Josephine the Songstress

At her concerts, and most especially during troubled times, there's only a small few who take any interest in the songstress herself, such as she is-perhaps there's a fairly large group up there in the front rows who are curious as regards to how she manages to pucker her lips, how she forces the air out from between her dainty little teeth, that they experience a bit of awe and marvel over how the tone fades away and how she is able to use this transient dissolution to her own advantage, how she practically dies, putting herself out and thereby firing herself up for her subsequent performance, her song that becomes ever the less understandable as it progresses, but the essential mass of the populace-this is very clear to see-the multitude have retreated into themselves. Here in the meager pauses between its battles the folk finds itself in a dream state, it's as if the limbs of the individual were finally relaxed, as if those who are bereft of peace and calm were finally allowed to throw them-selves upon the great bed of warmth of the folk where, then, they might stretch themselves. And within these dreams Josephine's whistling rings out here and there-she calls this pearling, we call it stuttering-but in any event it belongs here more than anywhere else, this is its place where it might be received as, then, music hardly ever finds any particular attentiveness bestowed upon it, there's just nobody out there waiting for the next great song. There's something of the poverty of our shortened childhood in this, something of what has been lost and of the bliss that we'll never be able to find again, but there's also something of our active day-to-day existence, something of the small, inconceivable gaiety that is yet there and which refuses to die-and all of this, truly, all of this is not to be spoken using the great tones of brass instruments, rather it requires a light touch, a whisper, an intimate trust that sometimes talks a bit hoarsely. Naturally, it's a whistling-how else? Whistling is the language in which we speak, though there's many a soul who whistles away for the entirety of his or her long life and doesn't even once know it, but here whistling has become freed from the chains of our daily lives, the restrictions that life forces upon us and, so, this frees us too-if only for a little while. This is why we never wanted to miss these performances.