The voice frightened – is that what it is, in late Jandek, in the recent run of albums? A frightened voice, cowed somehow, fearful – but of what? Of raising its voice. And even of singing. A voice frightened of what it will become in song. Yes, I think there is that fear, but that is not all.
Fear – but isn’t there a kind of courage that gathers itself in the music, that allows itself to be gathered? That, beginning, lets the beginning be carried forward, as the song reaches that field of possibility in which it can stretch itself out. As it reaches its milieu and tests its possibility like the first flight of a bird. Only this is a bird that must plummet and only plummet.
That its freedom is lent at once to following of necessity. That freedom is indistinguishable from nonfreedom, as it comes to this necessity. As it comes into it, inherits it. As it rolls forward with it, and rolls from it, the source – freedom, necessity one and the same is what repeats itself in its going forward. Nonpulsed time in pulsed time, the amplification of the same unfolding in place. Until the song is only what carries repetition forward, the freedom-fate with which it began.
Fearful – no doubt. But there are many moods here. Many low, crushed moods. Many moods that are reached only by the downpress of the a great weight. Crushed, almost broken, but not quite broken. Still the chance of singing, and playing. Still the movement forward in the idiom and even of the idiom, for the idiom, too, is enlarged by the movement of the late albums. Is deepened and broadened as the singer sings in the crush.
Freedom-necessity. What does it mean today to write of fate? And why should fate lead this way to a music of near absolute despair? Is it because fate is always relative to an idiom – that to make an idiom (to make it by making, for one can never be constituted in advance), to deepen it, is to follow in some sense what that idiom permits (freedom) even as it seems to bore forward in a single channel, being completely constrained (fate, necessity)?
I’ll need to make a topography of idioms … to map and chart the landscape of music. Does Donny Hathaway follow the idiom of soul? Does James Carr? What do they each open within soul? What is driven forward? And what becomes of jazz with Sam Rivers? And what of Derek Bailey’s claim to have discovered, in free improv, the non-idiomatic, the non-idiom outside?
In each of these performers there is, perhaps, a way they break away from something. That there is a cut at a certain point, and something new becomes possible. A new concentration. A new directedness, where it is as though you would only have to follow yourself, to take a step forward, for it to be revealed.
Vague thoughts, poorly formulated. But that moment when this new freedom carries with it a necessity, that you must do nothing other than create, that song must follow song, that you arrive at the studio without songs knowing only that there must be recordings.
But why Jandek, then? Why Jandek, and for me? Is this a question about my taste? About my physiology? About my history as a listener? About my place within a culture of listening and within a culture as a whole? Why focus on the moods of fear and anxiety? Why these moods and not others?
What kind of autobiography would I need to write to answer this question? What kind of cultural analysis? What philosophical leap that would take me beyond culture and all the way to the conditions of culture? What account of amor fati that would drive taste into the body? What account of mood that would speak of the attunement of peoples and epochs? What poetics would I need that would inform the appeal to bear the idiom of the music on the page, in prose? What relation to language that would let language sing like Jandek?
In some sense, I tell myself, you must have FALLEN to listen to Jandek. That these are songs that are broken away from success, and from the criteria of success. That he sings after a fall, that these are songs sung FALLEN, that their cry rides up from a FALLEN place. That he went to the end of something and beyond it, as you must go to the end. That the field of the possible was exhausted, that it was no more a question of the body’s strength nor of its weakness, but of what happens at the end of strength and that of weakness. FALLEN – as if it brought its own broken wisdom.
But might the music not show you the way that falling will happen? Does it not stretch out like the steepchaser the line along which the tower will fall? Then it is not that you must have FALLEN but that you listen along those cracks that will allow you to break. It’s not that Jandek unleashes an explosion inside, that somewhere inside you are demolished. Not, then, that you life must have already broken, but that there are faults along which you life will break. Faults, fractures that exploded open with your birth. That what you are is also broken, and it was ever thus.
To die, then, before you die. To fall before you are FALLEN. The song sings along the cracks. Reaches you there, where the ruin is beginning.
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