wandering songs
What if Lucas’s ‘Wandering Songs’ [canciones errantes] aren’t songs about wandering, as close reading suggests, but songs that wander—as you see, squinting, with your vision blurred?1
This criticism that employs the fleeting view, the first impression, reveals that a song is “Like wandering smoke, a song drifts across time and space—cresting in Woody Guthrie’s recording of ‘Worried Man Blues,’ subsiding into silence, then rising again when I lift my banjo and pluck the melody: ‘I’m a-worried now, but I won’t be worried long.”
This criticism makes a difference between a song about wandering (a song that represents wandering) and a song that wanders (a song that produces wandering [Ù50]). Julio’s writings can be seen this way too: as songs that wander. I play them again and again, when I read and reread, when I think and talk and write about them. When I set their frozen, suspended selves into motion, bending them with the light of my eyes and desires and moments, they begin to do things perhaps, that he only vaguely imagined.
Sometimes, Deleuze suggests I read books as I play an album, not necessarily start to finish, but by choosing cuts. At other times he compares writing to an electric current: it is always there, but I can – I must – plug into it to make it work.2 That’s a wandering song.
1 Julio Cortázar, “Lucas, His Wandering Songs,” A Certain Lucas, Trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Knopf, 1984), pp. 115-117. In Spanish: “Lucas, sus canciones errantes,” Un tal Lucas [1979] Cuentos Completos/2 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1996), pp. 293-294.
2 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, Trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 8.