Blind Willie Johnson and time

Sunday 3/8/26

We speak so often of time, but nearly just as often we fail to consider--let alone understand--that time isn't necessarily about seconds, minutes, hours, years, decades, etc.

It takes about an hour-and-a-half to listen to the complete recorded output of Blind Willie Johnson, but what does that mean? How is it not a hundred years' worth of time, and so on, in a different but real regard?

We can do the same with word counts and fiction. Not all word counts are created equally. Someone's fifteen words can be someone else's fifteen million words...and counting, because that second person's words, however amalgamated, never approach the heights and depths of the place inhabited and transcended by that first person's fifteen.

To listen to the discographical corpus of Blind Willie Johnson is to listen to a lifetime's amount of musical art. Which you can do in the space of the other version of time needed to watch two formulaic, instantly forgettable episodes of whatever on Netflix.