Singing

1. Alone, but not to be alone. Alone, separate, like a god or a beast, but only to welcome the becoming-god, the becoming-beast. To become other, and not like yourself. Then solitude is not solipsism. Solitude is the waiting to alter. Waiting, forgetting: who will I become? What names will pass across me? What are the words with which I might sing?

Some singers know this waiting, this solitude, and write of it in their lyrics. Some seek to stage the solitude of singing as it is not possessed. Unpossessed, dispossessing, how to mark in words what voids words? How to sing in solitude of what destroys solitude?

Sing of departure. Sing of the exit across land and sea. Let the words take leave. This is what Will Oldham sings on Days in the Wake. The name of the album came late to him. It was issued as The Palace Brothers, and with a blurry photo on the cover. But then Will Oldham understood: it was by this album that he had announced his leavetaking.

He was going. He had gone. No: there was going as there was singing. Sometimes, on these songs which Will Oldham sang in his kitchen and recorded onto tape, you can hear the thunder rolling outside. But in truth, the thunder is in the music also: a thundering silence that says nothing, means nothing, and simply rolls in itself.

Listen with your other ears and you too might become a beast, or a god. The solitude of singing unlocks your listener’s solitude. Listen – be alone, and not with yourself. Become beast, become god. Depart, across the land and sea.

2. It is not that the song waits to be sung. Singing is nowhere than in his singing, the singer. And as it reaches you, as it comes to you. Become god, become beast: how is it that it never stops arriving, that singing is never completed? And how is it that it never seems to begin, but was always there, set back in the song and the singer, and set back in you as listener, as though the song had only rejoined itself as there was singing and there was listening?

A relation accomplished as it undoes its terms. Not the singer, nor the listener, but both undone by way of singing, of listening. The singer is nothing but singing, the listener listening, and isn’t it the case that a kind of substitution occurs. The singer sings for everyone, like Kafka’s Josephine. Sings and substitutes for the each member of an eternal people. Each, pausing in their work, becomes the singer who sings in the song, and by means of substitution. Each, substituted by singing, pauses in that substitution.

And what of the singer? Josephine becomes vainglorious; she wants fame, to be exalted. Why doesn’t she understand that she can sing only because she is exactly like the others, and that she is only a listener, and to the singing she is allowed to sing? A listener, because the song is never hers, because it always surprises her, as it comes without allowing her to stand at its origin.

Substitution, then – the one becomes the other. Or, each time, listener become singer and singer listener – a crossover, a becoming-other in each case.

3. What elects the singer? How has he been separated from the others? Because he waits, because he is prepared to wait. He is no different from anyone. Perhaps he is more similar to anyone than anyone. Shakespeare was unlike everyone because he was like everyone (Borges). More similar, closer to no-one at all, that is to say, to anyone, to everyone, the indifferent man of the streets. But he waits. He endures on the streets, walking among others. He is everyone, as he passes between everyone. And he waits, forgetting everything but everything.

What elects the listener? Who comes forward in him to listen? Who takes his place? He waits for one who has likewise waited. Has waited all his life to hear – this song. His song. But why this song? Why does it become a destiny? Why does it set back waiting in himself, waiting become the listener for which he always waited. I have heard it at last, this is the song of songs – but why this song, and why his election?