Of what does Will Oldham sing? What is it he allows to be sung? Lazily, without rereading the pages of commentary I wrote on the songs themselves, I remember how on I See a Darkness, there is always struggle, that enmity is close, that it takes a personal form (Black), that the same black is what friendship may guard against (I See a Darkness), that strange creatures are birthed inside us (Song for the New Breed). The song restages the struggle; it begins again. But the first song on the album also declares music itself as a place (A Minor Place) and, I wonder, that place of struggle. As though, on the album, Will Oldham was singing of singing and the difficulty of wresting song out from struggle.
Always the moving testimony of friendship and love on his albums. Adopt a kitten and if you cuddle it the cat it will become will be cuddly. Adopt an older cat and there may be no cuddles; it is only her head she will allow to be stroked; her body is off limits (the cat who lives in my parents’ house – the only cat I have known who could have been called mine, which is to say I was the first one with whom she had a rapport and to whom she went. Not any more, though). Was Will Oldham cuddled as a child? He admits in an interview he would like to be one who goes off alone, like, I imagine to myself, Snufkin in the Moomintroll books (but why did Tove Jansson solve the mysteries of his parentage in Moominpappa’s Memoirs?) – yes, he would like to be one alone, but when he travels it is always to friends. I wonder whether he envies Bill Callahan, who strikes me of one who loves aloneness.
Friendship, struggles, and a language which seems half-archaic, that lets speak in the awkwardness of its syntax of the syntacticality of language, which foregrounds the strangeness of grammar and how grammar determines meaning and orientates sense: this is what sings on Will Oldham’s album. It is what song allows to be sung; it is song itself which sings through him as it reaches back into the history of song (so many streams run together in his singing) and leaps out of that history. But to where does it leap?
I have wondered whether it might be said that music is divided in itself, riven? That along music, along its body, there is something like a cut? But it is not the body of music which is cut; music is the cut – the blazing line from which music wells. Music is the split in the earth and the magma; it emanates from itself, out of itself; reborn is what music is, its origin. But what if the rift itself were the origin of the same world into which music pours? What if it is also a world that originates with music and the origin, the rift, sets itself back into being?
When Heidegger writes on the temple in the rock cleft valley it is to celebrate what begins there, the way a people and their destiny are gathered by the temple such that their history might begin. The god is in the temple, and nowhere else, he says. The god is there, in the temple cella. I have always liked to write of gods. The Greeks knew no such thing as religion, Heidegger writes in the Heraclitus lectures. No religion – but there are gods, the ones who see us and who give us the capacity to see, and perhaps who sing too – who can be heard in the songs of heroes and of heroic deeds, of gods and mortals.
Does the bard with his lute open a world in the same way as the temple? Or is the temple – the holy precinct of the temple – that place in which the bard may begin to sing, since it is because of that place that a people are gathered? There was not yet a word for poetry for the Greeks. The one who would be called a poet was yet a singer, and would remain so. The song was that living repetition of the past, that time-space (the interval in the day, the time after the feast, before others in the great hall), that event in which, inspired, the singer would sing again the genealogy of that people who were gathered around him.
What would a history of song look like? And could that history tell us of the meaning of that destining so important to Heidegger? Of song as it opens a world? Of the ‘there is song’, the giving of song which is also a giving of the world?
Will Oldham is not a bard who sings before others in the hall. If it is a world of which he sungs, it is one for which a people is missing. Will Oldham does not call us from the past, but from the future. It is of a future people that he sings and to the future he addresses itself. It is said his music is timeless, but this is not true. Rather that the whole past, the ‘all’ of song is allowed to sing of what is not past and what is not yet.
It is the songs on Days of the Wake that lend themselves to this lazy reading. All I am trying to do here is to find an idiom to write about music, and about what I want to call (but what does this mean?) the ‘there is music’. I admit it: this is a lazy transposition of what I have tried to write about reading to listening. I was interested, in the last book, about what I called the ‘there is’ of language. I suppose that referred to something like its materiality, its heaviness and the experience of that materiality to which literature is linked. Now I want to find a way to write of music in the same way.
Intimation that it will through looking at song that this will be possible. Song as it foregrounds words against music. As if a tension exists that would allow music to sing of itself ‘behind’ the words the singer sings. Behind them, but also in them, singing with them, sweeping up those words in loving arms and bearing them there is music. Bearing them, those words, but also borne in those words, with them. The song is the rift that opens in the day. Along its edges, darkness burns. But one that can be seen, even as it withholds itself. Auditory metaphor – but it is difficult to find one – music allows what cannot be heard to be heard. Like the grinding of the celestial spheres of which Pythagoras spoke. Music presses to the ears a roaring without form. It permits that reduction where all of music looms such that it cannot be grasped. That great suspension which presses meaninglessness into the meaning of the words of the song.
None of this is right. I am trying to write, I suppose, about how sound is ordered and then disordered. About the assembling of sound as part of the opening of a world to a people and then the tearing apart of that assembling. One that occurs in a minor music sung from a minor place. One which accomplishes the opposite of what Heidegger calls the opening of the world. Acosmic music (music without a word, kosmos), music of the disaster (des-astres, without stars).
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