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.