The Cult of Impersonality
A sketch of a thousand posts instead of a post.
Who is a teacher, a real teacher? One who will awaken you to what you already know, like Socrates with the slave boy, or one who awakens you to what you could not know?
For Zen monks, the priests of The Upanishads and mystics of all traditions, the idea is not to make present what could be communicated directly, but to confound, to let the pupil remain with the puzzle. Here, the teacher must be careful to reserve himself from the relationship. In some way, he must retain the position of the Other, where this names an individual who is not on the same level as those he teaches.
This is not a personality cult, but quite the opposite: a cult of impersonality, where the teacher's learning, personality and expertise bear another kind of relation. An ethics of teaching would focus on the way in which the teacher keeps watch over this relation.
Will Oldham's relationship with his music also reveals an ethos. His avoidance of any cult of personality, any stardom is not simply reclusiveness. The way he presents himself - for he must, in some way, present himself as a performer - is marked by a withdrawal, a black hole, that seems to draw his recordings across its event horizon.
A Common Approach
How should we understand this ethos? Perhaps we should look to what Will Oldham tells us of his life.
Will Oldham tells an interviewer how, ten years earlier, he decided to quit his acting career. He rang up his agent and told her he's leaving the business, and then goes travelling instead, drifting with no particular plan all the way to Prague. And then, possessed by a kind of unease, he heads back to Kentucky, and wanders what to do with his life. Was it then he decided to become a musician?, the interviewer asks. It was then he decided to become a pirate says Will Oldham, and recalls, rather wonderfully, immediately enrolling on a sailing course.
Can we really be sure he wanted to become a pirate? Isn't this a way of saying something else? Likewise, when we hear of his long trip through Europe, are we to understand this literally, or as a kind of allegory of his own artistic journey?
Reflecting in another interview on his attraction to piracy, Will Oldham emphasies a pirate does not exist before the act of piracy - that it is the act, usually undertaken secretly and incognito - that allows the pirate to be identified as such after the fact. 'Around the same time that I was thinking about all this', he says, 'I remember getting a letter from a friend, and he had determined in this letter who he was. And I think that stalemated me for a little bit. In my thinking, you were as much what you were becoming as what you were. Or rather, I had to do something in order to be who I was'.
Then piracy, like wandering was a journey of self-discovery that was also an escape - but only insofar as the self is understood as a verb, and which can only be fixed retrospectively as a noun. What matters is to escape from the noun, to live in the present as in the future anterior - to speak of what I will have been rather than what I am.
Then Will Oldham's work is not to be understood in terms of expression of a constituted self. The music does not belong to him as an individual - to Will Oldham who lives in suburban Louisville, taking his cowboy boots to a cobbler or returning Japanese art movies to the DVD rental shop - but to someone who exists as it were alongside of him. If there is to be a genuine becoming - if he is to continue to become other to himself through music, and let his audience become other too -, he has to reinvent not only his music but also his own persona.
What matters is to become. Isn't this what Kafka marked when he spoke of the liberation that followed for him when he passed, in his writings, from the first to the third person, from the 'I' to the 'he'? Now the narrator is enclosed in the narrative; Kafka is no longer the storyteller, but who is? The 'he' that awakens in the work. Certainly this song is narrated from a particular perspective, but beyond this song (and we would have to listen to the other songs on this album), is the 'he' of the singer.
Is this why Will Oldham has released his music under a stream of pseudonyms? The name Bonnie 'Prince' Billy? 'Its got the Wild West, the Billy the Kid thing and the Celtic thing', he says. But it has more than that - it is a way of naming as Palace Music, Palace Brothers did before it - the 'he' enclosed by the song and by the necessity that lays claim to his music.
Cynicism, Opportunism
Of course, one might suspect that it's all an act: Will Oldham was not born in the mountains of Appalachia, they might say; he only took up music after playing a child preacher in John Sayles' Matewan who sings old time music. He's a fake, you can say. He's putting us on. You congratulate yourself - in the end the performer is a cynic like you. The performance is either to be laughed away - 'he's only fooling around', or appreciated as clever showmanship. Here the projective space in which the performer is enclosed is one that sees cynicism and opportunism everywhere.
But what if there is a way of being claimed despite that projection and of answering the music? A kind of counterprojection from the music itself, that slips under the outstretched nets of cynicism and opportunism?
Will Oldham says he is looking for people he says 'to seek out my music. Because that's what I do every day - seek out new stuff. I like it that the audience and I have some common approach to what's going on.' A common approach - but one that does not involve direct personal contact. 'I do not want a personal relationship with my fans,' he says, 'Or to do anything that encourages them to think they have one with me.'
This is the relationship he wants with his audience - a common approach, an approach held in common insofar as each is given to a movement of becoming. Will Oldham does not want personal relations with his fans, but rather a mutual becoming, enabled by the music. The music, one might say, is the third term in the relationship between Will Oldham and his fans, setting itself back in relation to both parties. This setting back is experienced as a kind of claim, a vocation. Will Oldham is called to perform just as his listeners are called to listen.
Of course, there must indeed be some kind of choice over his performance - whether, say, to play guitar or autoharp, whether to work with this or that collaborator, etc. - but these choices, for the performer in question, emerge out of a kind of necessity that is implicit in their relationship to their work. Sometimes, what you create is greater than you. Or rather, your creativity places you into relation with what is thereafter placed in your care.
And likewise for the listener, it is the way in which the music sets itself back, retreating even as it enables the relationship between Will Oldham and his audience: it is its condition. But a condition that sets free each of its terms with respect to their becoming who they are. What matters is the movement the work of art sets in motion. On the one hand, Will Oldham can continually subtract himself from the ideas others project upon him and his music. On the other, his audience can be subtracted from their own sense of who they are as listeners.
Genius
'She has a gift.' 'He has a calling.' This is what we might say to someone who has a beautiful voice, or has particular ability of an instrument: look after your talent, don't waste it. To give such advice is to understand the faculty or ability in question seems to separate itself from the ordinary course of a life.
Perhaps faculty is the wrong word if it is to be understood on the same level as the other abilities you might have. There is something about excessive talent, genius, whatever we call this that separates itself from those abilities, seeming to withdraw itself. There is a difference in level between this faculty and the unfolding of one's ability to be able, one's can-do (a phrase I take from Heidegger, roughly translating Seinkönnen).
The dangers of the discourse on genius or talent is that we understand this potentiality in terms of a superhuman power, which is still commensurate with Seinkönnen. Of the discourses that swirls around the great men of the tradition - Goethe or Beethoven, Dylan or Hendrix (I think of the myths that continue to circulate in magazines like Uncut) reveal a particular kind of humanism. When Feuerbach allows the human being to take the place of God, this is only to raise the human being to the status of a new God.
But there is another experience of what we might name here (rather abruptly) as the holy. Here, we might think of the work of Hölderlin, or the broken, unfinished works of the romantics over which Goethe sighs. Here, long before Feuerbach, we see the beginning of a great shift. No longer is it necessary to uphold any idea of genius or even talent: the human being is not made in the image of God.
What matters instead is the minimal shift that allows the artist to be claimed by a kind of fragmentation, a sense of falling away from the 'I' who would speak from a tradition to the 'he', to the 'she' (but ultimately to the 'it') - a fall that calls for an ethos that seems to answer the work itself.
A Time of Need
'... what are poets for in a time of need? / But they are, you say, like those holy priests of the wine God / who travelled from land to land in the holy night.' By what right, though, may we compare Hölderlin and Will Oldham? Hölderlin, it may seem, belongs to the great tradition; he looks back to forebears who are monuments of European civilisation. And perhaps there is the brilliance of the poetry itself, and what it has meant to other great European figures.
The comparison, then, overwhelms Will Oldham, who is, in a sense, quite ordinary, one of us. But here we might have to alter Proust's formulation to say that though a genius may inhabit an ordinary man, with Will Oldham, the ordinary is also in some sense his genius. He is not removed from us as a great figure, but is among us, one of us, in the same manner, perhaps, as Josephine, in Kafka's story, belongs among the mouse folk.
But there are peculiar similarities. Hölderlin admires Pindar (from whom comes the phrase, 'become who you are'), and translates his works. But he lacks the ready made audience who Pindar addressed, and has to conjure for himself an imaginary Europe, creating a great myth (which Heidegger would later render literal) that reveals not so much his belonging to the tradition that flows from Greek antiquity, but the way we have been broken from it.
Likewise, in a sense, for Will Oldham, whose music might seem to belong unproblematically to the idiom of country music and blues, but of course cannot belong to any of these idioms just as, as we now know now, the genres of blues and country music do not belong to themselves. These traditions were fabricated - they were never quite there, never in phase.
It is this being out of phase which can reveal itself now not as a contingent event that happened to blues or country, but to what allowed them to be constituted as genres. This 'now' is simultaneously a time of need - not simply the wandering or scattering of tradition, but of tradition as wandering or scattering. A 'now' that lets us seize upon that minimal difference which was the chance of a tradition as it can appear only in the wake of the dissolution of the tradition.
(It is not simply that each tradition, each genre slips from itself, lending itself to hybridisations, but that tradition no longer has an 'itself', being the result of a kind of thickening or doubling up, a semblance created by marketing and journalism, by the need to classify and group. A semblance of genre interwoven with tradition 'itself' insofar as there was no 'itself', nothing in which it could come to rest, and nothing indeed to this 'itself' itself ...)
Will Oldham is as displaced from the fantasies of the richness of a country or blues tradition as Hölderlin is from Pindar - and as each of us is from any simple notion of belonging to a people or to a tradition. And even folk music is one genre among others; its life depends not upon following what is already given as a tradition, but of retaking it anew, reawakening it - and reawakening it as a reawakening, exposing the fact that it was never anything else but a series of repetitions - and allowing it to breathe in the rebirth of a genre (of the genre, of tradition as nothing other than a series of rebirths).
The Dream of the Archive
It may seem that in a certain sense, the vanguardism of pop and rock has worn itself out. Now that everything is available through peer to peer networks, it is as though a river has issued into the sea. All music is co-present, all of it available, and gone are the old prejudices that would elevate high over low art. This may appear to be a version of Malraux's 'imaginary museum' - everything is present, but at a distance from us, being set behind varnish in dizzying profusion. We feel a 'museum sickness', being first of all amazed that everything is obtainable, then a little bored, then, finally, indifferent.
Phonography uproots and stirs up the dead in a time of need, letting what is enclosed by the archive to happen again, but now in a different sense. To retake says Kierkegaard, is not to reminisce - not, that is, to remember the past according to the measure of constituted identities, but to repeat what never happened in the past.
A whole discourse associated with the art music tradition has crumbled like cliffs into an encroaching sea. The great names already canonised in rock and pop are joined by forgotten others, but by what has been forgotten in those same great names. Minor albums, neglected songs, byways unfollowed come forward in the vast, glistening sea of the archive. The past can engage us in its infinite differentiation.
Then there is no need to read Will Oldham as representing a lost past, an old wierd America; certainly, one might hear in his music the open-throated Pentecostalist, the leaning-together of bluegrass voices, the ballad voice which reminds us of blind destiny; but as he protests, he was as much a listener to Dinosaur Jr. as to Jimmie Rogers. In Will Oldham, the musical archive discovers itself anew. Or the artist is only a dream of the archive, produced from deep within its unconsciousness. A dream, then, a phantasm not of the sleeper who will wake and stretch his arms in the morning of a new tradition, but of a dead man who will never wake, like the poet of Basho's haiku.
Modernity
This is the modernity of a figure like Will Oldham, that hides itself to the extent that we enclose his work within genres whose existence seems to be self-evident. Like Hölderlin, he exists on the other side of a great divide, one that came later to music (and perhaps to cinema) than to other arts.
For Will Oldham as for Hölderlin, there is no substantive community; both will have to improvise an ethos that's otherwise missing. The difference with Hölderlin is that the same sea of music in its endless profusion is trawled by the nets of the entertainment corporations. Great lights are shone across the surface of the water, and for the artist who wants to do more than appeal to a public dreamt up publicity machines and marketers, a practice of withdrawal is necessary; a plunge into the depths.
Will Oldham understands the need for withdrawal, for a kind of willed obscurism that resists the commodification of music. As in the famous Magritte painting, in which it is the back of a man's head that is made to face us, he knows he can only present himself in his absence. Will Oldham must become Other if he is to honour his music.
It is this withdrawal that matters as it lays claim to Will Oldham's music and to Will Oldham and his audience through that music. It can now be characterised as a relationship to the archive that counts as it is given in a kind of repetition. His is not the vanguardism of an absolutely new music, but a retaking of what has already happened, letting it happen again. His is a kind of fall into the past, or a way of letting the past fall into the present not from an exalted height, as if it were a question of recomposing Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones all over again, but from the falling that had already lain claim to it (think of Cat Power's frail, broken cover).
Here, it is not a question, that is of what a performer wants or plans to do, but a kind of necessity, of a need implicit in the relation to music. This is explicitly marked in the simplicity, even primitivism, of Will Oldham's playing, which we cannot listen to as evidencing a pure naivete.
Who can be naive today when everything, all styles, all musics have become available? And it is marked more strongly still in Will Oldham's lyrics where, within an idiom with which we might feel ourselves familiar, he lets his lyrics be drawn into a new kind of play, where the word God is as though led by the hand outside the closed spaces of churches, mosques and temples. Or perhaps, in a strange sense, it does not signify at all, or rather, concentrates in some sense what reaches us as Will Oldham's music in its withdrawal from cynicism and opportunism.
God Lies Within
Take the song, Pushkin from The Palace Brothers' Days in the Wake. It's a small music - this is a short song from a suite of short songs, the length of the album only 27 minutes, an intense, concentrated music. A voice that is somehow fatalistic or impassive.
Why 'Pushkin'? Who does it name? Whose name is that of the great poet, the one who made a poetic language for the Russians? Perhaps it is a name for Will Oldham himself, who said once he wanted to record under the name Push. It begins:
'God is the answer/ God is the answer/ God is the answer/ God lies within'.
These lines sung, stated in singing. As though it were necessary to defend God, or the fact of God. Reiterated: God is the answer. And then: 'God lies within'. Above all within, in that intimate space closed upon itself and enclosed from the world. How necessary it is to defend that intimacy, and to know that God is there in that intimacy. That the answer is already there.
Then, repeated four times, 'And you can't say that I didn't learn from you'. Four times, over and again. To whom is the singer singing?
'And I will not have a good time/ But leave me just the same/ The statue marks the place here/ Where Pushkin stood his claim'.
The narrator wants to be left alone. Exclude him; he doesn't want a good time. He is thinking about the statue - himself? - where the one called Pushkin took his stand, made his claim (I can't quite make out the lyrics). Is he also Pushkin? The chorus again 'God is the answer ...' Again, the entreaty that God lies within. It is not sung plaintively but factually. It is a fact that God is there, and one which must be sung again. Sing to reach God. Sing to remind yourself that God is there.
'And I guess that she couldn't tell me/ Because she found it very frightening/ And though a lead slug would have felled me/ Pushkin rides the lightning'.
The last verse. To ride the lightning - this is slang, I think, for dying in the electric chair. Pushkin dies, electrocuted. He has been punished, but for what? 'A lead slug would have felled me' - is Pushkin part of the narrator? An accursed part? And who is 'she'?
The mystery should not be resolved. There is no key to this song. Someone is singing of God. Someone needs to remind his audience of God. Someone is dying. He is called Pushkin. And someone could have been felled. Violence is close to us, but so is the one who is called God.
Sincerity
Will Oldham's lyrics do not signify quickly; they do not say, you are like me, or presume a shared language between musician and listener. The song is an interruption; at issue is not an experience of sharing, as if this would presume the commensurability of the terms of that sharing. But there is a way of sharing that incommensurability, as if it was in this that the impersonality of the Other that would allow musician and listener to be engaged by their respective becomings. I think this is marked by the sincerity that bears his music.
Here, it is not a property of the voice that is at issue, but what bears it; not particular signs or significations, but the fact of its address. Sincerity is a sense that something must be said; a kind of imperative. It is as present in a gentle, unassertive voice just as sings with a strident one. It is as yet untutored; there is in it a uncontrolled wavering, which nostalgists miss in his more recent work.
He whines, others will say; he sings out of tune. But perhaps the trouble is his voice is too much like our own - that is, to the voice of those who are non-singers, non-players. Close to us, however, he is also removed. This withdrawal is what laps forward in his songs as sincerity, understood as a relation that opens between musician and music and between audience and music.
God lies within - what does this mean? Shared between artist and audience is that doubling up of the world that occurs in the work. This might sound mysterious. We can think of it with Heidegger: there is a difference, he says, between being, understood as the horizon against which things come to appear, and beings, those particular things, people, which appear to us. Anything is more than it appears to be. Or rather, this 'to be' watches over the indeterminability of the experience of the world and gives itself to be experienced as the engagement in question.
But perhaps the horizon in question is broken by another relation (or rather, as Levinas will sometimes write, a relation without relation), by a kind of sincerity that bears music, and with respect to which even the most dour music is borne by a kind of hope. Is it naive to suggest that such sincerity escapes cynicism and opportunism? It is not that the artist is the Other, but the relation between the artist and ourselves as it is given in the work. The holy is not a place from which the artist speaks. It is that speaking, the address that occurs as the work.
Mutual Becoming
The Other is closer to God than me, says Levinas, who stands in a tradition of dialogism that we do not have to disavow because we think of ourselves as atheists. This is because the relation to the Other is accomplished as an act of creation, which breaks apart the horizon of the present. No longer a question of the 'to be', says Levinas, insofar as it is predicated on the self-perpetuation of the same. Creation comes from without, from the outside. It is not a question of becoming other, which remains a variation on the self (even when the self, like being is understood verbally, as it is for Heidegger), but of being opened to the Other.
But the reference to Levinas can mislead us, since, at least in his early work, he confuses the Other as it is given as a term and the Other as it is given as a relation. That is, he attributes to the Other what is given in the relation to the Other, providing a kind of double of the metaphysics of the subject he wants to overcome. (I will return to this criticism on another occasion.)
With Will Oldham, it is what speaks in his personae, the 'he', the 'it' that is Other, and not the singer himself. It is in terms of his relation to these personae that we have to understand Will Oldham's life as an artist and his relationship with his audience, and not the other way round.
What would it mean to say that Will Oldham is closer to God than I am? That he is closer to living with the peculiar necessity of creation, answering to that becoming-other to which Will Oldham owes his existence as an artist. It is as if at the depths of himself he bore something completely Other, with respect to which he, too, is in the position of a listener. And it is the Other that also claims his listeners, joining them and Will Oldham in a 'common approach' or mutual becoming where each relates to the music as to the unknown.
What he creates is not ex nihio, from nothing, but a reawakening of the archive; he sings with everyone who has ever sung. He sings not from the past, but from the future anterior, from the needfulness of a relation to the future that escapes the projection of cynicism and opportunism.
