A few words about Bill Mallonee’s lush, cornucopia of songs.
Ending the Preface to his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes these words.
It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another—but, of course, it is not likely.
Bill Mallonee’s newest offering, Lead on, Kindly Light faces a similar problem. Mallonee would no doubt grant the poverty of his work, and he calls attention repeatedly to the darkness of this time. But, much like Wittgenstein, he stubbornly hopes to bring light into one heart or another. No, it is not likely. We each have a heart full of weeds, tall weeds; it is hard for light to get in. And even if we see a little light, true blue, we are too ponderous, too full of devices and of the 21st Century to rouse into concerted action. Mostly, like Nietzsche’s ‘Last Man’, we blink. And turn on the blue-light filter. A little sleep, a little closing of the eyes in sleep. All apps, we lack application.
Kindly Light is a dialogic album, lush with interlocutory guitars. Mallonee’s singing, his plain but precise phrasing, his wife Muriah’s delicate, tasteful harmonies, needlework through the songs, stitching together the different conceptual orders of melody and words. Like exceptional conversation, the songs become bearers of meaning as wholes beyond what they are about, centrifugally. In an elusive sense, they are meaningful in themselves, centripetally.
But, centrifugally, what are the songs about? — About the accumulated weight of human experience, bourne by an individual but touching the lives of all: about the unappeasable hunger of the human imagination, the irrepressible vanity of human wishes, the endless tedium of another day and our sickened anxiety over wasted time, — about our damaged hearts and darkling fates. There is no emigration from a world bursting with evil and sorrow, despite the fact that we all seem to have immigrated here. Death guards the borders, fencing us in.
That makes Kindly Light seem more about (the) darkness (of this time) than about light, and that is misleading. The songs chart the path of light in the darkness, its dimming and brightening. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. The light is there, never really gone, but we will not admit it. It’s easier to lapse into darkness. A little sleep…
The songs of Kindly Light all are cries of, cries for, wakefulness, for admitting the light, fighting toward it, for it. But it is also a reminder that our spontaneity is ever a receptive spontaneity, that our words were never the first words, are never The Word. And the light we admit, fight toward, fight for, will never allow us (to borrow John Henry Newman’s phrase) “to see the distant scene”. Light enough for the next step — that is what we can admit, fight toward, fight for. Some light in the brain, in the heart, enough to hazard everything, as we all do everyday, — no choice —, though we hide the fact from ourselves. We do not choose or see our path but we have to walk nonetheless. Time forces our footfalls. Will we sleepwalk or take the single step, awake, we have light enough to see?
The songs are sermons but not of the televangelist variety that rules today, preachers on screens, holygrams. No. The sermonizer here is sermonizing himself: Mallonee is his own congregation. He needs to hear what he is saying. We all need to be reminded more than informed. No message here from on-high, UHF. The message is sung from a modest place among the least of these, in poorness of spirit, from among the weeds by the wall.
For fans of melody, there is much here, songs that stay in the ear of the mind, that end up being hummed almost absently during the day’s business. The songs are unhurried, the guitars linger on, over and around the melodies. The listener is drawn into the dialog of the songs, asked to join it, given spaces to fill. These songs are, as Mallonee says life is (in “A Borrowing of Bones”), “a gift by slow degrees…
No blinding flash of light & few epiphanies/No one really leaves with anything that is his own/You get your doubts and a borrowing of bones…
Mallonee gets his doubts and he gets ours. All our bones are borrowed bones. We must return them in the end, like it or not. But, until then — lead on, kindly light. These songs hallow that light and, moonlike, reflect it back to the listener.
