Josephine the Songstress
by Franz Kafka
In private conver-sations amongst trusted friends we admit this quite openly, that Josephine's songs aren't, as songs go, anything all that out of the ordinary, there's nothing essentially miraculous about them. And, is it even song at all? Despite our fundamental lack in things musical we do have a substantial history that has come down to us about singing; in earlier times our forefathers were musical-there are legends that inform us about all of this and, indeed, even still we have some of these songs though, to be sure, nobody has any idea as to how they're to be sung. I don't know why it is that in the course of centuries we became so thoroughly disinterested in any sort of music, that, indeed, we became fundamentally hostile toward it, perhaps this is due to our particular destiny, that somehow we were chosen for this: that we worship stillness, stepping back within ourselves and not really being committed and, so, in all actuality we don't have much choice in this. But however all of this may be, we still do have some premonition of what song is and our premonition, to be perfectly honest, goes against her artistry, what Josephine actually does when she's singing. For, taken in an absolute sense, is this really singing at all?-perhaps, indeed, all that she really manages to do is a sort of whistling? And everybody knows whist-ling inside and out, this is the core artistry of our folk or, rather, it's not even deserving of the name "art," rather it's simply how you would characterize us, this is what we do: a soft kind of whistling with an undercurrent that hisses; and there's really just two sorts: the melancholic, ascetic, dreamy sort that typically is weak and pervasive; and then there's the triumphant, full-bodied tone that tends to have sharp contours. Thus, we're all natural born whistlers and nobody would ever think about labeling this as being art; sure, now and again somebody might do a bit of research into this propensity of ours and how it contributes to some particular topic, but in general everybody whistles without even thinking about it and, indeed, without even so much as noticing it and, moreover, it's quite certain that the greater majority don't even know that whistling is the one characteristic that defines who we are most intimately.