Some of the songs on Days in the Wake are addressed to 'you' - but who is the singer addressing? In 'I Send my Love to You', it seems clear: he is singing to his love, declaring what he has sent (my love, my hands, my clothes, my nose, my trees, my pleas ...) and asking for 'some' to be sent back to him. What does he want? 'Your ways, your call, your days' - all of this.
The joy of this song is that of a kind of dismemberment. He will send himself in bits - but, too, he will send parts of the landscape (my trees) and even his own pleas (he would send his own song to her, sending his singing so it was hers in advance). Who is she? Like him, she is inextricable from a milieu, a world (your ways, your call, your days), a time-space she inhabits and which it inhabits itself in her as a kind of style. So the days become-her just as she becomes in her days (they are the site of her becoming). Who is she? In the end, a style, a way the world is, the way the world is reborn in her and by her coming to presence. Time and space are not the indifferent repository of a style, they are enstyled, experienced as styled. They are sung and they sing in and with the singer.
In the last verse, he sings of becoming-duck (My head is bleeding/ And I'm a duck); the lake cracks, he sings, as it hears him quack. The world changes; the cosmos transforms himself because of his loving, his sending and his singing. All three are equivalent; all three belong to the time of the 'to love', the 'to send' and the 'to quack'. The laughter of this song is one of a happy dissolution, of that happy undoing through which the cosmos is released to becoming. Then once again, it is a matter of release, of attaining release through song, as singing. In song, in singing, the universe is deliquescing.
Listening to this song, I am reminded of another. In 'Whither Thou Goest', the song finishes: 'Scream my name above the sun/ Above the engine's carnal din/ Above the calves who bleed their lungs out/ Baa baa moo moo baa baa baa'. Is the last line the singer's name? Is he the one who baas and moos above the beasts who die? Is he the condition of lowing and baaing despite the machinery of slaughter? Perhaps to sing, for Will Oldham, is also this: not just to commemorate the ones who were slaughtered, but to recall their living as it lifts itself above all dying. Their living - the song of their living - as though it resounded in the skies above the slaughterhouses.
Even this song is a song of joy. As though to sing is to receive by feedback the sound of one's singing from the whole world, the whole cosmos. As if the whole cosmos sang in your singing and only increased the fervour of your singing. Until your singing body becomes the body of the cosmos as it is released into becoming.