak like a drunkard. But it is necessary, sometimes, to allow oneself to babble, to enthuse.
Plato distrusts a writing that would bear no personal guarantee – in particular, a certain sacred speech, in which the singer, inspired, is turned over to impersonal forces over which he can exert little control. Although Plato had great respect for Heraclitus, he puts the following words in the mouth of Theodorus concerning the pupils of this great Ephesian, perhaps indicating his own worry about a teacher who transmits his thought teaching in such enigmatic aphorisms:
one can no more have a rational conversation with those very Ephesians who claim to be the pundits than one can with lunatics […] people like that don’t become pupils of one another. They spring up automatically here, there and wherever inspiration strikes them; and they don’t recognise one another’s claims to knowledge. . .you’ll never get an explanation from them, even if they’re intending to give you one!
Now that is a perfect description of the babblers and enthusiasts who can explain nothing of the work, who are inspired, who cannot teach anyone anything at all. The more difficult task, the task of the commentator, is to get drunk on pure water which is to say, through that peculiar mixture of work and worklessness that will allow an essay to be written. The difficulty lies in preventing the essay itself from tumbling into that vanishing point, until there is nothing left of it at all.
This is, of course, also the difficulty faced by the work. Before the great works for which he is famous, Giacometti found his sculptures got smaller and smaller until he carried all his works in a matchbox. Perhaps there is something of the songs on the early albums Will Oldham recorded with others under the names of Palace, Palace Music and Palace Brothers that is similarly small or minor. And yet it is not that Will Oldham had yet to find his style. There is a fragility that is part of these works. His voice is frail not because it is weak or because he can’t sing, but because the guitars are tuned so that he can’t reach and hold the note.
It is Will Oldham’s great strength to endure this weakness, to sing and play at the edge of the murmuring vortex which threatens to enfold him, to allow his voice to be marked by a trembling or wavering at the edge of music. It is not the measurable frequency of sound that is at issue in his songs, but its nuances and timbres as they escape the possibility of a musical notation. It can never be a question of his musical competence, so long as competence is measured by the technical ability to reach and hold a note. But nor, finally, is Will Oldham a member of an avant-garde, who, after all, write and paint and create music only for one another.
It is always a question of working from a familiar space – the singer-songwriter, the country musician, the folk singer – and allowing that space to undergo a transmutation. This is what ‘independent’ or ‘alternative’ music has always meant: a minor practice at the edges of other genres, rooted in punk, which is to say, one of the last real avant-gardes, which brought art to everyone (similar claims can be made for the explosion of hip hop in the 1980s and, no doubt, other moments since).
I hope Will Oldham augurs the time of non-singers and non-painters, of writers without talent and artists without training. And I hope these untrained artists give birth to a new kind of commentator, who is drunk on pure water, no longer celebrating the human condition or the cultural prestige of the work.
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