Spurious

Marguerite Duras, from Writing:

One does not find solitude, one creates it. Solitude is created alone. I have created it. Because I decided that here was where I should be alone, that I would be alone to write books. It happened in his way. I was alone in the house. I shut myself in - of course, I was afraid. And then I began to love it. This house became the house of writing. My books come from this house. From this light as well, and from the garden. From the light reflecting off the pond. It has taken me twenty years to write what I just said.

Still, in Trouville there was the beach, the sea, the vastness of the sky and sands. That's what solitude was here. It was in Trouville that I stared at the sea until nothing was left. Trouville that I stared at the sea until nothing was left. Trouville was the solitude of my entire life. I still have that solitude around me, impregnable. Sometimes I close the doors, shut off the telephone, shut off my voice, don't want anything.

Write all the same, in spite of despair. No: with despair. I don't know what to call that despair. Writing to one side of what precedes writing is always to ruin it. And yet we must accept this: ruining the failure means coming back toward another book, toward another possibility of the same book.

Marguerite Duras, from an interview in Two By Duras:

Alcohol is irreplaceable. It's perfect. But it's death. I've almost always written on alcohol, and I've always been afraid. I've always been afraid that alcohol would prevent me from being logical, I've been afraid that it would show in my writing. Now, without alcohol, I'm  no longer afraid. But the moment I stopped drinking I was afraid I'd stop writing. The writing in books such as The Lover is, as a line of Baudelaire calls it, 'belle d'abandone', beautiful in its abandonment, in its loss. I've no idea if this abandonment has always been within me, forgotten. But it surfaced when I wrote The Lover. I wrote it without meaning to write, it happened[....] I didn't think about the style, I didn't think about how I'd write it, and when I started writing I felt that the book itself was the style. I had the impression of not writing at all, I don't remember having 'done the writer', as the Italians say.

The heart of The Lover is myself. I am the heart and all the rest of the book, because there's no literature there: only writing. These days no one writes. Or almost no one. There are books, books made out of books, and behind them there is no one.

... the clandestine nature of writing. I can only write for people if I don't know them.

I work a lot, very hard. I've always enjoyed working. Now I work without alcohol. I hope I'll be able to continue to work without alcohol. Because of my liver. I've ended up with a very small liver. That's terrible! Terrible because alcohol is so positive, so perfect, such a major occupation. There is nothing like alcohol. Just look at all the drunks in the taverns. They talk to themselves, they are perfectly happy, they are in harmony with their beings. They are like kings. They are the authentic kings of the world.

The Black Sun

How to speak of creation, of artistic creation, if not to draw it back narcissistically to the life of an artist, or to what the artist would have wanted to express? How think of art as the opposite of narcissism - to know yourself as the pool's surface that reflected your face? That your face on the pool's back is a feature of the water and not your own. Or that what you are is only that pool as it contracts itself to live a human life. Or to know yourself as an avatar of a god - that your life is not your own, but a sheath in which another lives.

That your life is greater than your own because another lives in your place and will awaken from you, like a butterfly from a chrysalis. And your life will fall away like dross, being justified only by what it allowed. To serve and not to rule. To abase yourself so completely you are nothing at all. To be the vessel of something, to let it work through you, as though you were that part of a circuit that allowed a current to flow. Part of it, but on condition that you are no more than a part, a conductor of energy and nothing more, and that your justification lies in this.

Is that what it would mean to be divinely inspired? Is that the possession, the dispossession, that Plato fears? To be the husk where a god passes (divine madness, he calls it)? We are without gods now. What does it mean to think yourself a husk? What current passes through you? The work instead of the god. The work that works through you, in place of you. The equivalent of speaking in tongues. For a time, inspiration, and then? What you have made. What stands apart from you. But what does so is not of you. It is not something you planned to make. Its origin stands away from you, prior to you as an artist, and the work as an artwork. The origin set back.

Why, then, did it visit you? Why did it come to you? No sense in answering that. No reason you could give. And the work is nothing you made. Or what you were was reversed at that moment - that you were turned somehow inside out, that your eyes were rolled back into your skull.

When I listen to Jandek - the late albums, it is not introversion I hear. This is not an artist who looks inside, for there is no inside, the inside is a landscape, a place where nothingness echoes. The soul unfolded. The artist's soul - given in the moment of creation and only then - is the explication of the soul, the way it is turned outside. The eyes rolling back into the head. Inspiration.

And what can you be thereafter except the shell of that experience, its husk? What can you be the cast off skin of a chrysalis? Except at every moment of creation. Except then when the nova explodes all over. Now and now when the embers burn again, glow red. And your life, your whole life catches fire.

I would like to say, however implausibly, that the despair on an album like The Place does not belong to the singer, the player. Or that this belonging is a way of speaking of the soul undone, of the eternal return that keeps it open, and open, and open at each transmuting instant. And that this, in the end, is the pulse of the work, the way it shatters itself open, the way it blooms like a jagged flower into the night.

And who is left, after? Who are the wound - strange flower - closes itself? Who after the torn soul heals over? The one who knows himself to be the avatar of a god, of the work. Who knows the origin burns outside of him. That he belongs to the black burning stars on the other side of heaven. Belongs to them, but by not belonging. That the source of the work flees him as it flees the listeners of Jandek.

And even to the extent that he has this in common with them - that there is a kind of community, a friendship, that binds him, Sterling Smith, to those who listen. And isn't it in the name of friendship that Smith must turn his life from us? Isn't that the pact, isn't that the honesty of a soul that does not possess itself?

A kind of honesty, as if to say: I made nothing. Someone else made it. Someone else sang and played in my place. To say: do not confuse me with him, with them, god or gods. Do not take me for the origin. To say: my life is the shell, the chrysalis, and what matters is the work. What speaks is the work.

Let the work speak for itself, this is the commandment. Let it speak - this the sole law of the work. But what does it mean? That the songs must not be read autobiographically. That it is not a matter of the life of Sterling R. Smith. Or that that life is placed on the altar of Jandek, and sacrificed. Much as in the same way that a novelist will take something of their lives and give it to the work. Here is Nabokov, speaking of the same:

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it[....] Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore, and the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own.

Note, then, that what sounds like the despair of Sterling Smith is merely lent to the work. It's what the work asks for, as it belongs to an idiom, as the music sounds depressing. It is the music, then, that calls to the life, and not the other way round. Or rather, the music is not the expression of a life, but what is called from it, in much the same way, perhaps, as in a double star system, one sun may draw from the fiery substance of the other.

One sun licks part the life of the other away, devouring it. And that black sun - the music - draws forth some part of the life of Sterling R. Smith and not the whole. That it calls into being part of what Smith is and can be, even as he is more (and less) than that. It is in this sense, then, that the soul is opened. In this sense, in his music, that it is only open, the bruise that sings. For it is wounded as the work opens; it is what is summoned to the surface by the work; it is what is made to speak.

A silly example. Discussing the song 'Helicopter' in an interview, Andy Partridge says

the whole thing probably came out of the guitar pattern sounding a bit like the blades of a chopper[....] It was probably, 'Oh that's a bit like the blades of a helicopter - there we go, that's what the song's about.' Sometimes it would take no more than that. In fact, that's a big thing for me - the onomatopoeic sound of the instrument you're writing on.

The lyrics follow the music. The music summon the lyrics because of the onomatopoea. And likewise in the double star system of Sterling Smith and Jandek, it is Jandek that summons from Smith's life what accords with the music. And since the music, for the most part (and I am thinking here of the recent run of albums) sounds depressed, or desolate, or terrified, these are the kinds of lyrics it summons.

The exceptions here, of course, are the two love albums, in particular, When I Took That Train, whose lyrics, recalling the thrill of infatuation and romance, jar horribly with the music. It is not even that the music voids what is sung of romance, of magic - this might be interesting, making a numb album, an album that voids romance in romance - but that it seems merely a tiresome exercise, a throwaway music, Sterling Smith responding lazily and inappropriately to what Jandek asks of him.

There is another temptation, to which Smith, I think, succumbs on several recent live recordings, including the recently released Manhattan Tuesday: to personalise the lyrics, to link them too strongly to the vicissitudes of his own life, as if it were the measure of what Jandek were capable. In truth, Smith's depression, real or not, does not matter to Jandek. Or that what matters is what it becomes such that the black star can burn it away from the surface of its double, swallowing it, sacrificing it, so that songs can come.

I have always smiled at the idea of Corwood Industries. We have the artist, Jandek - this naming Sterling Smith and whoever he performs with, even if he performs with no one, and the record label, distributor and booking agent (for his recent gigs), Corwood Industries. That Sterling always allows to speak in the first person plural. Always 'we'. I think the promoter Barry Esson is part of this 'we' - didn't he announce himself recently as a representative from Corwood Industries?

Either way, Corwood, who is nothing other than Sterling Smith (who seems to have another company, Sterling Smith holdings, registered to the same address) releases albums by Jandek (Sterling Smith and associates), distributes the albums, books gigs and so on. This means Sterling Smith, in the guise of Corwood, is not obligated to speak of Jandek as though he were part of it. That he can speak of Jandek's albums as units to be shifted, or discuss distribution problems with customers on the phone.

At the same time, of course, he is part of Jandek; and for the most part of his career, he is Jandek, pretty much. When you book a Jandek gig with Corwood, as I understand it, it is the Representative from Corwood, plus band, whom you book to play. All this is wonderful. It shows a kind of humour, it's fun, but also displaces questions of the identity of the performer with respect to what is made. It is a way of bracketting troubling questions of agency and responsibility, and the whole insistence, in our media age, of accounting for artworks in terms of the life of the artist.

In a real sense, I think all this is a way Sterling Smith responds in friendship to us, listeners to Jandek. It is his way of answering to the music of Jandek in a manner that is honest and responsible. Reading interviews with musicians, I am always struck the religious motifs that surface when they describe their creativity. The most sensible of musicians wax religious, as if the only vocabulary they can use, the only one suitable even in our secular age, is that of God, of angels, of the divine.

I do not laugh at this. It is courageous in its way, for all that it refuses the idea that the human being might be the measure of the work. A religious vocabulary is almost necessary - it is pretty much all we have to go on - when displacing agency in this way. Thinkers like Heidegger and Blanchot have attempted to produce another vocabulary for the process in question, but their work is not well known to come into common currency.

In friendship - Smith watches over the music of Jandek, but he does not do so for himself. He is not the only listener. From the first, from Ready for the House onwards, he knows other people will listen. He knows he even owes it to them, to get them to listen. Thus, from the first, although he is uninterested in claiming responsibility for these albums, for standing in place of Jandek, giving interviews, allowing himself to be photographed, he wants units shifted. Wants to find ways of distributing them.

Whence the near comedy of Corwood sending out boxes of albums to anyone who expressed an interest. Give them out free, Smith says. Distribute them. Very few albums were sold. Indeed, a complete lack of interest in the 1000 copies of Ready for the House pressed up back in 1978 made Smith almost give up recording altogether. Fortunately, a couple of reviews came in. His records were played on college radio; he began to record again, and from that time 1981, there's been at least one new album a year.

On the sole interview with Jandek, included as a special feature on the DVD, we hear Smith saying he has to release one or two albums a year, in order to keep Jandek afloat. That those one or two albums are sufficient for Jandek not to disappear completely as a known recording artist. And there is the sense that Smith owes something to Jandek, that there must be some strategy to keep the name in the eye of the public (what little public he had). That he was in debt in some way, that Jandek kept him, Smith, afloat, that it made sense of his life.

And I think that is the other side of the double star system I have described. It is not just that Jandek sucks life from Smith, drawing incidents that fit with the idiom of the music, requiring him to write appropriate lyrics, to sing, to drawl, but that Smith draws some comfort from the presence of Jandek, too. In one sense, he is responsible for Jandek - this music has been placed in his care. He must look after it, tend it, and make sure it is passed on.

This is the friendship Smith has not only for Jandek, but for Jandek's potential audience. In another, Jandek watches over him. It orientates his life; it makes it greater than it is. Smith, by way of Jandek, is more than he can be, and this is marvellous. Who would not want something in their lives to live or die for? That, I suppose, is part of having children: your life gains a sense, a direction. It makes sense as something which can be substituted for others.

And isn't this what is alive in left wing politics too - the sense that you have always usurped the place of others, that you have taken their place, the nameless sufferers, and that you must, in turn, substitute yourself for them? Each time, it is sacrifice, each time, sacrifice lets life make sense. But we should also remember that Stalin asked Russians to sacrifice their lives in view of what was to come, that every dictator has asked the same of his people, and that the figure of sacrifice should itself be sacrificed.

A double star system, then, where each is responsible for the other; where term watches over the other. Why, those present at Jandek gigs have asked, does the Representative from Corwood (the Rep, let's call him) not acknowledge the audience? Why doesn't he thank them? Why, when his guitar string breaks, and he passes his guitar backstage for a few minutes, not engage with the crowd, some of whom have travelled thousands of miles to see him?

Because Jandek has asked Smith not to get in the way of the work. That Smith must not interpose, that he must keep away, lest the particularities of his life prevent the music from looming in its magnificent impersonality. Smith is a machine part, a 'modest recording device' as the Surrealists said.

And why the cryptic fortune cookie notes in lieu of any real communication with interested fans? Why does he sign them Corwood, not Smith, or Jandek? Because of the same impersonality. Because he does not stand at the origin, and is not the source of Jandek. And because - more broadly - our time does not permit of a vocabulary sufficient to speak of what he, Smith, has experienced. The holy names are missing, as Heidegger says; the holy itself is missing. The holy, as this is one name for the origin of art. Just as origin is only one name for what it names and so is art.

Deleuze says somewhere that no government will ever be leftwing. That to be on the left is a way of perceiving the world, a kind of attitude, that allows you to begin not with yourself, but with the world. A narcissist assumes she is the measure of all things; she begins with herself and brings everything back there. It is the attitude, Deleuze suggests, of the right. But to begin with the world, with the becoming of the world. To begin what is far from you. To remember the origin as it stands outside ...This is Deleuze's left. It is what it means, for him, to be on the left.

The figure of sacrifice, of discipline, is returning in the discourse on the left. Perhaps Deleuze's position will be regarded as a low point, of politics-as-ethics, of a kind of atomisation of the great political task that should lie before us. We need the party and the discipline of the party; need, that is, not only to escape and find a weapon on the way, but to charge forward as a collective, to work together in hope and discipline.

Perhaps, then, turning to Jandek, thinking of him, is the worse kind of foolishness - that it is itself a kind of narcissism, a petty attempt to retreat from the real arena of struggle. Perhaps it is part of an ethical turn that involves no more than an adjustment to capital, to a way of coping without addressing the conditions of our lives. We are stoics, then, those of us bound in friendship to this or that artist, who have retreated to the garden. And meanwhile Babylon, the empire, is all around us.

Then

Where did I put that volume of Mandelstam? Not the Penguin classic edition, but the other Penguin one - where did I put it? I think it's boxed up in the Bela Tarr office. Boxed up with the other books, or piled up somewhere, behind the desk. I haven't looked at it in years. Not a glance. But the spine of the book is enough. Just seeing that cool cream spine calms me. Alongside Malte Laurrids Brigge, in the Hogarth edition. And Pessoa's Book of Disquiet, in Quartet Encounters.

Stranded in Exeter a few weeks ago I experienced the same thing: the sense that in the books I opened - and this was a rare Waterstones, that placed books in translation where they usually have those 3 for 2 offers, and where the literary classics section included old Calder editions and out-of-print Bernhards and Handkes: that I'd opened, too, a doorway to the side of my life.

That something unexpected had let itself be found. That came drifting along, then, just then, when I was ready; when I'd already read half of Mrs Dalloway as I lay on the grass beside the cathedral, when I'd already eaten two small salad tubs from Marks and Spencers. Then: a little volume of Tabucchi's, Dreams of Dreams, which includes 'The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa', where the heteronyms visit him in turn. And the first section, dreams of Rimbaud and Debussy, of Mayakovsky and Freud, as fantasised by Tabucchi.

Yes, that book is exactly right, I thought. Right for now, today. I found other books, too, seen before but never owned. Lars Gustafsson's The Death of a Beekeeper, once reviewed alongside Blanchot's Death Sentence by John Updike (which is why you get that wierd quote on his blurb for Blanchot's novel, which mentions, incongruously 'the beekeepers defiant courage in the face of pain'). A book made of journal fragments, not real ones, but a fiction. Of a man with not long to live, and writing. Writing in that space stretching open in the time left to him, and a fiction.

What would it reveal?, I asked myself, and an imaginary Sweden opened before me, rather like the one on the cover. Of the skerries, rocky islands like in Bergman films. Sweden where Bergman is still alive, I thought, and how old is he now? And worked it out. 88 - or 89, I thought. Does he still live alone? Alone on the island?

And a treat - did I really need it? and in hardback? and at that price? - Handke's Once More For Thucydides. A small book of pen portraits of places at particular times; haecetties. Worth it for Handke's prose? Worth it for its grey spine which lies on top of other books by my bed. I have a Handke in reserve, I tell myself. An emergency Handke.

Frost arrived today, Bernhard's Frost, so I have an emergency Bernhard, too. I usually have one in reserve. Until recently, it was The Loser, the funniest of all the novels. And a little after that, Wittgenstein's Nephew. And until today, nothing at all. But now I have the dreamy blue spine of Frost laid horizontally opposite from me. And I know its pages are rough along its edges, that they do not present an immaculately smooth white cliff. Rough pages. Like a book in French. Like my Les Editions de Minuit of Marguerite Duras. L'homme Atlantique, tiny and ragged-edged.

And I bought a nice edition Kafka's Blue Octavo Notebooks, too. Did I need it, when its contents are held, in their entirety, by another familiar Kafka edition? Ah but I could have bought - and didn't - the hardback edition of the aphorisms, much more lovely. The same aphorisms printed in a tiny font at the end of the notebooks. So, in a sense, I'd saved myself money. I'd been frugal ...

I photocopied it once, that larger edition, in my lunch hour when I worked as a temp at Hewlett Packard. I still have it, I think, two hundred pages joined together by treasury clips. The whole thing, and in Hewlett Packard! As though I was salvaging something, and perhaps myself. Taking time back. Or letting time lap to me from another direction, then, just then.

And I reread The Sea of Fertility there too, twelve years ago, a lifetime ago. There to assist an employee who'd been off with a stroke. There for one week, with nothing to do. So I read it again, The Sea of Fertility. And I think I had Hollier's Against Architecture there, too. I think I read it and abandoned it in anger. Having photocopied it when I was on the dole. Photocopied the whole thing, as I would later do Husserl's Logical Investigations and Internal Time Consciousness in one of my first teaching jobs.

But those books, Husserl's were never necessary to me in the way Rilke was, or Mandelstam, or Tsvetayeva. Tsvetayeva to whom I felt obscurely protective, and whose work I knew from the letters quoted in someone else's book. Those letters, quoted, were enough. I've carried some of the these books with me, though I sold many others. Some of them are left, boxed now, or piled up where I can't see them behind the desk.

How many thousands of books have I bought! And how many thousands sold! Because I also dislike to hoard, and dislike hoarders. Those who keep books unread in great cliffs, all up the wall. Didn't I deserve them, when I was young and poor? And perhaps that is the joy of buying books now: to have what I wanted then. To get it at last.

I was moved to see Bonnefoy's edition of Giacometti reproductions in that same Waterstones. In paperback at last, though over £40. In paperback, when I used to eye up the edition in Manchester, upstairs at Waterstones. And I vowed again to give my books away. To give them to who wanted them, to whom the books would open a doorway, unexpected, to the side of their life.

As I went to pay, I saw the new big book of Cy Twombly's behind the counter, shrinkwrapped. I asked to see it. I wanted it, right then. £50, I think. A huge book, a slab of a book. And a lot to read. I remembered the Twombly's at the Tate, from a year before. They'd stood out at the Tate, we agreed. And after that, the name would come to me every now and then: Twombly. As I knew it had been destined for me to see his paintings then.

Then - that time when you should meet a book. When a book is right for you - or a painting. I used to spend hours wandering the bookshops in Manchester. Feeling the creamy cover of Finnegan's Wake, wandering whether I should have it. Coming across Cage's Silence by chance ...

In the old student union bookshop, you could arrange to sell your books, the shop keeping a share - only 10 or 15%. They closed it in the end, of course. As everything good is closed. But for a time, I sold books there, and bought them, and the shop assistants - two of them, imagine that: two - called me Mr ----. I liked that very much. To be called Mr ----, and then when I felt unimportant.

What did I buy? What did I sell? Fire-damaged books from Hatchards. Thoreau and Emerson, in the American Penguin Pocket editions. Whitman's Specimen Days.  Old cheap Penguins. Science fiction for 35p a pop, which I bought to complete my collection of all the three and four-starred books in David Pringle's Ultimate Guide ...

Another time, years later, studying for a teaching qualification in Guildford, I used to pass an edition of Beckett's Complete Plays in a shopping mall bookshelf. And experience the then then, though I had no money. It was £8, I think. I passed it for thirty days, and then - bought it, as I still have it. Boxed up, piled up in the office.

I visit bookshops rarely now. It is part of my dislike of open time, of empty hours. I never wander. I think it's only once I went out wandering in this city. Once, and I didn't like it, I'd strayed too far, I felt like a cosmonaut of the afternoon. Get back to the office, I thought. Work, I thought, draw work around you. You should be out on a day like this, I thought.

No more 'thens' in the street. 'Then's come by post. Frost from the Book Depository yesterday morning. The big box of Jandek CDs from Corwood. That's where they'll meet you, summoned by you. Where the post is kept. Or, if I do not get there first, waiting for me on my office desk. That's how they come, books, from afar. I bring them to me. I bring the 'then', I call it. I don't go out to find books. They come to me.

You can only go out wandering when you're young, I told myself. When you've nothing in particular ahead of you, a whole life, but directed nowhere in particular. Only then can you wander, I thought to myself. When you're older, there's no point, everything's been decided.

There must be no slackening of time. Time must be accounted for. Work must shape your hours. Work and projects, for time is getting short. Soon, it will be impossible, but for now, today: work. Rise early and work. Go to bed early, tired from work. Burn out your eyes with computer screens and pages in spotlights.

Then. How do they reach me today, these books I bought? Tabucchi and Gustafsson? Kafka? I think they stand around me as books did when I was young. That it is someone young in me who wants them. That it is my youth that calls them, and needs them to stand around like a host of angels. Books. Then and now - today.

But nothing worse than the bourgeios with his books. Great cliffs piled up, unread, hardly necessary. Better scattered books without order. Books half-lost, just as I've already lost Mrs Dalloway (and I was halfway through it, wandering through London streets ...) Books piled casually and neglectfully. And books to be given away, piles of books pressed into willing arms. Here, take these. Take this, it'll mean more to you than me. For imagine it, what a gift, to be given Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems! What a gift to find Handke's Across in your hand!

And imagine it - the joy of reading Bernhard for the first time! Or Henry Green! The perpetual surprise of Henry Green, of Concluding, or of Caught. Then. Then, you will be ready, the one to whom I will give a gift. I will make you a 'then', hollow it out. I'll have made a 'then' you might carry like the ark in the tabernacle of your life.

The Dreams of Colonel Kurtz

(The suite of songs called, on the CD, 'Afternoon of Insensitivity' (Manhattan Tuesday) is a sequel of sorts to 'The Cell' (Glasgow Monday); there have been other sequels since, recorded live like these albums, that are still unreleased. Considered in the context of Jandek's many releases, 'The Cell' arrived from nowhere; conventional chops, a steady tempo, an august beauty obvious to any admirer of Bach. 'Afternoon' suffers by comparison not musically - it is an extraordinary brew - but lyrically, with the obtrusion of the lyrics. There's too much directness, too many long words that do not scan; they do not explore a mood, but force it. Anyway, here are a few impressionistic notes I wrote to accompany my 10th listening of the album.)

You can hear it as it comes into being, the music. Crawling out of nothing like the first amphibian from water. Comes into being, condenses as from the air. A mist that is sometimes a fog, becoming suddenly dense. And then dispersing a little - white, blank forms drifting apart.

The bass, discovering a pattern, a pulse seems to tread. The guitar squawls without notes. Textures matter, not forms. The bass treads, the organ seems to follow it. Then the vocals slide in. Vocals, spoken-sung, a little above the simmering music. A speech-song above the pulsing tread.

A resigned singing. A singing that begins in a mood, out of a mood, not questioning it, but searching within it. A voice in the fog of a mood. Washes of guitar - no notes. And the drums and the bass locked together, forward-treading. And the vocals, a new style for Jandek. Drifting mist above the cauldron. 'There's just this empty time/ I must persevere throuuugh'.

A speech-song borne. That searches above the musical bed. Horizontally, moving from side to side like a snake. A singing in two dimensions, restrained, half-crushed. That does not rise to look around. That slinks forward with the music's wash.

Are these songs? Slices of mood rather. Slices that seem to end almost aribtarily, that start up again, after applause, in the same way. That begin again as they began before, spinning out guitar squawls over the void. And the Korg synthesiser set to organ treading forward. And the percussion starting up, rolling forward. A pulse discovered. A pulse that holds the music steady. That gives the music its measure.

But it is all about the singing that, with this second track, glides into the music like a crocodile. And as usual with Jandek, singing is followed by a break from the lead instrument in a call and response. Words drawled, though clearly sung. And then a keyboard run. And behind this, the squawling pulse of the guitar.

The steady trudge of the drums. Forward somehow. But as though in orbit around a pulse. Forward, though turning around a pulse, measured by it. The music throbs, simmers. There is a tension - will it boil? Will it wander off the pulse and break into noise? But it is steady, so far. Steady two tracks in. Patient and measured. And the singing sliding along the surface of the water like a sea-snake.

Percussion bubbling. Bass pulsing, bursting from itself. And guitar squawls without notes. This a slab of music. A swamp, heavy and bubbling. A swamp of some poisonous brew, some foul mix of chemicals bubbling from the depths. Bubbling up and releasing its fumes.

A jungle scene. Life everywhere, but life gone wrong. Strange mutations. A foul, creeping menace. Steam from the water at midday. Tar swamps. Swamps of what disgusting substance? what brew? That seems to be gathering itself up now. Led by the organ as the organ rises in pitch. That seems to reach upwards a little. That has advanced onto some lower slope.

The tempo rising. The music intensifying. 'React with indifference/ As bombaaaarded by the woooorld'. 'God knows the uuuuuuuse' -and that last word howled high and torn apart. And now the music simmering back down again, off the boil. Why did it boil then and simmer now? No why, no pattern. It is, it spins on, a bridge over nothing. Simply a slab of song, a swamp. That bubbles.

And now the guitar plays rising notes - lovely. Rising up like the neck of some diplodocus from the jungle. Before it is allowed to wash again. Before it washes over the trudging pulse. And again comes the singing. Comes again, without melody, an instrument like any other. 'Crazy dumb thoughts/ Afternoon of in-sens-i-tivity' - lyrics in couplets. Two couplets and then on, the plunge back, the sea snake vanished.

Steady as she goes. Steering in the marshes. Brushing aside the dangling fronds. How long is this song? How long can it be? 'Why - am I - so - empty?' The song carries its own Law. 'Living long and living deep/ I did not see - relativity ...'. 'But I don't mind/ I don't mind.' 'There's a kind of numbness/ that I know ...' And the organ stops. The music stops with it. Applause again, and now?

A few seconds gap. Suspense. Then the organ starting lower. The guitar. And the organ walks along. Just organ and guitar for now. The jungle again. The marshes again. Back to the foul and fetid scene. What is that wierd squeaking? The song of birds turned inside out. The pain of minerals. Nothing is alive here. Beyond life, or life gone strange, unrecognisable.

And now the singing. 'It seems I've been depressed all my life/ I was about 11 years old on a summer's day/ I was aware of the nothingness/ I said to my mother, there's nothing to do/ She said just go outside, you'll find something/ So I went outside and - did things.' Comedy, but no laughter.

This run of lines spoken. Intoned. 'Now it seems/ There's more to do inside than outside/ But still there's nothing to dooo/ We simply manufacture circumstances that give the necessity to do something' - the last line awkward, it does not scan. It obtrudes from the music, forcing its way forward. Too present, and so with the next lines. I want the music again. I want the organ to enclose the scene. And it comes.

He sings something about the mind. Escaping nothingness. 'It doesn't seem we humans are happy/ we're just in situations that force us to act.' This is a treatise, a reflection. That comes into clarity in the fetid swamp air. That rises into lucidity, a kind of swamp noon. As if to say: the mind itself is wrong. The mind is where it went wrong, strange life, strange mutation. That correlates with nothing. That looks out, but for what? That searches, but for what?

'Just go outside/ the elements will teach you to respond.' And all these lines sung more firmly than before. And now it ends, shorter than the second part. Applause. And on again. I think of Aldiss's Hothouse, and the idea he has that the mind comes from without, outside, as from a parasite or an infection. A Burroughsian idea. Or of Kerans heading SOUTH in The Drowned World. There are keyboard washes now, for the first time. The pulse has fallen back.

'Staring out the window/ No expression/ Must have seen things/ It's - the highway ...' Sung-spoken a little higher. Intoned more breathily, and higher. There's more lethargy in the music. The swamp in the afternoon. The organ playing a rising flourish of notes (was it the organ playing these rising sounds earlier? the guitar?). The diplodocus's neck craning up. More wierd squeaks. More birds turned inside out. Obscene life. Life gone wrong.

'Don't want to hurt/ Don't want anything/ It's no use/ Just lay low ...'. 'They have hope, those - creators/ No creation here/ record of falling - erections/ the edifice of meeee.' The lines coming quickly. Words staccato. Blankly sung-spoken. Climax: 'I can't let them have me/ God how worse can that be!' Sung in horror. The singer wanting to keep - what? The non-creation. The crumble of edifices. Land slumping into swamp.

'Depression is consoling/ At least it's mine/ I can be a slave to depression/ But at least it's mine/ The scary world of losing control/ is far worse/ No reason to be/ is something I know/ There's no overpowering outside force/ To excuse myself/ Well, I don't care.' So literal. Too literal. Absolutely clear over the music, which I want to come back again. 'I don't want to care/ it seems alien/ oh sure, there's beauty/ it's quiiiet heeere ...' And on, in the same metre, pretty much. 'Nothing's interesting/ The only interesting thing is nothing/ That's all I want/ I care - about nothing.' And the song ends. Applause.

What stage have we reached? The third and fourth pieces, which straddle the double album were confessional. The lyrics do not wind and turn, but seem to have hardened themselves into a theme. A theme has coalesced. I feel uneasy. As though the lyrics were too dominant, too clear. That the sunlight burns the swamp vapours away. What am I looking for as I listen? The murk. The river of tar spread everywhere.

'Is it just go outside/ and you'll find something to do ...?' A continuity of concern links song to song. A reflection intoned. A musing. Do I need to set out its principles here? But I'm listening, not analysing. 'I can't die/ to the why/ that loooms/ in my consciousness'. I listen to the long 'loooms', and without understanding. I want to force the music back into obscurity. To let it lose itself, away from the lyrics. I can't stand the over-explicitness of the lyrics. Their obtrusiveness. Their crude non-scanning. That makes the song serve them and not the other way around.

I'd prefer a feverish vocal. Lyrics that bubbled, that rose up of themselves from the music like parts of dreams. Fever-dream lyrics, the dreams of Colonel Kurtz, lost in the jungle. 'Okay, so what now/ What does one who doesn't care do?/ Does he step to force himself to deal with the result of those steps'. I'm being forced to think. Forced to lift myself as a listener back into the first person, to ponder the lyrics, to muse with the singer. But I want to listen - and without understanding (with no miiiind as Jandek might sing).

But now this song, the fifth, has worn away and the sixth, too, has passed. The last song begins with more urgency. The tempo's up. The current's quickening ... There's no guitar anymore. It fell away somehow. No squawls ... And the music is wrapped around the voice, the lyrics. The steam has almost been burned away from the river. A clearing has been hacked into the jungle. The undergrowth's been cut back ...

The Worn Out Blues

(I Threw You Away is the album that inaugurates for me the most compelling series of studio albums by Jandek, following the acapella albums the appeared around the turn of the decade. It's followed by a flurry of albums, of which The Humility of Pain, The Place, A Kingdom He Likes, Khartoum and Khartoum Variations are closest to it in style. Following are a few notes I jotted down as I listened to the album for the 5th time.)

What kind of music is this? From where does it come? Did I ask myself those questions when I first heard Jandek? But I didn't need to situate it; it made its own sense. As though it had drawn all the rules, all the norms into itself, and become the Law. A strange black sun, completely black. That turned into itself like one of Van Gogh's stars, a well of darkness instead of a well of light.

What state did this music inhabit? To what did it belong? As though it were made of some basic matter of the universe. As though it had been woven out of what was most real, and most true. Such was its conviction. Such was the absolute certainty of its making. A music that had known necessity. That was crushed, completely crushed. That wandered in strange corridors it had opened, far from the light, darkness falling into darkness.

How to paint with just one colour? As though he had bottomed out despair, and found some strange new state. Not that he had risen to write, somehow of his despair, like Kafka, who felt joy when he passed from the 'I' to the 'he'. But that he sung from what was more basic than despair, lower.

This is a compressed music, a music pressed flat. A two dimensional music, that lives on one plane. Black painted on black. Spirals of black cut into black. Music devolved, music in devolution, falling back. A music more primitive than primitive.

The song of a great cry, wordless. A great wordless cry that bears the singing. That is the sound of being ripped from nothing. The cry of what was reluctant to be born, that dragged behind that nothingness from which it came. That was, in truth, only nothingness become dense in nothingness, nothingness that had found body. And that thrashed wanting to find its end, and cried.

What monotony bears the music! A single flattened mood, spun out. The spinning out of one mood, as it lets itself out and then pulls itself back. The guitar plucked neglectfully, almost randomly. Any note will do. Any non-note in this non-tuning, and all to the ghost of a blues form. The ghost of the blues, the blues turned black.

Blues for the desolate. Blues that is the wind around petrified bodies. Bodies of those who died in pain and in a state beyond pain, where pain bottoms out, falls. And fails to find itself. At a certain stage, pain is too great to endure. It is endured - but by whom? No one. No one bears this pain. The no one into which the singer has been dissolved. The no one who sings in the long moan of the vocal.

And misery beyond misery. Beyond what anyone might suffer. Suffering without subject. Suffering itself, wandering in itself. A ghost lost in the corridors. How gruelling it is! And how mesmerising, how right! How was this depth discovered? How the bottoming out to nothing?

Death within death. Dying writhing in dying: is there still life here? Is there still movement? Because the music still moves. There's still a going forward, still a dirge that spreads forward in time. There's even a momentum. A sense of the necessary. You can never turn off one of these songs. If it is on, it stays on. It must remain, and you must listen.

Still blues forms. 'Let me tell you about my blues/ My blues have turned black/ Black, black, black, black, black.' Almost to self-parody. Almost so you have to say, Is he for real? To find a context for this. To hold yourself from it. But the blues is on fire. Black flames, burning slowly.

A devolved music. A music melted, become sludge, become oil. Music in catatonia. Music locked-in. What could be more withdrawn than this? What more turned into itself, lost? What more lost than this? As though it were the outcome of some self-discipline. A long process, like Kaspar Hauser's solitude. Year after year of pain. Year after year in pain, until there was nothing else for it but to make music from pain.

To cut into its streaming. To find a form and hold it just in place. To find a rhythm, a metre. To sing a line and then play, a call and response. But to give it form, the pain. To lay it flat and scratch it. To scratch out a blues, a minimal blues, that is barely a blues. To carve out the worn away blues, the blues turned black.

Black. Cindered trees. Ashes. That's the landscape: ashes and black rivers of ash. And that's the canvas: nothing but black. How to paint in just one colour? How to discover the most minimal of forms? There's a pulse. A rhythm, not quite held together, but something like a rhythm. A movement forward. Not steady, and with clanging, ringing breaks, but a movement.

The song gathering itself up - for what? For release? Not for that. The momentum belongs to despair. Despair presses forward, absolute. Despair is hardening itself into a form. No release here. No catharsis. It will not end well. But to have given it a form, despair - isn't that enough? To have given a structure to blackness in blackness?

'Bluuuuues turned black'. And then 'black, black, black, black, black'. Wailed - is that the word? Howled -not that: too intense. And it's almost parodic. As though you had to laugh. To distance yourself. The song's closed in itself. In itself, and not regarding us. He sings to himself. No: he gives voice to despair in despair, suffering in suffering. He unleashes it, he gives it form.

Suffering lives a life. Suffering given freedom. But only to return to itself, spilling back. A freedom-necessity to draw back to itself. How flat this music is! How low! Spread blackly across two dimensions. Never raising its head. Never raising itself onto its elbows. A crushed music. A music black and viscous, like oil. A music smeared, not played.

Like the oil that coats the shore and seabirds. Like the oil that sludges in from some great wreck in the ocean. Somewhere else, far away, a life has been wrecked. And this is music spilled from the wreck, surging in like oil. 'I'm a zombie/ inside/ I'm -  unknown' and then the non-chorus, the non-refrain: the word black three times. And then. 'I'm rotting/ stinking/ flesh.'

And the voice rising into a howl: 'baby, you can see it it'. And then a grotesque drawl, 'but I knooow it's reeeaal'. Like Blonde on Blonde's vocals stretched. A drawl pulling the words apart. Rising into a howl sometimes. And then the music, in response. Plucking and strumming, occasional fretting. Atonal. But that makes sense, its own sense. That shines out like a black star, like black stigmata.

And when the song ends, another one begins in the same tuning. Another surge, another oil coating wave. This time the vocal lower in the mix. A little further lost. A little further out. What terrible resignation is this? What resignation beyond resignation, beyond Oedipus with his eyes torn out? Beyond Oedipus led by Antigone, looking for a place to die?

A resignation resigned to itself. That cannot die. This song even more desolate than the first. That has a little less momentum, and less plain horror. But a song further along in the process. That has been taken a little further. 'I won't hurt nobody/ not even myself'. Vocals down in the mix, almost lost. 

What dreadful state is this? What desolation? Despair further lost in despair. And lost from loss, wandering without forgetting. Somehow the guitar keeps it together. Somehow, played strongly, it rolls the song forward. 

The Mood

Get low. Get as low as you can. Keep low.  But how do you get there? Mood gets you there. Holds you to itself and drowns you. Until it is just you and the mood, and the mood everywhere. As if the mood preceded you. As if it was the mood first, and then you, or that the mood was always waiting to dissolve you and that you were only ever a perturbation of its surface.

The mood into which you cannot step into even once. And that is part of the step that draws you to it, that belongs to that same fatality. What does it take to discover such a mood? Where does it lie, waiting for you? Where is it hidden, there at the base of everything, just below? And that terrible, dreadful surging upwards. That kind of seeking as it looks for you. As it knows you've already gone to meet it.

Turned Away

I have always loved those artists who were turned somehow from the world. Turned, and let their work speak for them, or, better still, got out of the way of what they made made and let it speak of itself and not of them.

Let the work speak for itself. For itself - and in your absence, as if you had been dismissed from what you made. But in truth you dismissed yourself, and that's why you made the work. To not be, somehow. To open a future that did not contain you.

Let it speak for itself. And speak of what you are not.  Blissful sound. To have made a place to disappear. To have opened a door through which to vanish. And the work is the door. The work is the place, the grove where no one is, and especially you.

What is the word for the opposite of narcissism? How to name not Narcissus' gaze but the river's as it gazed up to him? What is the name of the river that knew itself by his drowning? The word that unravels every word you would like to say. The work that unworks; that writes to turn writing away ...

An Ox-Bow Lake

I lack any real discipline, I know that. I lack some faculty of application, the patience to proceed day by day on a greater work: to labour at anything where gratification is not immediate. It is enough to be able to write at all - to make a kind of mark, to sink another telegraph pole into the earth as it is attached, however tenuously to the one planted the day before.

Until a kind of continuity appears: the way behind me stitched together by what was written. A thread of writing drawn through the skin of my life. And if I were to pull it out now - to delete everything, what would have been lost? Very little, I think, for I barely remember what was written yesterday, or the day before. It seems to matter just that there was continuity, just breath enough to continue. Just to press the instrument to my lips.

Continuity - and perhaps this, in the end, why nothing should be deleted: for it is by the courage of a thousand beginnings (closer, I think, to a thousand and a half) that a beginning can be made. I've set an example to myself, I who lack discipline. I shown it is possible to breathe rather than gasp, that I can take in a lungful and exhale it again.

That is to say, I remember by what was written only that writing was possible. Remember that rhythm that seems to suspend the forward movement of my prose just as the cable sags between telegraph poles. A curious rhythm, that catches me just as a boat, moving into midstream, is seized by a current.

Yes, I think it is by that slackening that something here is done, by that small sag, by the lag of a cable that is never pulled taught. As though what is made here is only a series of folds into which I might crawl and sleep. Or as though writing fell asleep here, and this prose were like the turning of a cat in circles when it looks for a resting place.

To sleep in prose. Or rather, to fall asleep for a span of time. No more than a moment perhaps. No more than that, as time breaks its continuity. As it seems to spread out across the land, breaking from the river of my life like an ox-bow lake.

And perhaps writing is also that - a kind of gap in life, and what is written day by day an unstitching, a way of opening life wide, of exposing it - but to what? An ox-bow lake broken from a meander. A space - a wound - where there was only time. And that says: everything you've lived is accidental. Everything weighs the same. You concerns are as significant or insignificant as anything else.

I lack discipline, I know that. And what is written here is only a simulacrum of discipline; the way a life sways from its path and falls down like a drunkard. And that it does so regularly - daily - what is the significance of that? It reveals the necessity of the opposite of discipline - of that unalertness by which I fall asleep at my post, then wake, blinking, wondering what happened.

A Line Undrawn

6.00 AM, a cup of coffee in my ragged dressing gown. 6.00 - too early, and there's sunlight in the yard like a mockery. Too early - the days are too long. Eternal light. Light eternal, before you rise and after you sleep. When will darkness ever come? Not for 20 hours. There'll be 20 relentless hours of light.

Nothing's happened yet. The day opens before me. Nothing's happened. Silence, some birdsong. Blackbirds nest in the outhouse. Waste from upstairs' soil pipe runs down the wall. Last night in bed I saw a new dark patch beneath the white wallpaper in the bedroom. Spreading splotchily beneath. Waiting to darken the surface like a liver spot.

And the kitchen still strewn through the flat. The washing machine beside me here; the microwave; a stranded set of cupboards piled with Corwood CDs. Time to write, I tell myself. Time to draw the line from which to begin. And so I have my coffee. And I sit at my desk, ready. And I have my books at my side - a hardback, from which I read last night, and a softback, over which I've glanced.

Begin, then, I tell myself. It's morning, the day has spread its billowing sails; time to catch those winds that will carry you to work. To begin - but what's that? To be carried into beginning, becoming a worker - what's that? To disappear into work; to write and patch up the holes in the text. To write transitional passages. And edit. And then, after a trance of work, to look out at the yard and say inwardly, I'm done. Done, and braced against the day, having made my stand. Done and the day pushed back into the beginning, the day made to make sense. The day steered, the day ridden all the way until, tired, I dismount and pat its back and return in righteous tiredness to the house of my life.

Yes, that's what it would mean to begin. To push off from the side of the pool. To swim the lane, one length and then another; to plunge into work like Brancusi's sculptures would plunge into the sky. To be a ship of work, held together by work, streamlined and burning off the inessential. Until your whole life would be just that: work. Until you become a projectile of work, arching through the air, inevitable. The day aimed, the day directed, every hour accounted for. Every minute burning forward like a rocket's fiery tail, and the hours jettisoned like the unnecessary fuel tanks that boost a ship to orbit. Until, at the end, the whole earth is beneath you. Until, weightless, it is the whole earth you see spanned beneath you and you sleep in the air like a swift.

What it would be to work! To work - and to live, work and life as strokes of the same movement! To work and to live, one step and then another! The steps of a giant in the sun! Of the lusty fellow on Whitman's Leaves of Grass, shirtsleeves rolled up, forearms tanned, ready. Of the carpenter Kafka would like to be, as he tells Janouch, who catches him in his exercises of the afternoon.

Am I ready to begin? Worthy - of the day as work, of the hours bound to one another like the carriages of a train? Ready to steer myself like a cowboy's herd across the desert? But the herd is scattered and the carriages lie upturned. Or there was no herd and no train. Nothing began, nothing assembled itself to begin; all the forces were scattered; the army deserted in advance; the troops have joined the partisans. And so is the line of the beginning scrubbed out right away. So are life and work lost to one another. So I advance like a hemiplegic, with one side paralysed and then another: work and life, both numbed.

A line in the sand - is that what you'd like to draw? A line that would let work be work, and life, life. To make a criterion, there where you stand; to pitch a tent in the midst of exile. But the wind is rising in the desert. A sandstorm blows in these morning hours. There is no line and no chance of a line. The pitched tent has spun away. A whirlwind turns in these hours. Life and work unravelled. Life and work spun apart. What did you think you could do? Of what did you believe yourself capable? Of writing a single line? The clear stroke of a single line? Laughter: the line is lost and the desert is everywhere. No work and no life, but the desert grows.