My life is very simple now. Damp, and Jandek, just them. Damp on the one hand – omnipresent, amniotic, all around me, and then Jandek on the other. Most mornings, I rise very early to try to write. Early, and I switch the heroic fan heater on in the kitchen to be rid of the night’s damp, penetrating in from outside and then condensing on the walls that have been stripped bare for the final reckoning.
I thought it was simply the damp and I, and the fan heater. The heater on the side of righteousness, the negentropic device that in its small way stopped this part of the universe from crumbling. I think of those everymen in Philip K. Dick novels – the tyre regroovers, the makers of toys from old garbage. They’re like the little heater, and I’m Joe Chip with his can of Ubik.
But just as Linda Ronstadt became, in Dick’s tangled mythology in the 70s, the voice of God or something like it, Jandek arches over me, halo-like. Jandek and the voice of Jandek, and his guitar. Back home from work, and the fan heater goes on again, eating up electricity but necessary. The flat must not decay. Must not resolve like the bricks on the kitchen wall outside, into pinkish paste. And Jandek watches over my efforts and blesses them.
These are my Damp Years, but also my Jandek Years, I know that now. I dream of writing 50 posts to celebrate Jandek’s nearly 50 albums. I may clear some time in the summer for that. Imagine: 50 posts! and on Jandek! In a small way, I will have justified my life. In a small way, something worthwhile will have happened.
I talk about nothing but Jandek, and damp, and think of nothing but the damp -and Jandek. I like to wake up very early, and then work, and then home and a general vague soupy tiredness in the wet jungle heat of the flat. ‘Keep it warm’ said the surveyor. Warm – it is hot here. Tropical. And in my throat, the spores. Deep there, in the throat, changing my voice, changing me: black spores.
Inside, my body is all black. Turn it out to the light and it will be black still, and absorb light. Black – and with damp, the deepest damp. Damp like sin, absolute sin. The mark of Cain, but across every inside surface. I am a cursed man. A man hollowed out. In the crevices, the corners – damp. There were the moisture meets cold plaster – damp. And inside me, in the darkness, along the corridors of my lungs and in the black cavern of my heart, spreading: damp, only damp.
But there is Jandek. The Humility of Pain – what a title! – that’s the one. The track, The Humility of Pain, the first one I heard from Jandek For Dummies. And because of the title. Because it was called The Humility of Pain. That title was absolute. I thought: it is very simple, and I’m not sure what it means. The Humility of Pain, I thought: he’s learnt a great deal, Jandek. Learnt it and over and over until it became simple for him.
Simplicity: already, in the title. The first song of the album, and the whole album. The title sheltering the whole album. Sheltering it, a black umbrella. A sheltering simplicity. Everything is here, says the title. Everything I’ve learnt is here, complete. A whole life’s lessons, and everything burning away, dark. A simple smouldering pile of darkness with bits of bone sticking out. A body burnt and a few bits of bone: that’s the album.
Not that everything is burned away – not a kind of transmigration into the air, a sacrifice that leaves nothing to burn. No: still burning, what remains of a life. Life but as it smoulders, having burnt for thirty years.
And Jandek watches over me, but blindly. No one sees. The eye is smouldering, with the rest of the remains. And now it is as though the damp changes polarity. As though darkness has turned a corner in darkness, and night is lost within itself. A wandering along the edge of everyhing. A peat fire along the ridge. Black, unspectacular smoke. Black and burning, patient, not yet completely reduced. Still the remains, smouldering.
Even the first album smoulders like a fire almost out. When did Jandek ever burn? How young was he? He spoke of seven novels burnt. Seven novels put to fire when the publisher’s rejected them. He works as a machinist, he tells a musician in his first interview in 1985. He’s a white collar worker, we are told by the journalist who tracked him down in the 90s.
7 novels burnt, that was the start. All the fire was in them, and the fire burnt away. Fire died in fire. And then the first album, a vision already complete. In 1978, the first album, after 7 albums. But this time, Jandek (who had not yet taken that name) was going to do it his way. No publishers, no outsiders. He would pay for the manufacture of his own records. He lived simply; no friends – or at least that’s what he wrote to a fan in 1980. A simple life in the house pictured on his albums. Curtains drawn.
Jandek – but that’s not his own name, but a name assumed – in his house, sitting on a chair. Hours empty but for music. Days pass; months; Jandek has his mind on music. He will organise his life around it. Everything must be simplified – simple. Only music. Voice, guitar. Sometimes other instruments, collaborations, but always the return to voice, to guitar. From which everything begins. From which everything can begin.
In the house, by the chair and an unused drumkit, a Fender acoustic, a simple amp, a microphone, a four track. Jandek getting up and dressing for work and going out to work and then back to the house and to the room where everything might begin. There are other rooms, all simply furnished. Echoey rooms, and in one a desk with a fold out table and a notebook, and pens, and pencils.
Jot down notes. Ready, open on the table: the white page of the notebook, with pencils close by. Be ready to write. Be in this room to write, echoey, white-walled and the window, as anonymous as any other, with curtains drawn against the light. And other rooms, where food can be eaten. A dining table. A kitchen.
Jandek falls beneath his name. He is never quite his name, which never names him. He is the other one who is not-yet Jandek. It is Jandek that is important, not him. He is Sterling Smith (perhaps). And Jandek – is elsewhere, and all around him, and nowhere. He is the representative from Corwood Industries who arranges gigs for Jandek, and the pressing of his CDs. He’s not yet Jandek; he does not coincide with him. Not yet him, and the house is where he wonders as he waits for him.
The phone unplugged. No one’s to disturb him. And he won’t have a computer in the house. Keep it simple. Wander from room to room. Days pass, months – and gradually strength comes to him. Strength in jags and spurts and then long bouts of weakness. And then, more steadily, strength comes and for a few days, Jandek comes very close to him.
He sings. It is not his voice. He plays – but whose hands are these? The four track running. At night, Sterling Smith goes to bed excited but also calm. He knows he must preserve his strength, tend to it. Even his strength is weak, he is usually weakness itself. To bed early, and to rise early. And then, after coffee, to the room where the instruments are. And then to play and refind the mood. Play, tune his guitar and let himself be tuned and attuned.
Sometimes, for long periods, he records nothing. He plays instead – his new fretless bass, his old piano, in another room. Play, just play. He asks for little – just to play. One day gives unto another. Days breaking into one another with the steadiness of his labour. One day, another – and each day the river-path that lets the music come. A mood. The pressure of a mood, day after day. Gathering, coming to itself. Until it’s time again for the music room, for a recording.
He rarely looks at his notes. The lyrics work themselves inside him. Jandek’s voice asks for him. His hands. And when he sings, it is Jandek who is close to him. Closer to him than he is. Jandek suffers. Jandek is suffering. And he suffers Jandek. He suffers himself as Jandek.
In another room, piles of Corwood CDs. Piles of his own CDs, ready to be shipped out. Letters and orders from fans all over the world: he keeps them. They help him keep his strength, and build and ark around his strength. For it is his strength that must be nutured. Rest. Eat properly. Exercise. Strength, the strength to begin is all.
But his strength is weak. It comes to him, it passes. Strength comes in gales and squalls, but then departs. And he must watch over it quietly, and without hope. Must not press himself. No stress. Wait, until waiting no longer takes an object. Intransitive waiting. Impersonal attention.
At night, sometimes he wakes and goes across the landing to the bathroom. Alone at night, he’s unsure who he is. And knows he must aim his sleep at the morning. That sleep is his ship of death that is aimed at the morning. Keep your strength: he doesn’t need to tell himself, not anymore. He is his own ark, his protector, curtains drawn.
In the evening, he sometimes drives out to meet his colleagues. Sometimes, out to see a film. Escaping his solitude only to return to it. Solitude he releases only to know the sweetness of its return. For it returns as sweetly as the finest summer mist on your skin. Returns like warn night rain in summer, sweetly. The house waits; the house is waiting. And inside him, too, Jandek waits. And soon another album will join those in the long list of albums from Corwood Industries. Soon, another title alongside those in that long, typed column.
Sometimes, there are trips. Sometimes, Jandek drives out, away; sometimes a plane to Europe. The house waits for him. The absence pulses. The instruments stand there – the guitar, on its stand. The drum kit, rarely used, dusty. Away, Jandek dreams of the sound of his amp when it’s switched on. The hum before music. The hum that says: I’m ready.
In foreign cities, Jandek drinks coffee and pulls out his notebook and writes a few lines. Sometimes he takes photographs for his album covers. Without planning, without forethought, the chance of a shot will surprise him; he thinks: there it is. He barely thinks about it. Everything is automatic for him now. 30 years, 50 albums: he knows what is required. Or it knows in him, in his habits, in the ethos into which his life has settled.
Sometimes Jandek feels simple, very simple. Not a thought in his head, driving along with the radio on. That’s why he likes, sometimes, to drive, to travel. To clear his head; to drift. As though the amp of his life were turned on, ready. Sometimes he feels he’s falling, but along the road, out. Falling as he drives out in his car, across the earth. And sometimes he feels he’s thrown out like dice, bouncing out towards the horizon.
Who is he? What chance is his? He passes among other people. He closes his eyes, opens them. They are everywhere, thickly around him, and he is anonymous. Who is he? Anyone at all; everyone, all people. And perfectly separate from everyone. He feels light. He feels he lives on the surface of the world. The light flashes across car windscreens in the carpark. In a white shirt and jacket, he feels lightly alive in the world, first among men, and last.
But who is he? Whose chance is he? Did Jandek throw the dice? Did he?
Lars Iyer's Blog 