Time: the Revelator, but what does it reveal? The oldest folk ballad, born with the world and enduring with it, which knows the destiny of all things, the long fall into oblivion. Wisdom: Gillian Welch’s voice is sung against oblivion, but not in the manner of the young Oedipus, who is headstrong and defiant. She sings, but hers is a voice like the blinded Oedipus, who, led by Antigone, looks only for a place to die.
To die, to rest: this, in the oldest ballads, is enough of a task. To find peace among things. And her voice as though comes from that afterplace – resigned, knowing death has come for her as it will come for all of us. But a voice, nevertheless, that is sung against death, which sets death back, if for a moment. It is coming; night will fall, and everything will be forgotten – that is the work of time, but meanwhile, revealed, is time’s work unworked.
Time attenuated, voided time: how is that these songs seem to drift without moving forward, which well, half-numbed from their own posthumousness? Songs not of death but of surviving death. Survival songs, but sung from death, out of it, in a voice stripped of personhood. Who are you, singer? No one at all. Who are you? No one in particular. Numbed: because they have already been stunned by death.
Does it matter that you appear or disappear? Does it matter who you are? But it is because it does not matter that it matters: revelator, what you show is one indifferent to showing. This indifference is everything. No desire to please. No ingratiation. Time says: I am the sky that opens indifferently above the world. Eye that sees without judgement, eye that has seen all, which has run up to the end of time and back. Blind eye for whom every day is the apocalypse, every day the end.
Revelator: It’s finished; it’s already finished. We will not find purchase on time. Where Gillian Welch’s voice leans, we lean too, drawn by its indifference. Fate says with her voice, you are dead. Fate says in her calm voice: you are already dead.
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