‘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.
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