Spurious

The Hunger Artist: Jandek in Performance

Kafka's hunger artist starves because he can find nothing he wants to eat. He starves and that starvation is his art - crowds come to watch him in his age, standing guard to make sure he doesn't cheat. Of course, the music of Jandek is the result of a choice: when it comes to live performances, there's the question of who is going to comprise the group, joining Sterling Smith (or, as he is known to concert bookers, the Representative from Corwood, that being his record label, which releases Jandek recordings) - or whether, indeed, anyone will join him at all; the length, duration and style of the songs (decided on the day of the performance, with a runthrough of the set with participating musicians, all of whom are given a considerable say in the direction of the music) and the venue itself (Corwood is very specific with its requests). And of course, with respect to the studio albums, there are choices of instrumentation, recording techniques, lyrics and so on, even as there is also a large element of improvisation in the performances. But in another sense, there seems to be no choice at all: follow the lyrics - especially those on the thematically linked albums that have appeared since the turn of the millennium, which trace, among other things, the ups and downs of a love affair, and the song-suites that have comprised some recent live performances - and it is clear, I think, that they have at their heart, a man in extremity, a man who performs because he falls short of the ordinary happiness most of us take for granted. He searches, for the most part in vain, for something to eat, but finds nothing. Nothing, that is, except perhaps performance itself, and the hope that I think is implicit to finding and addressing an audience.

Performing live, Smith's face (the Representative's) is almost always blank. It's not a mask, but the absence of masks; a space onto which you can project anything at all, but only because there's nothing to there; because, with rare lapses, it remains disarmingly still, subtracted from expression. Yet, for all that, he is an intensely physical player. We can watch him shuffle and dip as he plays his guitar - we can watch his careful enunciation of his lyrics as he leans into the microphone, stretching his words, moaning them, or letting them rise into a despondent wail, but the face, half hidden by a fedora, is without expression and his thin, ageless body is always hidden in black. We can expect no stage banter - no 'thank you' for applause; when his guitar string breaks onstage during his performance at Newcastle, he waits, head down and silent for three long minutes until another guitar is brought to him from backstage. Indeed, he never even glances out into the audience or acknowledges its presence. He might as well, notes the observer of a solo piano and vocal performance in Hasselt, Belgium, be playing in an empty bar.

And yet, for all that, he will sometimes reference the live situation in his lyrics. 'I made a mistake coming here today', he sings in London at the beginning of a solo guitar/vocal gig. And he sings, 'I wore a scarf in Denmark/ just like I said I would', at a performance in Aarhus, Denmark, and refers to 'the ticket that exploded' at a gig that was part of a festival celebrating the work of William Burroughs in Amsterdam. It works another way too - as Barry Esson, Jandek's erstwhile promoter and MC, announced at a gig rescheduled in Brooklyn after Hurricane Katrina prevented a performance, 'the emotion behind this event is in tribute to New Orleans'. Lyrics are written to reflect the location and the occasion of the gig, even if, at the same time, as was clear to audiences at Camber Sands and Bristol in his UK dates in late 2005, he would flip almost randomly the pages of the book he brought with him on tour (resting, at the first of these gigs, on an improvised keyboard stand and a kitchen tray) to pick out phrases to sing.

There are moments when the stage persona, for a moment, breaks - when, for example, someone calls out between songs in Chicago, in 2006, 'Where have you been man?', eliciting a rare, quickly suppressed smile from the Representative, or, on another occasion, he asks into his microphone, 'is this thing on?' But almost all accounts of seeing Jandek live emphasise the ghostly intangibility of the performer (he's called a 'cowboy ghost' according to a review of the Aarhus gig), and the way the Representative seems to drift on and off the stage (even, on one occasion, emerging with his band from a trap door in the floor). The distance from his audience that Smith carefully maintains is not part of the cultivation of mystique; I think it is an attempt to honour, rather, the music itself - to preserve it in its distance and its mystery.

Even Jandek's disparagers honour this distance, intentionally or otherwise. For all his horror at the music, Irwin Chusid's first response to Jandek's debut Ready for the House, passed to him by a radio station colleague in 1980, was to wonder at the fact that someone had gone to the effort of releasing it at all. On an interview included as an extra on the Jandek on Corwood DVD, he remembers being stunned by the 'amusicality' of the album, by its 'sheer emptiness'; 'I'd never heard anything that was so naked' - but what really mystifies him is the effort its maker had gone to to record material, get it pressed and then distributed. Why bother at all? 'It could be worst record ever released[....] It could also be the greatest record ever released. I can't figure it out ...', wrote Chusid to the artist in 1980. He decides, of course, in favour of the former - which fails, for him, to fall into the category of 'so bad, it's good' that he celebrates in his rag-bag of a book Songs in the Key of X. It is really only the myth of Jandek - recycled, clichéd accounts of an instrumentally incompetent recluse concerned for unfathomable reasons to move some of the albums he has had pressed - that concerns him.

The lure of such a myth is undeniable. For many years, all that was known of the man behind Jandek was the record sleeves, many of which (as we can now be sure) depict Smith himself, the Representative, at various ages in a variety of situations, sometimes making use of image-altering software. For Richard Unterberger, the album cover photographs show 'all the attention to framing and focus of the do-it-yourself stalls at Woolworth's' - but their artlessness is their merit, being inseparable from the recordings they sleeve. There is nothing affected about them, nothing ironical or distancing - they simply are, and uncannily so. The blank, defiant face of Six and Six matches perfectly this hard, anaesthetised recording - but if the smiling man in a cardigan in front of a country barn seems the very contrary of the despairing intoner of Worthless Recluse (an acapella recording notable for the particular extremity it reaches on some of the pieces), this doesn't matter. Is it a holiday snap? A record of a visit to a relative in the countryside? Its incongruity seems exactly the point: an ordinary man created these songs - a man with a past like anyone else. What are we to make of Smith apparently becoming a Sufi on the covers of Raining Down Diamonds and Khartoum? Is it an oblique religious or political commentary, following 9/11 (the albums were released in 2005, but were perhaps recorded earlier ...) ... the sign, perhaps, that all religions are one, and that Smith is encouraging us to reach a hand to the Islamic world in fidelity and friendship? Perhaps the cover photographs mean nothing at all; perhaps they mean everything. 'Explanations are, in fact, only a moment in the tradition of the inexplicable', writes Agamben, 'they are the moment, to be precise, which keeps watch over it by leaving it unexplained'.

More recently, the sleeves have not always pictured Smith - they are what appear to be holiday snaps from Cork, the Dingle penninsula in Ireland and Chester, in Northwest England, and, most recently, a series of rural scenes. What are to read into all this? Everything - since the space is blank and will admit of an infinite variety of transferences - and nothing, since it is blank and remains so. Perhaps, as Smith said to Katy Vine about his music and his relation to Jandek, 'there's nothing to get'; perhaps this 'nothing' is the correlate of the man who sings and plays at the heart of Jandek: it is Smith himself, or rather it is a hungry absence in the space of Smith, who can find nothing he wants to eat.

The outsider artist, as Chusid and Unterberger use this term, is unwitting: he does not know what makes his work interesting, but merely gets on with it; it issues from him with perfect ingenuousness. He simply does it - and it is what makes him what he is; the outsider works by instinct, perhaps in a manner more direct and naive than others, and can be admired (or mocked) for this reason. Like the man who builds a palace from tin cans in his backyard, his work would be the monument to a magnificent eccentricity; the wonder is that it exists at all. It can be admired (he does everything on his own terms), or reviled (no one else would release his music) - what matters is that dogged directness that is so naive, so simplistic, so untrained it's significant as a phenomenon.

Perhaps this rather patronising category does capture something important about Jandek's oeuvre - its tenacity, its seeming perversity (quote) bespeak a musical vision that can seem a simple incompetence. Yet at its best, on albums like I Threw You Away from the recent run of studio albums, or the early Chair Beside a Window, or a difficult album like Put My Dream On This Planet, this music can be said to belong to the outside only in the sense that it maintains an extremity almost unparalleled within the singer/songwriter idiom. This is what commentators like Chusid even as they disparage the music: holding itself at its distance and its reserve, it is entirely apart.

Heidegger writes that the origin of the work of art is to be considered apart from both artist and artwork. It is a spring - an Ursprung - that wells up in what he calls the working of the work of art, the way it struggles into existence. The moment of inspiration is blind in some vital sense; it belongs outside the artist. Indeed, in the philosophy of art, it was always thus - Plato fears the poet for precisely this reason: he or she may be divinely inspired, but inspiration is a form of possession or madness (see the Apology, the Ion and the Meno). In the Phaedrus, we find a more nuanced account of the dangers of lyric poetry as it glorifies the deeds of ancient times for the instruction of posterity. '[I]f any man comes to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill (techne) alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brough to nought by the poetry of madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found'. Skill, technique is not sufficient; one has to be inspired in order to be a good poet. But when inspiration is absent? The poet is a mere imitator, concerned with mimesis alone.

In the case of Jandek, technique - the received account of technique - is precisely what is wagered in the experience of inspiration. Why do musicians suppose he cannot play or sing? Because they are in thrall to a music of imitation, of tonality, of conventional song structures and playing styles. One has to listen to Jandek with another ear - or rather, listening to the music co-creates the ear of the one who listens. Here is something new; a new kind of playing, a new kind of singing, even as it borrows from established forms, even as Smith remains a kind of singer-songwriter: it is an inspired art insofar as overruns mere technical proficiency. But to listen with this new ear - to be exposed to the dangerous extremity of divine madness - isn't this precisely the danger? Plato would have expelled all the poets from his ideal city, except for those lyric poets whose work had been appropriately purified, bearing only on the relationship between gods and human beings, performed in a standardised rhythm and mode. More admirable than those who dismiss Jandek for incompetence - for a perceived lack of instrumental and vocal prowess, or (in a more recent turn) for the apparent shortcomings in his improvisational competency - are those who are afraid for themselves in the face of such music - who meets its hunger with an unassuaged hunger of their own.

On The Ruins of Adventure (as I write, the most recent studio album) - lumbering, staggering along, this is a dazed music, a music concussed - the fretless bass accompanies aimlessly a part-sung, part-spoken vocalising marked by despondency and abyssal despair. 'It's toooooo bleak' - the 'to' howled and stretched. 'Embrace the greeey of reality ...' The song does not fall from the Muses, but is a thickening of the earth - a fetid swamp, or the earth moving, swarming with mosquitoes, in solifluction. Without melody or regular rhythm - without the pulse of a musical groove, it is sludgy and inert - yet it moves nonetheless; it surges forward. But what moves? What lurches lifelessly from track to track?

Heidegger calls earth that materiality foregrounded in the work of art - in this case, lumpen bass picking and a vocalising thick with despair that wanders without settling on particular pitches. This is his name, too, for the reserve that looms around us in our relation to the world (the world become useless, things as they obtrude from the purposes by which we understand them). The Ursprung of the artwork, its origin, says Heidegger, shows how earth is in perpetual struggle with the 'world' of intelligibility and meaning. Explanations cannot exhaust the inexplicable: perhaps there is a way of speaking of Jandek's art that keeps watch over it by leaving it unexplained - that allows earth to resound in the torpor of his voice or the sludgy waddling of the bass. A way, then of speaking its inspired necessity as it remains outside mere technical proficiency and the imitation of existing forms.

It is Smith's peculiar vocation to dramatise the struggle between a despair too overwhelming to permit of a beginning, of its doubling into song, and the strength, precisely to sing, to perform. Jandek remains in the neither-nor, the neutrality of this perpetually thwarted commencement. It is necessary to sing, to play - but it is just as necessary to interrupt them, to mark the performance with its own impossibility. 'I made a mistake coming here today' - to begin at all is a mistake; the mistake is the art, or what blossoms into art. But the flower fades straightaway; the song empties and becomes a husk. What else is performance but a sham?

The hunger artist fasts because he can find nothing to eat. Could Smith sing or play otherwise? Perhaps something changes with live performance, in which he seems to be able to take a greater distance with respect to this impossibility than previously. Manhattan Tuesday, The Afternoon of Insensitivity, which sees the Representative playing keyboards with an organ setting, accompanied by, among others, Loren Connors, constructs a sombre sound-world that is of a piece with Miles Davis's 'He Loved Him Madly', not only participates in despair, performing it, trudging through it, but muses explicitly on its source in the performer's own life. 'It seems I've been depressed all my life ...'

On Glasgow Monday, The Cell, Smith sings his way - wispily, breathily, in a speech-song entirely new in his work - to a kind of resolution; it seems enough to ask questions ('What do I have?'), to let them resound. What matters is that this questioning is shared - that the audience, asked by Barry Esson to reserve their applause to the end of the song suite, shelters the inexplicable along with him. Does he find a kind of consolation thereby, a lightening of despair, when it is shared, addressed to others? I think here of the song 'I Love You' from Brooklyn Wednesday - does this song give despair (Smith's, and that unleashed by Hurricane Katrina) a direction, thereby lifting it from itself, transmuting its substance? Perhaps this lightening was always present in Jandek's music - perhaps it was there from the first, and this as why, to answer Chusid's question, Smith went to the trouble of recording, pressing and trying to distribute 1000 copies of Ready for the House.

Listening to the small portion of the live performances that have been released by Corwood, and dreaming of releases to come, one might wonder whether the hunger artist has found something to eat. In both East and West, the ghost is often thought of as having unfinished business, whether it is a desire for revenge or for justice. Buddhist traditions call the ghost 'hungry' since it is still attached to the world. Has the Representative from Corwood, who looks, as so many have commented, exactly like a ghost, found something to attach him? But I think of another hunger artist - the starving novelist-to-be of Hamsun's novel, who keeps a stone in his mouth to satiate his hunger. Driven to extremity, one day he bits down on that stone as though it were a piece of bread. And I wonder whether Jandek itself is Smith's way to bite down on the stone he's been turning for decades in his mouth, false succour. False, but also true, for how else to keep fidelity with the extremity in which he lives?

The Hunger Artist

Kafka's hunger artist starves because he can find nothing he wants to eat. He starves and that starvation is his art - crowds come to watch him in his cage. Of course, the music of Jandek is the result of a choice: when it comes to the live performances, there is the question of who is going to comprise the group (or whether, indeed, it will number more than one), the length, duration and style of the songs (decided on the day of performance, with a run through of the set with participating musicians, all of whom have a considerable input) and the venue itself (Corwood is very specific with its requests). And of course, with respect to the 'studio' albums, there are choices of instrumentation, recording techniques, lyrics and so on - even as there is a large element of improvisation in the performances.

But in another sense, there is no choice when it comes to the performance (and particularly in the studio recordings): at their heart, they have a man in extremity, a man who performs, I think, to give this extremity to song. In live performances, the Representative's face is blank - not a mask but the absence of masks; a space onto which you can project nothing (what is feeling? what does he see of the audience? what is he thinking?) but also everything, for does not his blankness invite the wildest of speculation.

A blank face - but the gestures of a guitarist, a bassist, a pianist (whatever he is playing) are also present; we can watch the Representative turn to his fellow musicians, watching them; we can watch him shuffle and dip and crouch over his guitar. He is a physical player. But the face, half hidden by a fedora, is blank. Certainly we can watch the words come from his mouth - watch him lean into the microphone, drawling sometimes, stretching a word, but always wanting to be heard, always precise in his vocalising. A blank face - and no stage banter when a guitar string breaks, and he has to wait for three or four long minutes another guitar to be brought from behind stage. No 'thank you very much' for listeners who might have travelled halfway round the globe to see him.

What do the audience of Kafka's hunger artist watch? A man in extremity. A man who starves. What a feat! What endurance! And Jandek's audience? 'I come to bring you a bit of depression ...' Watching the live band settling into their groove, interacting but following the lead of the Representative's vocal, I wonder whether it is really extremity we see there, on the stage. In live performance, the lyrics change: they become more frank, more confessional; some (Manhattan Tuesday) permit of a simple, autobiographical interpretation. Is he a man in extremity or a controlled man, part of a controlled ensemble who somehow seeks to account for himself, to search for himself, and before an audience?

Often he will acknowledge that audience in his lyrics. 'I don't know why I'm here/ to sing in front of you'. But it is an acknowledgement of the inadequacy of what they will see. Why is he here? But it should be admitted, too, that we find another lovely kind of extremity in the speech-song of Glasgow Monday, The Cell - a wholly new style of vocalising in Jandek's oeuvre. A first - a breathy, tentative, suspended speech-song that seeks and searches over the piano - but for what? Some kind of resolution; a provisional answer to the questioning that is his speech-sung voice. And, too, that some performances revel in a muscular thrashing, in power, which has little to do with confession at all.

Perhaps at Jandek's heart is not always a man who starves. But then, with the solo recordings that follow the acapella period around the turn of the millennium, that starving man is there and he is all there is. A starving man - and who starves because what is good for us (romance and work, ordinary sociability) is what he cannot find a way to want. He falls short of what we take for granted; he searches for what we, his listeners, presume ourselves to have. He is a man in exile, a man in suspense. Life, for him, is some kind of mistake, some aberration. And yet he sings. He starves.

I do not mean to imply that, listening to Jandek we are like the spectators outselves Kafka's hunger artist's cage; I don't think we are the well-fed watchers for whom his starvation is an art we can admire, and for which can be exchanged the panther who takes his place when he eventually expires. I wonder whether we listen from a kind of starvation of our own - from that place in us where we are not in place - where the possibility of life, ordinary life, seems to wear itself away. For the hunger-artist, there is an audience of the hungry. How else could we bear what we heard? How could we want it?

Granted, there are those for whom the oeuvre of Jandek is a kind of stunt. Some, like Irwin Chusid, marvel at it - for all his derision (and Chusid is an articulate and funny man - he's hilariously derisive) - there is his wonder that there were ever Jandek recordings at all. Why would anyone want to do that?, he asks, over and again. The fact of their existence perturbs him, and he seems to admire what he takes to be a mad tenacity. This is one of the images of Jandek circulated in the media - of an infinitely perverse man, a curiosity, an outsider, a kind of beast.

For their part, Corwood do not admit to being perturbed. Letters from Chusid are met with friendly toleration. I think the early days were so difficult that Chusid's acknowledgement was already an encouragement sufficient to go on. We find a similar attitude in the filmakers of Jandek on Corwood who admit they were first lured to their subject by his reputation - the 'myth' of Jandek, and we a little disappointed, at first by the music. Doesn't Katy Vine, the journalist who tracked down Sterling Smith in his Houston home admit the same?

For those listeners, there was of course also the record sleeves which, after the live performances, we can be sure depict Smith himself, photographed at various ages and in range of situations, often making use of photograph-altering software. Here, too, we find a kind of blankness - the blank face of Six and Six, which matches so perfectly this hard, affect-less recording (tracks that find their way into an affectless state at the heart of great depressive moods; the still eye of the storm), is defiantly - who? The smiling man in a cardigan in front of a barn is the opposite of the singer/intoner of Worthless Recluse ... what speaks by way of the failure of this correlation?

Interpretation breaks down. It runs aground on the record sleeves, which will eventually stop picturing Smith at all. Smith becomes a sufi on two of them. He is outside Mansion House in London, on deserted streets, on another. Each time, with respect to the recordings themselves, there is something missing. Who isn't tempted to read and reread the covers in search for a clue (what is he carrying on the sleeve of Blue Corpse?)? Something missing - and that it is who sings and plays at the heart of Jandek; it is Smith himself; it is the absence in the space of Smith, who cannot find a way to live.

We should admit the recordings are varied; there is a ludic Jandek - a playful, hilarious one (think, for example, of 'Mother's Day Card', where two voices sing the message on the inside of such a card); a spooky one (the multiple voices of 'Om'); a meditative one ('I Sit Alone and Think About You'). for a long time, I think, there were no recordings at all - the acapella recordings seem to come after a break; the voice is deeper.

This becomes especially noticeable on the studio recordings that follow the great I Threw You Away - for my money, the greatest in Jandek's mighty oeuvre. The Humility of Pain, Khartoum, Raining Down Diamonds ... what is being pursued from album to album? My answer, very simple: starvation. The inability to eat, to find a thing to eat. And more intensely than ever; more focusedly than ever.

These recordings, I think, close themselves from Chusid and other, similar listeners - those who are looking for the stunt-Jandek, to confirm or disconfirm the Jandek-myth. How, when you had heard them - really heard them - from your own starvation, could you go out to look for the man who made them. They are forbidding. They push us back, I fancy, as they push Smith back too - doesn't he wonder at them? Isn't he amazed, too at what he has made? How not to feel a kind of holy seriousness around these recordings, which hold themselves, with respect to our listening, at their own distance?

I am always moved to read of the quiet reverentness that, for the most part greets Jandek performances (though it is always fun to read of those who call out, welcome to ... X, and for Smith himself to - briefly - smile). We know seriousness. We know a kind of sacred - a distance - that surrounds the recordings. I'm sure that Smith feels it too. Sure, that is, that they also push him back from what he has done. What must it be to live at that remove from himself? To honour the recordings that made themselves from singing and playing?

I think this is part of what it means to be a hunger-artist who reaches the hunger-listeners who open their ears inside us. I think it demands a paring away, a blankness. The studio recordings have reached moods more terrifying than anything I have heard. Moods of a desolation so absolute - of a despair so refined that ... they escape what I can say of them. How to greet them except by silence? There are few artists whose work I will simply put on and listen to. Few whose work has a drama sufficient to carry that listening, when a hungry man steps forward to listen in my place.

Jandek: hunger artist. Perhaps the distance of the recordings - their rarefaction, their daring - is the double of that which the artist feels towards the world, towards the ordinary possibility of living. He sings in extremity - is it not reasonable to suppose that he lives, too, in extremity? How can he bear what he bears? But he sings, plays and records. He issues LPs. And now, of course, he plays live, too. I think there must be great joy in this. Why not? Hasn't the hunger artist found something to eat?

The live performances seem different to what has gone before. There's less distance around them. And, in the performances, less extremity. Is this what has permitted a kind of autobiographical turn in their lyrics? Is it because the presence of other musicians make Jandek something other than a machine that quarries despair? I admit I listen to the live recordings (with the exception of The Cell) with different ears. Or rather, that my ears are not starving; I do not listen from my own extremity. I enjoy the grooves; I laugh sometimes at the bathos of the lyrics ('Real Wild'); I like the fierce interplay and the surprise of what new collaborators allow. But I listen differently, and from another kind of distance.

December 2007, and it's a full year since the last studio recording - one of the longest breaks over 30 years of Jandek LPs. I want to hear him starve again. And I want to listen again from where I am starving.

Links to articles on Jandek's performances.

The Posthumous Voice

What does it mean to speak of the posthumous voice, of a posthumous singing? Not simply that the song is sung from the perspective of someone already dead - killed, perhaps, as on the song on which Nick Cave duetted with Kylie Minogue. Posthumousness would not have anything to do with the supposed narrative position of the singer, or with the ordinary conception of the narrator. Nor is it concerned with a singer's recordings released in the wake of his or her death - as with the recent compilation of live tracks and demos from Karen Dalton, for example. Rather, the experience I want to indicate bears upon a quality of the voice itself. And it is of Jandek that I am thinking in exploring the idea of the posthumous voice.

Jandek is ostensibly the name of a group that formed (under a different name) in 1978, but most Jandek recordings - and there are nearly 60 albums in print - are the work of one individual alone; it seems very clear that he is the same person who runs Corwood Industries, the label upon which all Jandek recordings are released, from Houston, Texas. Sterling Richard Smith, born in 1943, who also registers Jandek songs for copyright with the Library of Congress, is present on all Jandek albums, as a vocalist (though sometimes other people sing) and as an instrumental player - on guitar, piano, harmonica, fretless bass. The run of albums that most interests me are the solo recordings Jandek's put out since the turn of the millennium, starting with I Threw You Away, and taking us all the way up to The Ruins of Adventure, released last year.

Listen to these albums and it is clear (this is obvious) it is not a tonal music. Nor is it (and this may be jarring) a music in tune. The instrumental work draws on a whole range of sonorities - by turns intense, combative, resolute, distracted, subdued, but always physical - through the plucking of strings and the stopping of frets (thought Jandek's is not a conventional fretting) - with considerable dynamic range. The guitar does not simply take its cue from the voice, following it, subordinating itself to it, since the vocalising itself echoes and resonates with the guitar work, both in call and response. But it is the voice, nevertheless, that seems to lead the songs (and they remain very much that - songs), even as, as with the instrumental work, the emphasis is on the materiality of the sound - its texture, its grain - where pitch and rhythm are no longer the primary focus.

Hovering uncertainly between speaking and singing, the voice remains unmelodic, with wayward, part-improvised lyrics which are usually clearly audible despite slurred, irregular phrasing. The singing, so difficult to bear for many listeners, never settles into a particular pitch, remaining agonisedly in motion; Jandek presents us with a voice in extremity, and an endless quarrying of pain and related states, in which infinite gradations of suffering are allowed to differentiate themselves. The music of the albums with which I am concerned here remain in the singer-songwriter tradition, even as song prolong themselves into half-hour soundscapes.

We may want to hear these albums autobiographically - as the audio journals of a man depressed, in extremity. The legitimacy of such a hearing is undeniable, being evidenced in an unambiguously autobiographical turn in lyrics in recent live performances. But a confession, sung or written, need not tell us much about the conditions of what permits song or writing: the materiality of a voice (of playing), what it can do (and what it can't). Perhaps we might even say, as has been noted by so many musicians, that the faculty of music making, the facility of inspiration remains somewhat prior to them, at the origin, the Ursprung of the work of art, as Heidegger might say.

This means a biographical hearing of Jandek recordings would need to do more than follow their apparently confessional turn. There is the fact that they are sung, and, sung, accompanied; of course, with singing, more than other deployments of the voice, it is never a question of merely reporting a sentiment, but of performing it; which is why writers - philosophers in particular - have envied and aspired to the condition of music. Thus the preface to Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, written many years after its publication: 'this book should have sung, not spoken' - as though it were possible to discover a heightened form of expression, as when, later in his oeuvre, Nietzsche allows Zarathustra to move from speech to song and even to dance.

In the case of Jandek, however, there is something unusual about the attenuation to which the voice (the music) is subject. There is a sense of an artist exploring an expressive potential, certainly, but if this is a virtuosity, it is one mired or floored. Nietzsche holds out for a music that would let joy and mourning coincide, for loss and fullness to be present all at once in that site of dissonance in which pain and contradiction expose themselves in their full rawness, but Jandek's music is lost in the sludge like Beckett's characters in How It Is - in a space with barely three dimensions, and which, even as it does not prevent movement, constrains it, confining it to a single plane.

The voice, here, exhibits a virtuosity of a peculiarly limited kind, just as if a painter had decided to work solely in tones of very dark grey, or of black or black, or in the blues that has turned black to remember the title of one Jandek song. But this is a peculiar virtuosity: that of a twitching or spasming - of a creature by the roadside that is not quite dead. As though it were the sludge itself that sang, that had formed itself into a voice and sang of its own condition. Is this what I hear in the wavering of the voice and the instrumental work as it refuses to settle into a single pitch? Is it despair that seems to sing of itself?

There is, I think, a drama to the music - a dramaturgy that depends upon the slippage between the ability to perform, to sing, to play, and an inability - an inability to be able, that is to do anything at all. Some would discover this inability in Jandek's unconventional use of the guitar and the other instruments he plays (or cannot play - or will not play according to the rules; or plays - according to other rules). There is also his vocalising - by turns wailing, despondent, conquered, frightened, defiant, tutelary as it remains non- or a-melodic, improperly phrased.

But I find this inability somewhere else: in Jandek's music in its attenuation, its remaining of the brink of extinction, in the 'and more again' as it gathers itself up, in the one more gasp of an attempt for breath - each time, in its relentlessness and its wearing away, in its pauses and re-achievements, it is the capacity to sing, to play, that are placed at issue, and that become the drama, such as it is, of the performance.

In a sense, despair (to let the many dark states that are Jandek's concern settle on one word) becomes a line that can be followed; it permits of something like an avenue of freedom - of freedom, the ability to move in despair, not despite it. Despair is animated and given life. At the same time, despair, the inability to do anything, the inability to be able, cuts across that line, breaking it as crevasses break across a moving glacier. The song remains, it has a certain momentum, but it is cracked - the line that can be followed, lived, is jagged and broken. The ability to be, to sing, to play, has to be regained, but when it is so, it is lost again almost at once. And finds itself again. And is lost again ...

It is a remaking that happens as struggle, as creation in extremity that has, as its stakes, the possibility of its own endeavour. There is a fatal dependency of the performer upon the impossibility of what he sets out to accomplish - upon an unfreedom or incapacity as it is brought into contact at each point to the music. Let me concentrate this idea into an oxymoron that is my way of expressing the limits of those accounts of Jandek as the work of an incompetent instrumentalist: the success of the music depends in some sense upon its failure - of the extremity that maintains, in tension its conditions of possibility and impossibility.

What do I mean by this? There is a wonderful passage in Kafka's journals where he speaks of the 'merciful surplus of strength' that, even in the midst of despair, permits the writer to write of this despair, ringing changes upon it. What, in the midst of unhappiness, allows one to write 'I am unhappy'? A peculiar strength - a merciful one, in which I am permitted strength enough to report my unhappiness. This does not alter my basic situation, or offer therapy or cure, but allows me nevertheless to take distance from my suffering, without, however, simply objectifying it, or placing it to one side.

The drama of Jandek's music is given in a freeing up of fate, a kind of mercy - not as it lifts itself from despair altogether, but as it momentarily allows despair to sing of itself. Mercy lies at the root of the surprise of the address, of being able to address. This carries the music; it bears it - there has been a retreat of suffering in suffering sufficient to sing of it - but suffering is there nonetheless. This does not imply a detachedness or an objectification of pain; there is still a bearing of suffering, a way in which suffering is enacted. I am tempted to put it emphatically, without knowing what this formulation might mean: at issue is not simply a performance of suffering, but of suffering as performance.

We are thrown into existence, says Heidegger; the fact of human existence is aways pre-given such that we are obliged to find ourselves in a particular situation, understanding (in Heidegger's sense) and taking a stand upon what exists in our vicinity. We do not throw ourselves into existence, we are thrown; and we cannot get back behind or thrownness. This is why the adolescent's wail, 'I didn't ask to be born' is not ridiculous. Not only that, but we are obligated to do something about our condition; we exist in time, and the future opens before us. Our existence is a project [Entwurf]; we remain in the throw of thrownness [Geworfenheit]. The project is what means we are thrown into the future; we have to do something about our condition, even if it is only to accept it. To chose to do nothing is itself a choice (a refusal to choose to choose). But are we always capable of making such a choice? Can a merciful surplus of strength lift us from that despair in which incapacity voids our ability to choose, to live, to act, from the start?

Writing in a prisoner of war camp, the young Levinas suggests thrownness should be understood as a kind of abandonment or dereliction; that it has the sense of a desertion such that our relationship to the fact of our thrownness returns to overwhelm us, disrupting the opening of the project, of that projection that throws us into the future. For Heidegger, famously, it is by bringing ourselves into the right kind of relationship to our death that we might retrieve a sense of the particularity of our own existence, bracketing out the pressures made on us by others. Death, in Heidegger's cumbersome phrase, spells the possibility of the impossibility of continuing to exist at all. Where death is, I am not, says Epicetus; but I can nevertheless bring myself into relation with the fact of my mortality such that I can seize upon my life-project as what it is.

Authentic existence, for Heidegger, is lived out of a sense of the urgency and finitude of that project; thrown into the world, I must now make sense of it not as an intellectual task, but by the very way that I live. For Levinas, however, death is not simply an event at the end of one life. It vouchsafes itself in any degree of suffering; it casts its shadow over all pain. It may seem that Levinas is thinking of something very different to the fact that we might bring ourselves into relationship with the fact we will one day die. It may seem that he is providing something like a phenomenology of suffering, drawing impressionistically on a metaphorical sense of death, whereas Heidegger is providing us with a phenomenology of mortality, with an account of what it means for us each to be mortal. I think Levinas would respond, in a manner I cannot explore fully here, that what he is really doing is showing us how death has always been thought as a metaphor, and especially so by Heidegger, and that suffering, likewise, has been metaphorised and sublimated in that tradition of which Heidegger is a part.

A tradition which passes through philosophical reflection on tragedy. In Greek tragedy, so the story goes, the tragic hero is thrown against necessity; he is abandoned to what he cannot know and cannot determine. Freedom breaks against necessity; the hero is dashed to pieces, but for a moment, he brought himself into a splendid freedom. He laments, but to do so means he still had the strength to lament; he has found a refuge sufficient to grant him the power to protest. He is possessed of a will and of a power to resist.

I would like to say - and I cannot substantiate this here, - that authenticity, for Heidegger, has a tragic dimension. The authentic person has confronted the fact that he or she will die; this knowledge, ineluctable as it is, nevertheless permits a seizing hold of life, a carpe diem. For Levinas, by contrast, no such stance is possible;the sufferer is overwhelmed by necessity, coming up against a limit, against which he or she will run up inexhaustibly. This, says Levinas, is the 'tragedy of tragedy'.

But what does he mean? Hamlet, says Levinas is exemplary. Hamlet is a mutation of the violent revenge tragedy, a play focused on dilemma and not revenge. Its protagonist does not have the reassurance of the mastery of thought or of action; Hamlet vacillates – not because he is planning perfect actions; when he acts, he does so rashly and his actions miscarry. Nor is it to give him time to think for he allows thinking to fall back to that region where decision is impossible, to a madness of indecision, a yes-no without resolve.

'To be or not to be ...' Hamlet longs for death, but he fears hell; he will not take his life for fear of what will happen to him after death. But if he cannot make an alliance with death, he cannot live, either. He cannot open a path to resolute decision; he does solitary combat with the absurd. Elsinor is the hell where phantoms wander - not just his father, but Hamlet, too: phantoms of resoluteness, phantoms of action. And it is the same hell he would want to enclose the others. This, indeed, is why he will not murder the praying Claudio. Hamlet's Denmark is rotten, all are damned, the royal

‘To be or not to be …’ Hamlet longs for death, but he fears hell; he will not take his life for fear of what will happen to him after death. But if he cannot make an alliance with death, he cannot live, either. He cannot open a path to resolute decision; he does solitary combat with the absurd. Elinsor is the hell where phantoms wander – not just his father, but Hamlet, too: phantom of resoluteness, phantom of action. And it is the same hell he would want to enclose the others. This, indeed, is why he will not murder the praying Claudio. Hamlet’s Denmark is rotten, all are damned, the royal family must be drawn into hell’s circle if the country is to be purged. And so they are. Then Fortinbras comes; hell recedes; the world retrieves itself in Elsinore. 

In his famous soliloquy, according to Levinas, Hamlet ‘understands that the “not to be” is perhaps impossible and he can no longer master the absurd, even by suicide’. ‘Hamlet is precisely a lengthy testimony to this impossibility of assuming death’; ‘To be or not to be’ is a sudden awareness of this impossibility of annihilating oneself’. Hamlet cannot escape; to exist, not to exist are each as impossible as one another. In the third act of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet cries ‘I keep the power to die’; Hamlet does not have this power. Freedom does not triumph over fate, but is overwhelmed by it.

'To be or not to be': who speaks? what speaks? Perhaps Levinas would say Hamlet gives voice to an irretrievable dereliction and abandonment. I think it is because Levinas thinks of necessity as the very relationship to being that he can invoke what he calls the 'tragedy of tragedy'. Hamlet cannot assume his thrownness; freedom does not triumph over fate, but is overwhelmed by it.

For T. S. Eliot, the figure of Hamlet is fascinating for us moderns because his behaviour is without 'objective correlate'. For Levinas, such a correlate (although it is not, strictly speaking, a term of a relation) is given in existence itself, in the 'irremovability of a past that cannot be erased'. Being itself is as though cursed; necessity makes its claim upon us such that we cannot escape into the future. Pain recalls us to our finitude only as it gives the limit at the end of our life unto a kind of infinity or limitlessness. A limit that becomes limitless - but that, by turns, that becomes a limit once again, narrowing itself down such that life, finite life, becomes possible.

Pain is inexorable, but a kind of freedom opens within pain sufficient to live, to prosper, perhaps, to begin and realise plans. Pain retreats in pain - existence is permitted to leap forward; the project opens, and thrownness gives unto the throwing of life into the future. Pain is inexorable. Yet Hamlet vacillates. To be or not to be. There open spaces of possibility; even the possibility of impossibility, the enabling, authenticating relation to death can open. But this opening (to be) is provisional, and it wavers in physical pain with its opposite - not to be is not to experience the possible as the possible. The impossibility of possibility - with Levinas's reversal of Heidegger's phrase, there is marked the erosion of the project because of the return of the past. Life becomes fatal, fate-bound and is mired in necessity.

Casually, much too quickly, I would like to say that Levinas's remarks bear witness to the close of a whole philosophy of tragedy (of the role of the exemplarity of tragedy in several strains of post-Kantian philosophical thought). And this not because we are overwhelmed by necessity, but because we cannot hold out the chance of that harmony of necessity and freedom that would allow us to clear a space in which joy and mourning, loss and fullness might struggle against the other before us in a beautiful dissonance. No longer a space, a site, but a line - a more uncertain and precarious oscillation, a neither/nor to invert Kierkegaard's title, in which the possibility of impossibility reverses itself into the impossibility of possibility, and vice versa.

The drama of Jandek's music is given in terms of this oscillation, this neither-nor. What does it mean to characterise the voice in Jandek's recordings as posthumous? The songs are sung as if the singer were already dead, as if death had already reached him - as if nothing were possible, not even singing. They are sung from suffering, out of it, and of a suffering deep enough to erode, to wear away, the very ability to be able. They are sung out of an unfreedom, of an experience of fate, of necessity, that simultaneously spells the impossibility of being able to sing. And yet, by the same turn, they are sung and therefore borne by the voice of a living body, of someone alive to sing; the singer is someone who had strength enough to sing, who depends upon an ability to be, a capacity that, as freedom, opens song to him as a possibility.

This is what even allows Jandek to sing of the impossible; the impossible is possible; incapacity - the inability to sing - binds itself to a living voice. But what makes this voice posthumous, as opposed to being merely resolute, stalwart, or tragic, is that it touches, in so doing, upon the impossibility of possibility. The posthumous voice is to be thought of as the slippage from the possibility of impossibility to the impossibility of possibility and vice versa, an alternation that is dramatised in the recordings of Jandek as they explore the infinite gradations of despair.

The Inward Ray

The evening is a staircase you have to ascend. No: it is like those tiered gardens you see in the East - whose steps are long and broad, but that take you upward nevertheless. And at the pinnacle - or, better, the plateau? At that point where it spreads out without cease and with no more steps? Then and only then can you give yourself to listening.

Ask yourself, am I ready for Jandek tonight? Ready - is that the word? A state of preparedness, a kind of calm concentration - why is it at concerts that I never feel I achieve it, never feel right for what is about to unfold? For a long time, I avoided them because I never felt ready to listen. And now? Up the stairway of the evening. Nine o'clock; the plateau. I'm ready to listen now. But to what?

In Northern India, raags are written for a time of day, a season. That's the preparedness: the time, the season. You are brought to the point when a raag might be heard, and by no more than the earth's elliptical orbit. Brought to it so that the raag might deepen it - might hollow out the season in the season; might discover time within time, unfolding it, opening out its flower.

And Jandek? In the recordings I regard as essential - most of the studio recordings from I Threw You Away onwards, which is to say, those made in the last 5 or 6 years - there is a kind of desolation that must reach you. As though everything were dimmed and reduced to itself. As though the world had contracted, hardened, and was falling in an inward collapse. The rays of the sun burn outwards; but what of an inward ray - what of a ray sent inward, a sun collapsing upon itself? What of darkness falling into darkness and all the way to that terrible void that would draw everything across its horizon?

How terribly concentrated the recordings are! How focused! Sometimes, in the course of a song, a relaxation, a breathing. These are sometimes short, panicked breaths - an animal in a trap; an animal by the side of the road and breathing quickly. Dying, but still breathing, and too fast. Or they can be long breaths, the patient without air, the patient who would gasp air into his lungs, but finds none; or that air is not air enough, that there is never air enough, that breathing cannot find what would sustain it. Long breaths, last ones.

Either way, the songs are sung around death, in its orbit. Around it, close to it, but never close enough for annihilation; there's never an end. This is a dying-singing. A singing of pain, of absolute pain. That hollows itself from pain, in pain. That quarries pain, adventures in it. Pain learns of itself. Pain learns and sings of itself.

How is it possible to be still alive? How to be alive in pain, still alive? This is the surprise with which Jandek begins on the essential recordings. And what of the less essential ones? Why is Brooklyn Wednesday a little further from me? Why, though I've played it 20 times through, all 4 CDs does it remain over there, away from me?

Because when I listen to Jandek - when I'm able to listen, ready for it, I want only the despair, and the variations on despair. Only despair, suffering and pain, and their variations. Only the infinite gradations of pain in pain, the infinitely subtle quest for suffering in suffering, as pain turns in pain, as it awakens and falls to sleep in pain and lives it, as pain is lived and is given life, a body. As pain gives itself a singer to sing of itself. As pain sings of itself, a half-crushed animal by the side of the road.

Am I ready for Jandek, and tonight? Ready to follow the course of an album? Khartoum. The Humility of Pain. The Gone Wait. The Ruins of Adventure. Raining Down Diamonds. I've climbed the stairway of the evening. Climbed and at the plateau, nine o'clock, nine bells. To what should I listen?

The Two Khartoums

What's the relation between Khartoum and Khartoum Variations? The first is acoustic, the second electric - but the second is slower, too, spanning the songs out, swelling them, and I imagine that is as though a balloon had been blown up in each song, pushing the words apart from one another and stretching them - or that Jandek had discovered the song in the song, that secret more expansive song that is turned yet farther away from the world, that sings to itself and of itself pressing into its own darkness.

Why that image, of an inside that becomes an outside? Why an inside that collapses into itself, swirling lyrics and music around it as around a plughole? Because what Jandek reaches is never an interiority - never the closed space that would enclose a personality, a person. This is not a personal music, but belongs to no one. Or rather, it belongs to no one in someone, or that no one he shares with the others with whom he plays and sometimes and those of us who listen.

No one - and this is why, I imagine, the song becomes a cry, why words break into wails, and why instrumental passages stretch out between the phrases - why the Variations seem to swell the original Khartoum, making the songs vaster, as a sail is full of wind, letting them be carried by a wind from the outside that, becoming word, become music, does not let itself disappear into each, but remains wind, as it blows with the words and with the playing.

No interiority - or rather, that inner space a sail spread to catch a solar pressure, and I am thinking now of the yachts that may one day sail out between the stars. Solar pressure, a solar wind, but it is a black sun that burns at the heart of the music, and from a black sun that there comes the wind.

Why, gloomy, do I want to hear a gloomy music? Because it is more than that, more than gloomy. Because as I listen, and new ears are hollowed out in mine, I hear more than gloom. I hear that evacuation, that hollowing that is the vast space from which the songs seem to come. I hear the hollow space that has cored our Jandek's heart, making it not a space inside but one that presses outside, that is turned inside out and runs up against the darkness.

Who is he? And who am I that listens? Gloom finds a new direction. Gloom no longer gloom; a door opens. The door: the whole sky, and unto what does it give? I would like to be listening now. Would like new ears to grow within mine like the satellite dishes that scoop up rays from space. Khartoum, Khartoum Variations - from the one to the other is a movement of hollowing, of spacing out. From the one to the other a yacht on the sea to a solar one, a real sun to the black one that burns in the place of Jandek's heart.

Unwittingly

The outsider artist, on one account, is unwitting: he does not know what makes his work interesting. A kind of doggedness is his, that's true - he gets the stuff 'out there' - but its source is also hidden from him. To go on, and that's all. A blind need to continue. Relentlessness.

Certainly this image fits Jandek; there is a sense an idiom continues to discover itself in him - an idiom - but is this the word? is it not a question of what burns at the edges of folk, of the blues, of improvisation, of rock? - with respect to which he is always unwitting, making a music that sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails those peculiar capacities with which he was gifted: that voice, that way of playing, but also, moreover, that temperament, that depression, that set of lyrical concerns - all of that. Succeeds - when the lyrics, singing, playing, fit the mood his singing, his playing cannot help but suggest. Fails when they do not - on the love albums (When I Took That Train), for example, where the hope in the lyrics seem at odds with what we hear in the tone of the singing, the playing. Where it is still despair that attunes everything.

But it is naive to separate capacity from performance, as if the two were not joined on the songs and the albums: as if the potentials that would be his are not only transformed but made with each step in his extraordinary oeuvre. That he creates, he makes, as he also creates himself - creates, not from nothing, but from that peculiar destiny he made for himself as one album followed another. Creates from that set of possibilities with which he was gifted and that he also gives himself.

What belongs to him is relentlessness, the desire to make, that is also a desire to remake himself, to partition his life - separating the musician (Jandek - he and whoever collaborates with him, the songs copyrighted at the Library of Congress), the owner and manager of the company who releases his albums (Corwood Industries) and the white collar worker, busy in the world.

To partition his life, and by so doing, to keep that place of transformation and remaking open, writing his lyrics and recording his work, buying new instruments, collaborating with others on live performances. Keeping it open, and this is his relentlessness, it is this around which his other lives are a husk.

Who does he become when he becomes Jandek? Not himself; not the involate one kept apart from the world; it is not that simple. Another and someone else. The one who changes, and to whom transformation arrives. A kind of sacrifice, perpetually burning. An avatar ...

Is he relentless? Certainly. What is its source? No matter. What matters is to continue, regardless of talent, of opportunity, all that ... To continue, and this is the source, and the reason why these apparently despairing albums are not made in despair. Handed over to Corwood Industries, sold and distributed, they are made available to others; they communicate, and to do so is already hope, the source of hope. This is what cannot help but bear the music.

Is he unwitting? But only as he makes his own idiom, which means he cannot know what he does, and only does it. Only as he opens his own idiom by going forward - but what does this mean? A movement that makes sense only when you look back to see where he's been.

Album after album leading back like the crumbs Hansel and Gretel left in the forest. And back to - where? The source is mysterious. Simply a will to begin, to make. Everything follows from that. A kind of relentlessness. A need to partition, to keep one part of life apart from another. And to live out of that separation, to live from it. As if it were also necessary to be reborn as an avatar. To let yourself be born thus as into another life. His life as Jandek, as another. His life as an avatar in another world, where he develops his own legitimate strangeness (Char).

To work unwittingly. Without knowing where it's going. Steve of This Space has written many times around the problem of genre. Literature, if I understand him, belongs outside all genres, even its own. Literature remains outside, being displaced with regard to itself, and this is what marks a literary writing. Literature outside, in lieu of what it is, and experiencing that lack in every sentence.

Literature without model, as the experience of the loss of models. Modernism as this loss, when creativity begins in the wearing out of genres, as idioms become impossible and you fall beneath them. And this fall, with relentlessness, becomes a beginning, and a literary beginning. And literature begins in the fall, in the loss of all models, all genres. In the fall that makes talent irrelevant, ability by the by. What matters is exhaustion, the experience of failure. That is also, unwittingly or not, an experience of the whole of art.

How to start again? How to make a beginning? From a death to what has been. Until what remains are fragments. That point - where? Nowhere, until the necessity to begin rises up. The source, relentlessness. That magnetises those fragments like iron filings. That lets them point the way ahead, a pointing that is itself a moving ahead.

How to begin, to find a beginning? To fall. And know only the desire to move forward. This holds for the artist, but perhaps, too, for the listener. That you have to have exhausted something to listen to Jandek. Or that you have to have experienced his exhaustion, alongside his imperative to go forward. An exhausted going on, but a going on.

Isn't that what you will need to hear? Isn't that what qualifies and elects you as a listener? Isn't that what marks you out? And then every time you listen, it is also a beginning.

It's Sunday, and the first sunny day for weeks in our failed summer. Sunny and bright - blue skies, and my Visitor is out, and it is time for my listening. Time, which had been waiting in me all the while. Gathering up, that readiness for listening. To the brink of me, and bringing me to that brink. Until listening is a way of creation, of making. Until I make as Jandek sings and plays on Raining Down Diamonds, and then Khartoum. 

White in White

Jandek has an eye on the whole; the whole has an eye on Jandek. An eye? An ear. It is not that Smith first has a mood then sees everything through its lens - everything, the whole, the outside as he will sometimes present it, while he is inside, in his house - but that the mood has him, that he arises from it, that, as Jandek (sometimes a group, but it's usually just him, just Smith), he coalesces out of something much more diffuse.

Coalesced, pulled together in response to the music, to the prospect of making. Pulled together from out of the future, temporalised, and given a past, a present in view of what he'll make. And that's how he becomes Jandek and not Smith: how he passes through a mood and passes into it, and then - by what surplus of strength? - is remade by way of what is to come: to make music, to sing, to play.

And Jandek's music is first of all that - the miracle of coalescence, of coming together. Of capacity, of being able to be able. As it arises from the confused muddle of a mood. Certainly the singing, the playing of Six and Six is abstracted, blank; it barely seems to belong to anyone. The singer become thing, become condition. The singer returned to that bubbling mire from which all things come.

Monotonous, apathetic - an absence of mood rather than a mood. Sung from that no-place where feeling should be. That place beyond pleasure, beyond pain. And a singing stark, hermetic. That has closed itself away. A voice that has locked itself in. Voice of the house. Singing and playing in the house, inside. In the cell, in the corner. Turned away from the world, and turned to - what?

Catatonic. A voice minus itself, lacking itself. All feeling, all mood. The absence where a mood should be. How did he reach that state, Smith? How did he find it? The second Jandek album, from 1981. Only the second - but by what process was he able to sing, to play - of nothing? What to reach that apathy, that apathein that is the absence of feeling? That is a place to begin, and from which everything begins.

Somehow, a breaking away from the muddle of mood. Some kind of separation has occured. Some reduction. When I listen, I'm sure he reached that state through long training. Through some other process. And I think of the novels Smith said he burnt - 7 of them, not rejected from publishers, but reclaimed by him, Smith, because Random House took too long.

He took them away from the city ('our experience living in lower Manhattan was ... necessary', he writes to Chusid, using the Corwood 'we'), burned and buried them. Gave them a proper burial. '[W]e took the printed matter to the countryside for an unfettered, proper cremation. Stirred into ashes into the ground[....] The countryside dirt was hungry.' And buried what else?

Write enough, I've always thought, and you come to understand how it breaks from any form of personal expression. A fantasy, really - that of becoming imperceptible by writing and that it would happen to anyone, and that that would be the blogosphere. And I've thought that to fail at one thing say writing - finishing a book - would break anyone from the desire to succeed according the arbitrary rules of others. Until it is neither a question of success or failure - or that failure, a kind of falling, would be the way to find 'your legitimate strangeness' (Char).

But what strangeness is this? How intense Six and Six is. How fiercely bright, like phosphorous. And proceeds according to itself, by its own light. That discovers its path as it goes along. Light in light. So bright you can see nothing by it except brightness. As though it were a peculiar kind of night. A night without a source of light. But now light is everywhere, it comes from everywhere, thick, cloud-like. It is like passing through a dazzling cloud. That's bright, but where you can see nothing but brightness.

How to focus on the lyrics? How to listen to them when it is the performance itself that dazzles. That guitar, detuned, tuned away from tuning. And the voice, loud in the mix, very present. And so present its hard to follow what is sung. Only that there is singing. Only the absoluteness of singing, loud in the mix, very present. Sometimes whispery. Singing in short phrases. Scarcely any drama. And the guitar, tuned to some wierd private tuning, strummed and picked.

The whole has an eye on Jandek. And if Smith sings, performs - if he does so as Jandek - then it is from that gap in all moods, that eye in all storms. An eye - an ear, rather. That hears ... what will allow Jandek to be gathered to itself. But what is heard? What draws him forward, Smith, Smith-as-Jandek?

When one song ends, another begins from the same place, and in the same non-tuning. Begins again, intense, without absolute focus. Paced roughly the same, no melodies. But flat, a music of the plain. Consistent, with the same tempo, no choruses, no refrains. Just its continuance, white in white. White light, like a migraine. A pallette of high notes (non-notes); voice and guitar, both high. A fierce guitar break. But still on, going on. Monotonous. God, what intensity. Who's doing this? Whose strangeness is this?

The Humility of Pain

Jandek has an eye on the whole. The singer, the player (I am thinking of the solo albums) has his eye on everything - the whole. It is marked in the lyrics, and particularly on those on the albums that follow the acapella ones, around the turn of the decade; it's very clear: God becomes a word he has to use ('Because it's all about God/ It's all about God ...'), and 'you', the addressee names more than a lover, and so too with love.

These are songs about everything, about the All. That address themselves to the All, which is sometimes addressed through the 'you', and sometimes through the word God, which becomes necessary as a way of naming the All. And in the same period, a new candour about his own depression: it becomes clear: the All gives itself through this same depression. That the songs are about the whole of existing as it is given first of all through depression.

It is a mood that matters, a mood that discloses - a mood that forces him up against the All. As though only now could he name and face what he had aways faced. As if now the condition of everything had become clear. That everything, that All through the lens of a mood. Or attuned by it. And the music in that mode which explores a mood, where the words name one and the same. Where it is a question of exploring what is given by that mode as possibility.

This given, I think, is also the life of the work, Jandek's recordings. It's what gives them momentum, even as the songs seems lethargic and anaesthesised. The sense of a quest, of a 'must go on', as in late Beckett. Of a limited canvas, black to be painted on black, and yet because of these limits: everything. Because of them, because of the concentration upon them, and the exploration, along its edge, of all that this mood allows: a sense of the whole, that everything is here, given. Or that it is the horizon of the given that you are brought up against, there from where it comes.

I think you could trace it as a lyrical theme: the necessity of going inside, of staying there. And of experiencing this confinement as a cell, as a prison. And yet, after a bit 'In the cell, I have - possibilities': it is there from the cell everything is to be seen, known. Everything, even if it is only dark and cannot be known. And from there, from the room, that making begins that doubles up what gives in its darkness, in non-knowing. It begins there.

Early to late, the theme of sitting helplessly, unable to do anything else. 'I don't know what to do except/ Sit in a chair/ All else is too difficult/ Maybe walk around/ Once in a while/ But quick, back to that chair ...' An incapacity, a retreat. But isn't it, too, that place from which something can begin? And the image of being in, enclosed from the world: 'My house is dead/ And so am I/ And I'm still falling ...' Retreat, incapacity, but 'I just command the boat inside the house'; and the house is the boat.

Sometimes the dream of finding the key to a kind of paradise, of unlocking it. A way out of the cell ('the key is out there ...'), a way of finding the place ('Unlock that place/ And see what's there/ How can I do what I need to do/ In that place with those freed-up things. Laughing and joking and having fun').

But then the sense that confinement is the chance, and the key must not be found. ('Everything was making sense/ Locked up in my little room'). And in another song, 'I don't need a window/ To see what's outside ...' He is mourning someone. Some loss. 'And the thoughts that I have/ Memories of you/ I pray to God before I stare at the air'. And now that loss is possibility. It reveals, and by way of becoming the topic of a song. And there's the chance of going on. The chance of beginning over.

Why so many albums when, in Chusid's memorable formulation, each falls unnoticed in the forest? Why again, and over again? Because of that chance, that beginning. The mood becomes propitious, loss rich, depression suffused with hope. And how is that possible, that hope? Perhaps simply because the mood is doubled up in song. Because it lets itself be sung, it pulls back to grant strength enough for song, for recording, release and distribution.

Singing happens. The song is out there, away. And that from the first, from as soon as it's sung, since it will be recorded, will be placed on an album alongside other songs. 'In the cell, there are - possibilities.'

Unique to Jandek I think is the fidelity of this chance, these possibilities to the mood itself. That the music, the lyrics, bring us close to that enfeebling moods that blossoms to allow chance. How can anything begin? How can it be made to happen? But it happens, it begins, and the singing, the playing remains with the joy that that there is something, rather than nothing. That making was possible, and again.

But a joy that is pressed back straightaway, that is brought down, drawled. No sense of a lift, of lyric flight. Hope and possibility brought close to their opposites. A music played and sung along the edge, flattened. That keeps itself low. (Beckett to Van Velde: 'I'm not low enough'). And isn't that what is meant by 'the humility of pain'? That pain must bring low that same hopeful flight. That the chance to make must answer to the impossibility of making, to pain, to weariness. And that God is given only because of that pain, that weariness.

That is pain's humility. That is its lesson. A lesson endured on the later, solo albums. Endured - suffered. Even as it falls back a little. Even as it gives a chance. No lyric flight here. No lasting rapture. Everything brought back to the same. Black painted on black. Near nihilism. Nearly nothing left, black on black ... What life there is to wail only that there is life. And that wail, that wretched protest is also the whole of life, what life can be.

Sometimes it seems pathetic. 'You should get away from me/ I'll just bring you down/ I'm in my corner crying/ Like a lonely dog'. And then, in the same song, 'I don't care about philosophy/ Even if it's right/ I end up back here'. In the corner again, in the cell. By way of a reduction that no longer belongs to philosophy. In the chair, I stare. Or, I don't know how to anything but sit in a chair. Humility again, but one that is also a way of seeing, of living, of not merely enduring pain, but letting it sing.

And this is the doubling up. This is the mutation the mood allows. And on the later albums, there is little but this - the mood, its mutation. As if there were only a single mood to Jandek, only one. That continues from album to album. That gives the chance of singing and then withdraws. Until nothing remains but the songs.

Pain sings of itself. Pain knows itself and sings of itself. And by way of Jandek. By way of what is sung and played. And by that same singing, that playing, there is also the humility of pain, pain remembering pain and not rising above it. Pain staying its own course - but more than that. Pain doubled up, made into a song, singing of itself and staying its own course as it refuses to rise, refuses lyric flight.

To sing from pain's humility means a fidelity to pain. A way of staying with it, of running in its groove. This why, performing, there will be no address to the audience, no talking. Because this is not a performance, or just that. This is pain, pain in song. It is pain's humility that demands nothing else. A guitar string breaks; the instrument is passed backstage. The band waits. The Representative looks down. Minutes pass, nothing is said; the guitar, restrung, comes back. And in those minutes, silence. The Rep looks down. In fidelity to pain. In pain's humility.

And this is what he sings to an Austin audience. 'I don't know why I'm in front of you/ I'm six feet under the radar screen ...' Six foot under, and there. Dead and also there, a dead man singing, and singing from death. This is Jandek's black on black.

The Desolated Voice

'The Humility of Pain': a song addressed to - whom? To himself, the singer, the narrator? First impression: the voice desolated. More than alone, more than solitary. Utterly cast out, utterly removed. Subtracted from anything but itself. And even from that, from itself. Cast out from itself and having to sing to itself. And for itself, for its own sake. To prove it was there - itself. To prove itself there, that it could be there and had the strength.

Yes, that's the need for this address. The need for the singer, the narrator, to sing to himself. It is to join himself to himself, to reach across the breach. The voice grows defiant, even amidst its desolation. Grows somehow surer of itself, gathering itself up. In this address, this call to awakening, though the one who is called is only himself, possesser of this voice; singer, narrator.

And this more general sense that all these Jandek songs are addresses - but to whom? To us, the listeners? Well, we cannot be ignored. These are songs released, whole albums. But this reaching to the public is also an attempt to return to the private for the singer, the narrator. That great arc that he must travel to return to himself. And now I imagine this arc is the one described by Jandek, for Smith. That the voyage out - writing songs and recording them, getting them pressed and distributing the recordings - is an attempt to come home.

To return - but to what? To himself? To that gap in himself that made it necessary to sing, to play. To that absence of self through which he gave birth to the other that sings and plays in his place. Rosenzweig's God absents himself from himself to allow the world and human beings to appear. History is the drama of the becoming-God of what is separated from God; of the redemption of the world.

And the time of Jandek releases, for what does that prepare? The whole oeuvre: toward what does it look? The becoming Smith of Jandek? Smith knowing Smith by way of Jandek? Rather Smith becoming nothing, and that lack he also is discovering its strength. Until it is that which sings, and that which Smith becomes in singing, in playing.

Being turning in its sleep. Being contorted; the grimace of nothingness - its protest against being drawn from itself and into life. Men seek immortality by their works, says Plato; it is why the writer engenders a book, the hero deeds. In truth, this is a deathly immortality - a way of living on undead.

Deeds make the hero just as writing makes a writer. But writing exists all too much; it exceeds the writer, as deeds do not exceed the hero. And the same, too, with singing. What you have discovered is too strong for you, and in truth, it is as though it discovered you. And thus your oeuvre lives its own life, runs its own course, like a god who has been reborn as an avatar and forgotten its divinity.

Then the creation of Jandek is by way of absenting, a making space. But Jandek will not become Smith; the oeuvre will not glorify its maker. Rather, it will deepen that absence, increase it. Until the gap between Jandek and Smith is wider than ever. Until absence and presence struggle against one another, light and darkness, like Mani's Gnosticism.

It is Jandek who reaches us in song, not Smith. Undead Jandek, never alive. And who sings from being brought into existence, into life, from beyond it. Death sings; death lives a human life. Or rather, what has never lived is singing; the remainder, the desolated part that lives on in our works without us.

Question and Echo

What questions do we ask into an oeuvre? What is allowed to echo there? Two boys lost their ball in deep grass on a French hillside. Following it, they discovered it had fallen into an entrance of a cave. Inside, carrying torches, they discovered great ochre coloured beasts on the walls in the flickering light: this was Lascaux where, thereafter, various theorist-adventurers would find there what they wanted, asking their question into the cave's echo and receiving their echoing question which they took for an answer.

And so with the writer in her criticism: is it not some clue to herself that she seeks when she writes about a body of work? As though the authors upon whom she writes were other versions of her, ahead of her. As though they had advanced further on a journey she was only beginning.

So can a writer find their courage in that pantheon of writers that stands all about them. Courage by their example, by the signatures they left just ahead of you, as the adventures in Journey to the Centre of the Earth followed the marks of a previous explorer.

Courage is important, and also the sense of being accompanied. The critic can also call from a dead body of words something like a ghost of their author - the name Bataille, say, but as it refers to more than the writer who lived and died. Then criticism is also a kind of seance; it lets that shadow flicker on the cave walls that is a ghost of the writer - a way of communing with the dead as they are buried in words, and not under earth.

What kind of life did the author lead? Where did they live? Who loved them? These are questions the ghost cannot answer. But the critic's question, the first, is what drew her to the oeuvre in the darkness. That led her downwards into that echo chamber where questions return in the guise of answers.

Some writers know to get out of the way of the work, to let it live. Know that the work belongs to darkness, that the ochre beasts should be discovered by the uncertain light of a reader's torch, and that there should no general illumination, no way of seeing the whole, and all at once.

So Blanchot, who wrote to a director who proposed a film version of Thomas that his desires did not matter with respect to this project; he voices a doubt in his letter - part of his general suspicion of the visible - but then says: treat me as though I were dead. A posthumous existence he'd already claimed for himself in the author's note at the end of The Infinite Conversation.

Dead, and away from the work. Dead, and retreating into darkness, to let the work be. To let it shine by the reader's torch and not according to light of his own pronouncements. Discretion, then; withdrawal - impressive to maintain, in the face of the media, a kind of negative celebrity, a void in place of a man. There is the work in the darkness that belongs to it. And the man about whom for a long time we knew nothing.

And as with words, so music. And as with Blanchot, with Jandek, too: for his retreat in the face of his work is as absolute. What discipline does it take to perform live, and yet to maintain his discretion, not to put on a show, to address the audience, and to insist on there being an exit that leads out of the venue by a secret route, where the audience cannot find him?

And what effort to resist replying in depth to the queries that he is sent, limiting himself to a few cryptic, fortune-cookie words written in his familiar hand on a Corwood catalogue? The better, though, to allow the work to speak. To draw listeners to it by their own light - by their listening. And let them bring to it their own questions, which they hear, in the echoing darkness as answers.

Yes, this is admirable. But it does not hold quite all the way. For has there not been, in recent years, a new candour in the lyrics - a directness, a non-obliqueness, that provides the listener with a clue to the whole oeuvre, to a real sense of what it was always about? Depression, of course. For his whole life, says the singer on Manhattan Tuesday. And doesn't he promise his audience in Newcastle to bring them a little of that - depression?

With this frankness, something new happens; a light flashes out, and the whole cave becomes visible - everything, the whole oeuvre, and at once. And we see that the man who recorded and released his work for many years did so from depression, and out of depression. That was the mood that attuned everything. Depression was the secret.

And yet the point, obvious enough, but worth repeating, that his depression was never complete enough that it did not lend itself as a topic for lyrics. That it did not close over its head so he could not rise gasping to sing of it. Then it was never complete, never absolute, it allowed respite, and that respite was the work, and the condition for that work.

Depression doubled up - depression joyful enough to sing of itself: this is relief, respite - and isn't that borne also by the work. Isn't that its hope, that it was possible, that the grey clouds parted, the black sun gave way to the brightness of the real one? Wasn't that the miracle, the returning miracle of the faith implicit in the work, in the recording of music and its release?

An obvious point; and besides, it is to be remembered that depression wasn't always his theme, and it was never simple. The light that spreads from Manhattan Tuesday, from the lyrics in recent years is only a flash; everything is seen and at once, to be sure, but this is a fake, an eidolon; it brings one Jandek forward only to push another aside, and the oeuvre is more than what is illuminated now.

'There's nothing to get', said Sterling Smith in response to a question of what the music was about. Nothing: and that is the darkness in which an oeuvre gathers us to itself, and speaks to us in a secret autobiography - not Smith's, this time, but ours, who listen and seek to find ourselves in listening. But to lose ourselves too, this is true - to become, to get away from ourselves. To move in a new direction.

But isn't that what is also told in the story of a life? That if we seek to become what are, that becoming also means an escape, and even a kind of death - a dying to what we were, just as the Tarot dealer reassures us that death - the skeleton with a scythe - only means change. And that life will have to fall to what it does not know in order to find not itself - fixed, determinate - but what it might be.

Does this mean we might identify with the music, discovering it as an account of our moods, our melancholy? Or is it - fake alternative - also difference that alters them, our moods and our temperament, that attunes them differently, letting them resonate with what they do not quite know?

But all of this is too simple, as if it wasn't the play of these alternatives that fascinates - the eternal fort-da of the search for meaning and its defeat. For isn't it the very ordinariness of the man on the record sleeves that is the source of mystery? The ordinary - a young man in a check shirt, smiling at someone - as it is framed and presented to us as the record sleeve of a music that sets the blues adrift?

And isn't it what survives of these blues forms that makes this music offensive to those (Chusid) familiar with, say, free jazz and the contemporary art music avant-garde? It is the way Jandek is close to blues forms and far, the way the Representative is presented as a man just like us but who is also withdrawn from us, who does not acknowledge his audience.

Close and far. Living and dying. Or a kind of dying - endless change come close, meaning sliding away. It is not just that Jandek is an enigma, and Smith, but that we are likewise enigmas, and it is this that echoes back when we ask our questions into the dark.

Let me ask my question: Why Blanchot, whom I read for the first time in 1993, and now Jandek, heard for the first time only recently (a matter of months)? Why this pair, heard and listened to before I knew the legend that surrounds either of their names?