Write, try to write – the daily drama. And so much to write, but wasn’t that always the case? I have a simple admiration of those who work, for whom work, writing, is a necessity. From whom words must come, even if words are impossible. Wait until they come. Like Bill Callahan in a rented apartment.
It is necessary: isolate yourself until there is only waiting. Until all you are is waiting. Waiting waits in your place. And then, one day, it may come, it may not, but it may be possible to write one passage or another.
There is Bill Callahan in an anonymous apartment in an anonymous Midwest town. Writing ‘River Guard’. Writing in the afternoon, in the morning. Everyone else is going about their business in the everyday. Bill Callahan has let the everyday enter his heart. It is turning there. It speaks to him. It speaks dispersal. Now Bill Callahan is the stranger he wanted to be. And it is as a stranger he sings. And it is as strangers that we meet his songs.
Dispersal. Will Oldham surrounds himself with friends. He records with friends, friendship is the sign under which his work his realised. But Bill Callahan is alone, even when he is with friends. This is because it is fate to him, his music. A solitary fate. He tours with his guitar, just him, and his songs. He sings out of his experiences of the vast space between the walls of an apartment. He sings from the experience of watching dust motes drift in the empty air. Of diffuse light as it falls on everything. He withstands the great but even pressure of this light. He bears what the rest of us do not know we bear. He treats himself without mercy. It is inevitable: it is necessary to write, to sing. ‘It is necessary to travel’, Burroughs liked to say, ‘not to live’.
The last lines of ‘River Guard’ allow Bill Callahan to speak of driving alone. To the highest place. Watching the wind in the trees. Alone, high up, absolute. Think of the opening scene of Donnie Darko. Understand that incredible solitude which is born of the need of the work in you. A need which can only be spoken of in the infinitive. To write. To sing. Until Bill Callahan is no one but an occasion for the event which resonates through him as he knows it resonates through the whole universe. As though he resembled Pythagoras for whom the universe was a great song and a great roaring which no one could hear. The spheres in which stars and planets were encased turned in great circles, said Pythagoras. And as they turned they made a great roaring music. And that music permeated everything, saturating every atom. Until every atom danced.
Bill Callahan is alone, it is late. He’s alone with his four track. He has been out for a drive, he’s returned. He’s full of the night. The wind blows through him. He is not a man but a night. Now it is time to sing. The song speaks through him. It is the night speaking. It is the great roaring behind the night. It is what Van Gogh saw when he painted ‘A Starry Night’.
You have to be alone, very alone to see what Bill Callahan saw. So alone that you are no longer there. Lonely even for yourself, for the one you once were. No-one speaks, no-one writes. Sometimes Bill Callahan thinks: it is God. But he knows it is not God. He knows there is a great gift, a great giving, but it is in the gift of no one. Giving gives. No formulation suits it. Better to think of it as a resonance, a drone.
I can hear this drone on The Doctor Came at Dawn. It is there in ‘Spread Your Bloody Wings’ and at the beginning of ‘Carmelite Light’. One day I will have to explain why it is there in My Bloody Valentine and Slint (the latter have reformed and are curating All Tomorrow’s Parties, Camber Sands. See you there.)
Lars Iyer's Blog 