1. Nonchalance of the song: it is only when it does not matter that it comes to matter. Only when it is Josephine’s song, the piping of one mouse among others that it attains itself. I could have sung that. Anyone could have sung it. No: anyone sings it in her place, the singer’s. It is anyone singing. Anyone – no one: ignored song, song without importance, that as though sings to itself.
Josephine, for her part, wants special treatment, to be relieved from her tasks. She confuses herself with the source of the song. And indeed, as Kafka’s narrator tells us, Josephine will soon be forgotten in the life of the mousefolk. She is no one at all; she is everyone; her piping is not distinct from that of anyone else.
Obscurity: the singer sings to herself. And not even that. The singer sings – not even that. There is singing, and the surprise that there is singing, and that is all. No singer beneath singer. And no song. Singing, and out over 70,000 fathoms. Out without support, like Kierkegaard’s faithful. On its own, unaccompanied: singing.
2. Bill Callahan in a darkened room writing songs and practicing guitar, and everywhere silence. Bill Callahan alone, but only to be alone with the solitude of a voice that is not his.
Solitude of the voice. The man content to live alone, says Aristotle, must be a god or a beast. Then the voice is that of a god, a beast. Ventriloquise it, wait that it comes to you to be spoken. A god, a beast – but one without a voice, that needs and borrows yours. And this is why the voice, for all its nonchalance calls on you, Bill Callahan, to live itself. To coincide with itself. It needs you, which is why you wait all day in the darkness.
How to live the fate of such a voice? For what does it ask you? That you become all voice, that the voice is only you. Occupied, who is it that sings in your place? It is not that Bill Callahan wants solitude, not all the time. He needs it. Needs it to welcome the solitude of singing. To let singing attain its solitude, to limit itself by taking his voice, to unlimit it by dispersing it.
All day, waiting in a darkened room. It’s autumn now. Summer passed in darkness. In a couple of weeks, he’s out on the road again. And until then? Bill Callahan waits. Waits until waiting flattens itself out and lies stretched beneath the sky. When will it come? When will its solitude unravel his?
3. Singer, you might tell yourself you are doing God’s work; that it’s God who sings, who lifts your voice. Faith is your refuge – but but what shelter can it offer when the voice is also the dissolution of God, when faith fails in its leap, when it is only falling? No one sings, not God. Faith – but in nothing, and held by no one.
Fear of your own voice, fear of singing: to what fate have you been elected? How to live the song?
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