Spurious

I Was There

Track of the year? Easy. Rickie Lee Jones' 'I was There', from The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard.

I am admirer of devotional music, music that seems to meditate on an events in religious narratives - not, though Taverner's 'musical icons' which seem kitschy to me (but perhaps I am put off my the image of the solitary composer that he presents; the creator-aristocrat), nor Arvo Part's petrified choral pieces, ice cold, out on the planet Mars.

It's a voice close to speech that I want to hear - a speech-song, close to popular idioms, vernacular, and the devotion revealed in a happy deformation of song, the stretching of some part of its elements - it's becoming jazz-like, improvisational. And a sense of that voice trying to find something, discovering, and not only the heart of the narrative (in Rickie Lee Jones' case, the Passion). A voice that also discovers something of itself - that looks for itself in the singing. That sings to dwell in itself, looking for itself, losing itself, and this even in the case of RLJ, who after all has had a long career.

You can hear it on the whole album - The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard, a long meditation on the life of Jesus that cluminates in its last, long track, 8 minutes long (I'm listening to it now): something has been lost - the assurance of an RLJ idiom (not simply the jazz-boho shtick of the early albums. More than that), and found because of the narrative and its musing, its recreation (but the last album, The Evening of My Best Day was also a renewal - out of political rage, was that it?). Jesus on the Saint Monica Boulevard. Jerusalem become Los Angeles, but keeping too the old Biblical signifiers (Jerusalem, Israel, and Babylon ('what happened was Babylon ...')) - keeping them, renewing them as those names are mixed with new ones.

A devotional music - guitar-work Astral Weeks-like: generous, opening the song out into a song-world. Chords that open out the song, that right away you know will let it encompass everything. And the voice - intimate, searching, virtuosic in its dynamic changes, its softnesses and risings. And the lyrics - extemporised, made up all at once, you can hear that, I think.

Who is the RLJ who sings this? I haven't heard her before (previous highlights: her cover of 'Comin' Back to Me' from Pop Pop; the many sweet songs of Traffic in Paradise; 'Last Chance Texaco' that Morrissey played very loud to the muscians who would play on 'Late Night, Maudlin Street', another miracle of extemporisation ...) A devotional music - because it really is the Passion story that allows it. That story, retold, that permits of an entirely new mood in her singing. I've never heard her like this before ... she's never been heard like this before ...

I admit that I love Messianic lyrics - as on Nina Simone's album 'There's a New World Coming, as it resonates strongly with the contemporaneous civil rights movement - RLJ sings at the same end of times, but in a different way, more tenderly, intimately. 'There you were in your white dress shirt/ Most of all I loved your hands/ I loved them so much that it hurt ...' Witnessing for whom? The one the bartenders knew. And the pimps.

A devotional music. A song-prayer, but to whom? A passion - but for whom? For the voice, in part. For the singer's own voice that has become strange to her, and strange for us, her listeners. A rapt voice. A voice that moves - with dips and rallying points. Drowsy sometimes, but suddenly attentive. Almost asleep - sensually drowsy, I would want to say that. But waking - tenderly, and in a new kind of tenderness.

'I was there', she sings. And 'you were there', sung many times. 'Where Jesus walked'. She addresses the others who were there sometimes. There - with Jesus, or drinking wine and eating bread with him? or in communion? - and sometimes sings to Jesus himself: 'We thought you were going to set Israel straight ...', but Israel, now, is only the Biblical Israel, the chosen ones who are also the benighted ones.

Verses? A chorus? None of that. The song pulses. Not quite revolves. But returns to itself, regathering. Musing, meditating. Returning to an event, to the significance of the event. A récit of the event. A Bhagavad Gita of the event - a divine song that sings of the divine song. The song lodged in the greater song. 'You've been travelling in so many universes ...' Pulsing - the song rediscovers the song. And the singer her own singing, reaching deeper into her voice than she can. Devotional.

Don't mistake me. The song is not great because it undertakes a journey of faith. The Passion is the Passion of the song first of all. And the faith is given entirely by the voice, of the voice (just as Bob Dylan says: I don't believe in anything but those old songs). A voice rediscovers itself in the Passion. Rediscovers tenderness, sensuality. Rediscovers Babylon and Israel (the Biblical Israel). And the Nazarene? A name for what calls the voice, what draws it from itself. A name for that singing called forward in its maximal tenderness, in its stretched-out sensuality. Generosity - is that the word? Giving - is that it?

Who is RLJ's Jesus? Who is he, sung of in tenderness? Who that awakens this devotional song? A name for the sufferer of all suffering. A name for Jerusalem at the heart of Babylon, where suffering changes its direction, where it rears itself up into a life - where it lives concentrated in one agonised form. The Passion names nothing other than this. To suffer - and for whom? For everyone, and with the suffering of everyone. It is not that the meaning of suffering is changed. It is not. 'The Son of Man' is a name for all suffering. For suffering in the kingdom of Babylon, which is to say this world, the only world.

But there is the promise of a kind of redemption, too. The promise that is Messianism. Not of the transmutation of suffering. Not the end of pain. But the fact that it can be spoken - sung. That it is given issue and can be heard. That the wrongs can be heard, and perhaps right can be done. Babylon speaks and sings of itself. Babylon discovers Jerusalem and sings of it (the Biblical Jerusalem). That is devotion. That is what it had meant to be there. That's what it means to sing from there.

Fate

Sunday and I drag behind myself like a ball and chain. Why does Gillian Welch's 'I Dream a Highway' and the album it comes from become essential? Patience - that word. Songs hanging like sheets on the line to have the wind pass through them. To give evidence of the wind, its passing, but to be more than wind, or what is left by its imprint (desert features carved out by blown sand).

What passes through the music? What is the music languorous enough, patient enough to allow there to be found? A kind of necessity, I tell myself; fate, as it let itself be caught by the waterwheel that this song is, and this album. Is it her voice (and David Rawling's, as they lean into one each other)? Is it the steadiness of the playing?

To be caught? No: to catch the song, even as it allows itself to be caught. Time offers itself as an ally of the song, of the singing, of the playing. Time and what is dragged behind time. But as it does so, caught, letting itself be caught, it is lifted by the hope that is singing, by the fact of song. Lifted, lightened, not by overcoming time, but by sending it in another direction, and by way of my listening.

Am I lower than the song, or is it lower than me? Either way, I imagine it to reach me as through a change in level, the river that travels the long way to the sea. That's where the ashes are scattered in India - into rivers, and therefore into the sea, the former always searching for the latter.

So does the level of the song seem to want to come lower, to look for something and by way of my listening. Or that it is fate that wants to search in that way, and let itself be reborn in the song like an avatar. In the song as I hear it, as it runs down my listening.

Language Blues

1. With some novelists, it seems their characters substitute for them in some way - and that they may ever be sacrificed to a fate the writer might wish upon himself. I have never written a line of fiction - I dare not - and I wonder if this is because language seems an impassable barrier between what I would write and what it is given to me to write.

I am strongly drawn to programmatic notes, to prefaces and statements of methods in works of philosophy, or, especially, those moment in which a text draws attention to itself, and meditates upon the conditions of its own appearance. What status has a written text of philosophy that would condemn writing? Derrida, of course, has explored this question with great brilliance.

For my part, I ask the question more stupidly, but still as insistently. Or should I say the question returns in me, or that I am sometimes very little other than the place in which it returns? And I admit, too, that I am drawn to those moments when texts that are otherwise theoretical become autobiographical - that refer, in an example, to the room in which they are writing, or to the circumstances of composition.

And better still, when the text is allowed to reflect on its own gratuitousness, on that peculiar bootstrapping that allowed it to be born, lifting from the life of the writer, allowing it to make claims  about what is true, and right, and just: yes, this is very beautiful, when the philosopher falls from her own text to confess that what she has written rides above her. When she asks, and who am I, husk of the work that has given birth to itself through me, and by pushing me aside?

I love to bring a reading of a text as close as possible to psychologism. Isn't there that it becomes most striking how a text can leap from a life, out of it, transcending it? Isn't it at that moment the text becomes most blazingly magnificent? As though the philosopher, too, had to sacrifice herself in order to write. That there has to be sacrifice, the dying of a life that, henceforward, is only the husk of the work.

And then I think I hear it again, that rumbling, that murmuring that precedes everything that might be said, and in any of our names. It is language that rises up - medium, vehicle of sense, that speaks itself and against the claim that is made through language. At this moment, I move from a fascination with what passes periously close to psychologism to something else: what is the name of that reading that would press a text back into the thickness of language, to the way in which it congeals even before any message can be delivered?

Nevertheless, of course, despite that thickening, there is still sense; words must mean. But I think language loses itself in every text; I dream of an 'itself' of language that wanders in its own labyrinth, that speaks of itself and sings of itself in everything written.

2. But what kind of song is this? Perhaps the one sung, in Blah-Feme's post, by anon who comes out of the forest, and that is remarked again and again. A possessing song, a dispossessing one, inhabiting language and turning it aside. Is it outside language, or does it, by contrast, turn language outside, tearing it from anyone who would speak in their name? The first person becomes the third, the 'I speak', 'it speaks';  language is as though snagged by itself, being drawn repeatedly to that event in which it loses the capacity to make sense.

Before song, before music, only noise without form and without rhythm. Isn't the musical exactly this? For Kafka, as Blah-Feme says, the moment of writing was about pain, about discomfort. Certainly; but wasn't it also about the transmutation of suffering - that strange crossover wherein to write of one's pain and to ring changes upon it brought with it a remarkable shift.

By that 'merciful surplus of strength' is the pleasure of writing given; Kafka lies beneath his characters, dying as they die, but enjoying their death and pain. But his unfinished work shows, perhaps, that such enjoyment itself has its limit, there where dying cannot claim them, and where K. wanders without consolation and without death.

Kafka, too cannot die - is that why he broke away from the text and from what is unmasterable about language as it wanders in its own labyrinth, in language 'itself' as it no longers refers, no longer makes sense, even as it seems to speak by way of reference and by way of sense. It is here I find the musical - or perhaps only the noisy. Not a song, but a cry.

3. 'This book ought to have sung', Nietzsche writes in a preface to The Birth of Tragedy. Sung - and of its own pain, of the pain from which tragedy and music both issue. Then pain must be marked in song, and in the becoming-song of writing; music must sing in the text, with it, even if, for Nietzsche, music precedes what can be said and escapes it.

The sense of this escape, I think, makes him the last thinker of music as music - of music as it is unsubordinated to the fixity of language. But isn't it curious that Nietzsche, the composer, gave way to the writer who thought language should be made to sing? And who seems to glimpse, in the preface to his earliest book, the chance of a writing of pain, perhaps of a musical language, that would re-enact, in our time, the birth of tragedy?

Are we too early for music as music, or too late? (The right response to these kinds of questions: incredulous laughter - is this how high philosophy has lifted itself? Higher than everything? - Too high; it rides above me, and who am I that has fallen beneath?)

Naively, impatiently, and nagged by the meditations of Deleuze and Klossowski, I have always supposed a barrier exists between 'us' and Nietzsche: that there were disclosed in the twentieth century, suffering so base, so basic that it fell below any redeeming performance of pain?

Wasn't it with mass death that tragedy - the philosophy of tragedy, revived by Schelling, pursued by Hegel and Nietzsche and then completed in Heidegger - came to an end? I think the dream of a Dionysian music also ended there, in murmuring and noise, in a diffuse and general cry.

4. But there are other musics. What would it mean to claim that pain cannot be made to sing, not anymore? Only that the philosophy of tragedy is laughable, and that the idea of a great tradition of art music, that has come to hollow itself out is also laughable. Isn't it necessary to violently juxtapose say, Heidegger, with, say, Madonna?

Music as a gleeful practice, with no lofty ambition, no link to what posits itself as the great tradition of European music - pop, innocent and new born, the eternal cheeriness of a song that spreads like gossip or rumour through the world. Escapism? Rather a lightness without nostalgia for the discourses of authenticity - to those gloomy callers to order for whom each person is to return to himself.

The lightness of forgetting - not of what happened and continues to happen, the great misery of the world - a kind of optimism of language. Late at night among the bookshelves of an eminent philosopher, it was for a CD of Dionne Warwick we searched to accompany our drinking. But to group the popular under the category of lightness is ridiculous: isn't this another academic temptation: to take refuge in the forms that seem farthest away from academia?

Is this a call to acknowledge the debt of popular musics to that of slaves and the sons and daughters of slaves? A music that, one might think links itself to the plight of Israel, conjuring for itself a hopeful mythology out of abasement? But this, too, is naive: as if a music hasn't already deterritorialised itself from what might be discovered by way of political economy. As if the idols of authenticity had not already shattered. Doesn't Eric Clapton play the blues? Doesn't the blues become simply a style among others, in the Imaginary Concerthall?

But perhaps there is a way of tracing this and other musics back, up the stream of deterritorialisation. If blues or jazz have taken on aspects of art music - the latter, in particular, entering the academy at the point at which it seemed to become most radical - what would an investigation of country, the Low Other of popular music, reveal?

Reading Richard Middleton's Voicing the Popular, I read of the Gramscian notion of articulation as developed by Laclau and Mouffe and by Stuart Hall. But who are the people who might be reached thus? Are they the lumpenproletariat, raiding the dressing up box of older historical styles, who repeat history simply as farce, or the proletariat, the universal exception, who would reveal the tragedy of the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century and then come to themselves? From tragedy to hope. Songs which sound that tragedy - 'We're low, we're low, we're very, very low' - but in which there flashes the coming revolt, the last repetition.

But I always wonder about those who have fallen from the proletariat and from any proletariat - the nameless, the indefinite. The fallen ones. Not even a proletariat; not even a people.

5. I dream of a song that is born out of suffering just as Kafka describes his writing to be begin in that 'merciful surplus of strength' that carries him into writing, and transmutes the suffering from which he begins. A singing that allows a particular suffering to pass into the greater suffering that rumbles and murmurs in language. Is it the blues that sings? The blue note of jazz?

Or perhaps pain cannot be made to sing. Or it is the unlimiting of the song, the passage from music to anonymous rumbling. Today I tell myself - foolishly, stupidly - that it is only in falling that you will let sound the language blues. 'Who am I?' - 'Anon.' - 'Who am I?' - 'The one in whom language lets sing what cannot be sung.'

Dummies

His voice wanders in itself. For me - I'm not thinking of anyone else. Just for me does it exert this fascination. And this 'for me' is the cause of my own wandering in myself. I follow him; I search for a discography, I look out for his CDs: he has been everywhere, travelled everywhere, and so must I.

Does he know what his voice becomes? Is he, too, fascinated by the 'itself' of his voice, his voice itself? Perhaps there are singers fascinated by their own voices. Who seek only to follow it, to find songs that best suit its wandering. Who from their own labels to record their own songs, who travel everywhere, to the four corners of the world so that it can wander yet further. I owe this to my voice. I owe everything to my voice, for who am I apart from my singing?

Then the singer, like the listener, is set back from his voice. It is not his. He belongs to his voice; it is his ventriloquist. Puppet, how will you ever be capable of the voice you were given? But to whom is it given, this gift? Only to itself, and to its wandering. The voice is already lost, the gift given to itself somewhere far away from you. Now you, like me, are only a listener. You like, me, are the dummy of the voice.

Three dummies of this kind: Will Oldham, who falls short of his voice in serious joy, seeking out collaborative friendships; Chan Marshall, who falls short of it in hazy bewilderment, who can scarcely let herself sing one song in an hour's performance; Bill Callahan, who wants to be alone to fall short of his voice, letting it echo back to him in empty rooms.

Keening

Voice of stone, voice of the earth: to sing is to lose the capacity to sing; to listen to lose the ability to hear.

My voice? Yours? Not even that. A keening raised to the sky, like the shepherdess' cries in The Sacrifice, indiscernible at first from bird song. I tell myself that bird song is innocent, it does not suffer. Like water in water, immanent, it is unbroken joy. Generation succeeds generation in the fields, in the forests - but what happens when a voice is torn from the natural immediacy? A new voice keens, but a voice destined to suffer - a voice fitted to grief, ready for it.

But whose grief? Whose malaise? It is not that it is impossible to sing joyfully, but that joy always bears grief at its back. It suffers itself, the song, in the singer. Suffers and is thereby detached from everything but itself. Detached - but for all that, it does not come to itself.

Suffering lost in itself, the song lost in the song: keening sounds over the plain.

You Are Free

Faith: she would like to sing with no particular voice, the voice of everyone, the voice of no one. Would like to sing, not for everyone, but in place of everyone. To sing, and to sing of grief and what is lost, not to assuage it, but to accompany it. Not to wipe tears away but to weep with them. To weep for their weeping, for the fact of their tears: how is it she divides loss from itself? How is it she lets pain suffer itself in her singing?

Give grief to itself. Lift suffering from any particular sufferer. Let it become the destiny of no one, let it lift itself to the sky like the aurora borealis. Pain is absolute. Suffering is in the ice and in sky.

You Are Free: but from what does she free us? She abandons pain to itself; she gives grief to grief. Freedom: lift pain to become the whole sky. Lift it, let it flash to itself above the sufferer.

Reverb

Abandon singing to itself, let it sing. Abandon the voice to itself. Why is it only in the act of abandonment that singing is given? Why only then, after abandonment, does it sing and sing of itself?

'Itself': in what corridors is it lost? In what dream? Because it seems to dream of itself. Seems to be lost in itself, with a reverb, now, that is internal to voice - it is not a treatment, but belongs to it already, as though it were always far away, even from he who has been given it. Far away: and with what does it echo? Where has it travelled, this voice that is as old as time?

Reverb before reverb, abandonment: Jason Molina's voice. How can he entrust his voice to itself? How to give it to itself so that it can give singing in turn?

The Sirens' Song

1. Beasts fear them, and the gods shun them. Is this why the Sirens sing out to passing ships from their island? By their song, they would reach the others, like them, who are feared and shunned. Why then do they seek to kill them - why do they try to wreck their ships on the rocky shore of their island?

I think Odysseus learned their secret, he who refused, like the others, to plug his ears with wax. Lashed to the mast of his ship, he endured what his sailors could not, and heard the Sirens sing of the pain of their immortality, and knew why they cried out to the only ones, like them, who were exiled from both nature and Olympus.

For the Sirens, death was a homecoming, the return to what could not live. How to discover the path home? In their loneliness, their exile, they sought to destroy the ones whose pain could come to term.

Agony. Odysseus cried out, and joined his cry to theirs. They fell silent. What had they heard: that the ones who could die also endured the inability to die, that this mortal, was, like them, immortal. For doesn't pain bear with it the impossibility of pain's cessation? Isn't the agony of dying what does not cease to die?

2. His cry is also their song, and their song what cries out in all human pain.

3. There is pain, there is singing: how to speak of a pain that will not end, and a singing that does not cease?

It is not by our relation to death that we retrieve our humanity, but by our relation to pain. Relation? The shattering of relation. Death turned outside itself and wandering without cease. What is song but the Sirens' song, that seeks a term for the indeterminable, to exchange immortality for death?

Pain

Orpheus hardly hears himself singing; he sings and that is all. The forest falls silent when he sings; the gods pause, the beasts listen. And of what does he sing? Of gods, I imagine, of beasts, of the forest in which he wanders. Strange doubling - a song of the forest in the forest. Song that passes through words. Isn't that what makes the gods pause, and the beasts? Here is a human being - here, and perhaps for the first time, is music.

Music that must pass through words, music that is never yet itself, that is given only as it lets language tremble. Orpheus is the first singer, the first musician. But of what does he bring to song, even as he sings of gods, of beasts? What is it that doubles itself by his song?

For Nietzsche, notes Schmidt, music has a precedence over language; only the language of tragedy approximates the song that surges before speech. In music, 'pain is pronounced holy'; music is the 'language of the will in its immediacy'. And in the preface he appends to The Birth of Tragedy many years after its publication, doesn't he regret that his book did not sing?

How to make Dionysian art intelligible? 'Through the wonderful significance of music dissonance'. Dissonance, pain: is music, for Nietzsche, the language of the birds and beasts? Is it a language of the gods? Perhaps it is only to tragedy that it answers, in a dissonance that returns to tear harmony apart.

Orpheus sings. There is pain in the forests; birds die, beasts die, but do they sing of their pain? And the gods - what do they know of shattered harmony? Orpheus sings of gods and beasts, but he sings as one who is neither, who knows for the first time, the pain of existence. But a pain, now, of the tearing apart of natural harmony.

The beasts stir, the gods at the edge of heaven listen with awe: who is this new being whose existence is pain? From whence comes the song that tears apart all joy?

The Head of Orpheus

Orpheus, after Eurydice was sent back to Hades a second time, lost himself in loss. He went back to the forests with his harp, singing as he wept, weeping as he sang. But why then did the Naiads who should have pitied him tear him apart? Why did he not move them to tears of their own, he who had lost his beloved twice over?

But who can bear the limitlessness of suffering? Who but wants to put an end to grief? They fell upon him and tear him apart, throwing his remains into the river. It is said that his head continued to sing as it disappeared into the waves, and that it sings yet.

Each singer is Orpheus, each the one the Maenads tear apart. To sing, to suffer: equivalents, one and the same. That is the tautology of song. But singing breaks itself from singing; it searches for its term. Singing is not always the infinite; the 'to sing' delimits itself in the 'I sing'. But why is it I imagine that Orpheus's head sings regardless, and that the limit always quivers with the limitless?