Can you trap yourself in an idiom? There’s an album of Jandek that doesn’t work (When I Took That Train) I think because it is a suite of love songs, of the anticipation of love sung drawlingly to the usual dissonance. The lyrics should follow the gain of the idiom, which means Jandek should only sing about despair and numbness. But then an idiom is not trap, but also a way – it is just that the way, in this case, is narrow.
When did he discover it, the idiom that is Sterling Smith’s and hence Jandek’s? It was there, pretty much, with Ready for the House, back in 1978. A whole idiom – an unconventionally tuned guitar, played with few chords or little fretwork pretty much one-handedly, and played for the emotion – strings brushed, plucked, strummed. And dissonantly, on acoustic guitar and sometimes electric, cheaply recorded on a reel-to-reel.
What kind of words go along with that kind of playing? Words that speak of detachment and numbness, to be sure. But there is humour, too – Modern Dances – and sometimes collaborations with other players (Blue Corpse, which is, for me, very overrated). I suppose I want to find an essential Jandek – a Jandek without many blues stylings, the Jandek, I think, which reveals itself in the most recent studio recordings. As though it took 30 years of working within an idiom to finally discover its secret.
And here the sense that it is the idiom that has guided the song-making and lyric writing, and even the idea of Jandek itself: in principle a group project, though typically comprising only Sterling Smith, that has withdrawn from the usual mechanisms of recording and publicity. An oeuvre – 50 albums – that do not compromise (with one exception, which only proves the rule) the idiom that opens with Ready for the House.
As if Sterling Smith knew rightaway that it was only following the idiom, becoming with it, that mattered. And knew from the first that he could not compromise by dealing with record labels or distribution networks: he would sell the records himself, at first in large batches, intended for record stores and radio stations, but then directly to his audience.
I think he says he took a day job partially because he could not live a life with this music, with music making. The idiom exacted a price: imagine: days alone in those rooms we sometimes see on his album covers. Days in the house with only music, and the prospect of music-making. It would be too much. And so he worked – first as a machinst, and then, later in a white collar job. And he prospered enough to buy himself a house in a good neighbourhood.
He’s in his 60s now, Sterling Smith, and releasing what I think is his best material. The Humility of Pain, Khartoum Variations, Glasgow Monday … do these albums, and the gigs he started playing in 2004 indicate he’s retired from work? To one correspondent, he announces in 2003 to get ready for surprises: but what in his life has changed so that he can be along now with music, with music-making?
Perhaps the gigs are a way of getting out and away from his house. A way to expose himself to the demand of music-making in a different way. To work communally, as he had done only sporadically before, and before an audience, which he had never done: a burden was shared. And likely those who play with him – whom I think have little relationship to him outside the gigs – know no burden.
Become what you are, says Nietzsche. But in the case of Seymour Smith, who is also (almost) Jandek: become what the idiom demands. Follow the idiom; become with it. And let it bear your life, too, like the meltwater beneath a glacier that smooths a way for them to reach the sea.
Did his colleagues know what he was making? Did they pay it much heed? Did he seek to keep his endeavour to himself like a secret? We know from those who have interviewed him how uncomfortable he is to be linked with Jandek. Jandek is not him, he says. He may not even be necessary to Jandek, he says. As though Jandek were the concern of an lunatic brother.
In truth, Jandek belongs to the idiom, and when Smith is Jandek, when he makes, when he creates, he is no longer Smith. The idiom demands nothing less. Just as Kafka steps into fiction as soon as he writes ‘he’ instead of ‘I’, Jandek is a step away from Sterling Smith and the others who play with the ‘Representative from Corwood’.
We shouldn’t think of Smith as a recluse, even if he told his early correspondents he had no friends. His reclusiveness is the face of Jandek – that is to say, it is no face at all. Jandek is no one, and Sterling Smith become no one. Who is it that writes and records in his place?
But it’s a narrow idiom, no doubt of that. Narrow, and unappealing to those who dislike dissonance, or the lyrics which trail along behind Jandek’s dissonance. Some have said Seymour Smith is a poet who accompanies himself with his playing, but really it is the other way round: there is the playing and then the lyrics, the poetry. His voice drawls on recent recordings. It pulls the words almost apart. It is the idiom that sings along with him.
But it is a narrow idiom. He is joined by another guitar player on Blue Corpse. The famous Nancy joins him on Modern Dances and other albums. And then of course the many excellent improvisors who have joined him on recent live excursions. But these remain, I think, within the idiom – although there are the humorous songs to think about …
Is it that the idiom learns of itself through Jandek? Is Jandek a way the idiom can discover itself and live a life? Sometimes I think there is a lesson in art, a way of learning not only by thinking about what is made, but about the making itself, and the way it belongs to a life. About the demand of making, as if it held the clue to a new ethics of self-formation, a way not of becoming what you are, but of what an idiom will allow you to be.
Then what matters is to discover an idiom from which you can live. An idiom – not your idiom, not that style which, all along, was yours, but that through which a call can resound, tuning you, attuning you, and letting you live according to its demand. Is this a way of loving fate, of amor fati, as Nietzsche would call it? Of loving what has been given to you to live? Or rather, of giving yourself, or letting yourself receive what henceforward let a kind of living awaken in yourself?
A life within your life. The indefinite article within the definite one. A demand from which you can live. And now I wonder, still more speculatively, whether Deleuze was right to speak of one form of becoming yielding into another, and that the ultimate was to become imperceptible, to become with everything, with the life that streams in all things.
(Tangent: I think at once of the bad faith Sinthome identifies in those who profess belief in a system and live otherwise. Like those for Kierkegaard who live outside the speculative palace they construct, magnificent as it is.
Bad faith: is this the name for this failure to live by your thought – to keep the consequences of your thinking far from you, away from you? But thinking must be of life, close to life – to that impersonal living that none of us quite inhabits, the call which demands our becoming imperceptible. Close – and perhaps that is also what writing affords – writing, now, with no aim or purpose. ‘Boring stuff about me’.
As if there were a way of discovering a life through that detour into your life. Write, then; respond to a demand. Live – or a let that living live that is without person. Write of your life and let it burn with the flames of an impersonal living.)
(Note to myself: ‘pulls the words almost apart’ – think of a verb that attenuates itself, that is stretched like a torture victim on the rack. Think of the ‘to be’ as it becomes pure pain … isn’t it that which lends its voice to Jandek?)
Lars Iyer's Blog 