Arise, Therefore

Here is an account of some of the songs on Arise Therefore, credited to Palace Music, another of Will Oldham’s aliases.

1. You Have Cum in Your Hair and Your Dick is Hanging Out

Barely sung, barely there – half sung and half there, with a half melody over piano and drum machine, you might not notice this song, the fourth on Arise Therefore, for several listens. Then it begins to emerge in its mystery and its quietness.

‘A headstart on the frog/ On the deer and the dog/ the things we true were taught/ loyal torn from our heart’.

The question is not what these lyrics mean, but how they operate, the world they open to us and the thoughts they set in motion. Who are ‘we true’? What they were taught gives them a headstart over the animals mentioned here; will they win the race? It is not said; but they have an advantage.

The true were taught things that put them ahead from the first – is this right? Perhaps the first two lines stand separate from the next two. Perhaps they are to be read separately. Then the things taught are ‘loyal torn from our heart’ – torn in loyalty? And whose loyalty is this – loyalty to whom? Did the things ask to be torn that out of loyalty to their source? Was it this loyalty which demanded that tearing? What then of the fate of the true? And what of the animals – the frog, the deer and the dog? Last night I ate frogs’ legs and thought: these are the legs of a cousin-creature. These little calf muscles and the little bulging quadricepts are like my own muscles.

When David Lynch spoke recently about his new film, he said, ‘Making a film is a beautiful mystery. You go deep into the wood and you don’t want to come out of that wood, but the time is coming very soon when I will have to’. The wood was the film and he was hidden in the wood with the others. It is dark there; you have to make your way in darkness. So too with this song. It is not a question of forcing a way through – of trying to come through the song, but to live it and to live with it, according to its measure.

‘it’s now so soft underfoot/ we sleep more than we sleep/ if god could make me cry/ I’d run along the water’.

The ground is losing its hardness, its firmness. We – the true? – sleep in a new way. Sleep gives unto another dimension. Some say dreams are the last refuge of the self and to dream is to do so in freedom. But I remember what Leiris dreamt about the act of dreaming – as though there were a second dreamer behind the first. So too with sleep – you can sleep more than you sleep when your sleep gives onto that deep sleep which was so significant for classical Indian philosophers. They asked who the witness of deep sleep was – who still there, when sleep was everywhere?

The singer cannot cry by himself. Crying must be give to him by grace, by the beneficience of God. But to cry, here, would be the freedom to flow on the water.

Now a kind of chorus:

‘she won’t come; I’ll be gone/ she won’t come; I’ll be gone’.

Is this a song about evasion, about escape? It is a song about many things and its mysteries are deep. We are in the woods with this song, happily lost there. The singer is thinking perhaps of the one he would take with him on a journey. Only she won’t come and he has already departed, perhaps because of his headstart. He is ahead of others; what he has learnt has been torn from him, although this is not a painful rending. The ground is soft and sleep has become deeper. The narrator is leaving, and she won’t be with him.

‘Play with it while you have hands/ a desperate lack of demands/ I can’t offer a thing/ better than dying, so take it!’

Play with what, you ask, but the answer does not come. Play with it while you still have hands – for you will not always have them. They might disappear, might become dog paw or deer hoof or the webbed fingers of a frog. The narrator can offer nothing but dying. He will kill or assist death in its coming. He will give death and bring death, setting you on the course of dying. He can give nothing better than that – as if dying is what is to be sought, as if it offers a kind of intimacy otherwise impossible. To your lack of demands he can give nothing but death, but it is a gift. Meanwhile, play remains to you. Play remains, but dying will be what you desire at the end of play.

‘scrap the outfit, hand me to the keys to your car/ if I leave before it is light/ I’ll be around when you are’.

You can wear an outfit, or it can refer to an industrial operation, either way, its time is done. The narrator must escape with your car if he is to survive. He is in danger. The light must not find him there. He must move and move quickly. The disaster is coming and he must not be there to endure it.

Then the refrain again. What mysteries! There is also the mystery of the title: ‘You Have Cum in Your Hair and Your Dick is Hanging Out’. Who is this you? The one who must escape because he has been caught doing what he shouldn’t with someone who was forbidden him?

2. The Sun Highlights the Lack in Each

This is my favourite song on this album.

‘Condition is certain and likely to go/ I sit like I did; like I may always/ under capsised boats, discouraged/ to know how sunk can be days’ …

The sentence (if it is one) is incomplete. Condition – the condition? – will change; a change is coming. The singer sits as he has done before and as he may always sit, beneath boats capsized on the bottom of the water. This condition is certain. The singer is discouraged perhaps as he is usually discouraged; the days are likewise capsised and he sits beneath them as he does the boats.

‘struck under, blown out, to cause busts/ I can remember, thanks to the smells/ how colours can be, and how to smuggle in breath/ to a column or corridor hemmed in with death’.

Is it the days that are struck under? How curious the infinitives in this sentence: ‘to know’, ‘to cause’! The narrator is beneath something a boat, a day; he is discouraged, but at least he can remember – he is reminded because of smells – what colours look like in their brightness and how it is possible to breathe. Scents remind him of a former life, of life in another place. But he is still in the place surrounded by death – constrained to pass down a corridor or remain inside a column, his movements curtailed.

Now the chorus, wonderfully sung, the voice breaking with strain and with struggle. The narrator is reaching:

‘O my/ our friends are all within reach/ the sun highlights the lack in each’.

Others, like the singer, are touched by the sun which can only show what is absent in them and how they are each absent to themselves. Friends are in reach, but they offer no solace. All are likewise lacking, all are shown to be lacking in the merciless light of the sun.

‘With enough money a woman is mine/ and I hers, to challenge and throw her over, over the rail, over a bedpost, out in line/ watched by whatever can spring from her’.

If a woman can be bought, she is a prostitute. But for the narrator, the one he buys can claim him, too – he is hers. Is this naiveity? Misogyny? He wants straightaway to challenge her, to test his strength. Is this to see what watches her? What springs from her – that to which she would give birth?

‘ain’t it always watched and lined out by it/ we can describe it, or shoot it, here we go/ take me for a ride, blindfold it, forget it/ I will be back in the smells you know’.

Strange drama! What springs from her is watched in turn. What does ‘lined out’ mean? It – whatever it is – can be described, we can tell what it is, but we can also kill it or let it take us for a ride. Or it can be blindfolded, light deprived to it, or it can be forgotten. These options spread before the singer and before the ‘we’ to which he refers. Either way, he will be soon among the scents again, those that remind him of a brighter world, of colours and the possibility of breathing.

‘The Sun Highlights the Lack in Each’: that is the title, and it is to this lack – a lack of colours, of breath – to which the song returns. As if everything else were a distraction, as if it was to the same to which each must return: to lack, to what is not in what they are. To the lack from which the song is sung with such mystery and ominious restraint.

3. A Sucker’s Evening

A song of threats and violence, one whose lines often come to me. It is sung briskly, at a trot, and decisively. Just minimal percussion and guitar.

‘I will not pick a fight with you/ I’d be scared I’d foul it up/ what with one of your arms/ I could get busted up’.

The singer is too weak to meet the other one head on.

‘Don’t come round here angry/ this is a house of water/ you’ll be cold and soaking wet/ ‘ere you leave here’.

Now the threat: the singer’s house (is it a real house?) is not a place to come to angry.

‘Make a noise, crack a glass/ I’ll hold his arms, you fuck him/ fuck him with something/ the fuck – he deserves it’.

A couple of posts back I said that when Will Oldham uses the word fuck it is as a holy word. It is not holy here, but a word of vengeance. Violence: the strong arms of the violent ones will be held and he will be violated by a cracked glass. He deserves it; he has brought it upon himself by coming to the house of the singer with anger. This is what it means to be wetted by the house.

‘Stay here while I get a curse/ to give him a goat head/ make me watch me take his place/ night has brought him something worse’.

The singer is a magician (or is the whole song a fantasy of revenge?). The spell will be cast to change the head of the angry one to that of a goat. Now the violent one has received violence in turn. The singer takes on his anger, his violence and his strength.

‘Lady and I we like to have our times/ tonight we spent ourselves/ we ran it dry like sand/ we had all there was to spend’.

To whom is the singer singing? In the first verse, he sings to the one who seems to be threatening him. In the second, third and fourth, it is to the one who will assist him in punishment. Now, in the fifth (this is a song without chorus) he sings of the times he shares with his companion (delightfully, he calls her lady). Is she the co-punisher, the singer’s helper? Tonight, time was spent and run dry – they are tired. A crime has been committed, punishment has been meted out. What horrors!

4. No Gold Digger

A happier song, sung fullsomely. Percussion, bass and piano and a strong vocal melody. But how peculiarly this sits with the lyrics!

‘A little cash was took off me/ while I lay there comfortably/ I wouldn’t move to stop her theft/ her deft hand moved across my chest’.

A robbery has occurred, but little was stolen.

‘She stole a glance, and stole a sigh/ with her eye pressed up against my eye/ the heat of her against my face/ the little dead girl, the little fish’.

She is alive and dead; she lives – hot face against his, breathing – but she is already dead, this little girl.

‘I heard the horns in the square play/ at the end, at the end of the day’.

Have they been there all day, coupled? It’s twilight now.

‘While boys and girls did promenade/ in the room I stayed with her/ I knew she wouldn’t steal from me/ yeh, she lay there trustworthy’.

Outside, others are walking in the square. They are in the room. She will not steal from him, he knows that.

‘No gold digger, tonight with me/ she gripped me goldly, and naively/ the horns died down, and thunder cracked/ as I rolled over on my back’.

Night comes; time has passed. ‘The little dead girl, the little fish’ is gripping him. She wants no gold from him, but gives gold to him in her grip. She holds him as, I think, he lays on top of her. Then, after the horns and as the storm begins, the act his complete and he rolls over.

‘she still lay just to my right/ and I to her left, to her left that night’.

They sleep alongside one another. Night is passing, but one lies beside the other. Neither is alone. Is she dead? Is he the murderer? Did he strangle her as he lay atop of her? Was her gold grip that of one being murdered? Is this why he knows she cannot steal from him? Ah, but the singing is jaunty and the melody buoyant.

5. Give me Children

Piano and guitars, a little percussion; a strong melody.

‘I take in a stranger and he hits me/ I take in a wind and it bites/ I listen at night/ to you cry constantly/ saying ‘show yourself; fight yourself’.

Botched hospitality: the stranger who is offered sanctuary abuses the singer; the wind itself, passing into his home, has teeth. At night, his companion addresses someone – is it the singer himself or something else. ‘Show yourself’ – the one addressed is invisible, not yet seen. ‘Fight yourself’ – the one addressed needs to struggle against himself first of all, as though the addressed one was the site of many forces struggling against one another. As though the one addressed was a war and not a person.

‘We are two kids, we have acted foolishly/ when could we possibly/ when could we possibly’.

Two kids? Then the companion cries out from a separate room or a separate bed. Where are their parents? ‘When could we possibly’ – possibly what? Unless possibility is itself deined them. Unless they are unable to be able and strength is denied them. But the next lines seems to complete this phrase:

‘Only every summer/ then only if you know/ o I know I know I only know you/ and pretty much always this will be true’.

It is possibly every summer, and only then. And only if the other – his sister? – knows. But knows what? Perhaps her knowledge is the same as that of her brother’s (?) knowledge of her: all he knows is her. But still – what is it that is possible?

‘living on the memory of this love/ memory is knowledge, dove/ she leaned back on the wood and she closed her eyes/ saying quietly as she went to sleep,/ "don’t let anyone see us/ say what they’ve seen and expose us;/ I’ve seen how they are and I hate it/ they could never talk about where you’ve been"’.

Then they are not kids, if this would refer simply to their youth. Then the scene is one of forbidden love. Others will not understand; the lovers’ (are they lovers’?) secret must not be exposed to the ones hated. What do they know of the singer and the dangerous journeys he has undertaken?

How many songs on this album seem to be concerned with interior places closed against the outside! About opening the doors to strangers who threaten the intimacy of those places! This is an album about hospitality and its dangers. About the darkness of a space closed away from the world.