Jandek has an eye on the whole; the whole has an eye on Jandek. An eye? An ear. It is not that Smith first has a mood then sees everything through its lens – everything, the whole, the outside as he will sometimes present it, while he is inside, in his house – but that the mood has him, that he arises from it, that, as Jandek (sometimes a group, but it’s usually just him, just Smith), he coalesces out of something much more diffuse.
Coalesced, pulled together in response to the music, to the prospect of making. Pulled together from out of the future, temporalised, and given a past, a present in view of what he’ll make. And that’s how he becomes Jandek and not Smith: how he passes through a mood and passes into it, and then – by what surplus of strength? – is remade by way of what is to come: to make music, to sing, to play.
And Jandek’s music is first of all that – the miracle of coalescence, of coming together. Of capacity, of being able to be able. As it arises from the confused muddle of a mood. Certainly the singing, the playing of Six and Six is abstracted, blank; it barely seems to belong to anyone. The singer become thing, become condition. The singer returned to that bubbling mire from which all things come.
Monotonous, apathetic – an absence of mood rather than a mood. Sung from that no-place where feeling should be. That place beyond pleasure, beyond pain. And a singing stark, hermetic. That has closed itself away. A voice that has locked itself in. Voice of the house. Singing and playing in the house, inside. In the cell, in the corner. Turned away from the world, and turned to – what?
Catatonic. A voice minus itself, lacking itself. All feeling, all mood. The absence where a mood should be. How did he reach that state, Smith? How did he find it? The second Jandek album, from 1981. Only the second – but by what process was he able to sing, to play – of nothing? What to reach that apathy, that apathein that is the absence of feeling? That is a place to begin, and from which everything begins.
Somehow, a breaking away from the muddle of mood. Some kind of separation has occured. Some reduction. When I listen, I’m sure he reached that state through long training. Through some other process. And I think of the novels Smith said he burnt – 7 of them, not rejected from publishers, but reclaimed by him, Smith, because Random House took too long.
He took them away from the city (‘our experience living in lower Manhattan was … necessary’, he writes to Chusid, using the Corwood ‘we’), burned and buried them. Gave them a proper burial. ‘[W]e took the printed matter to the countryside for an unfettered, proper cremation. Stirred into ashes into the ground[….] The countryside dirt was hungry.’ And buried what else?
Write enough, I’ve always thought, and you come to understand how it breaks from any form of personal expression. A fantasy, really – that of becoming imperceptible by writing and that it would happen to anyone, and that that would be the blogosphere. And I’ve thought that to fail at one thing say writing – finishing a book – would break anyone from the desire to succeed according the arbitrary rules of others. Until it is neither a question of success or failure – or that failure, a kind of falling, would be the way to find ‘your legitimate strangeness’ (Char).
But what strangeness is this? How intense Six and Six is. How fiercely bright, like phosphorous. And proceeds according to itself, by its own light. That discovers its path as it goes along. Light in light. So bright you can see nothing by it except brightness. As though it were a peculiar kind of night. A night without a source of light. But now light is everywhere, it comes from everywhere, thick, cloud-like. It is like passing through a dazzling cloud. That’s bright, but where you can see nothing but brightness.
How to focus on the lyrics? How to listen to them when it is the performance itself that dazzles. That guitar, detuned, tuned away from tuning. And the voice, loud in the mix, very present. And so present its hard to follow what is sung. Only that there is singing. Only the absoluteness of singing, loud in the mix, very present. Sometimes whispery. Singing in short phrases. Scarcely any drama. And the guitar, tuned to some wierd private tuning, strummed and picked.
The whole has an eye on Jandek. And if Smith sings, performs – if he does so as Jandek – then it is from that gap in all moods, that eye in all storms. An eye – an ear, rather. That hears … what will allow Jandek to be gathered to itself. But what is heard? What draws him forward, Smith, Smith-as-Jandek?
When one song ends, another begins from the same place, and in the same non-tuning. Begins again, intense, without absolute focus. Paced roughly the same, no melodies. But flat, a music of the plain. Consistent, with the same tempo, no choruses, no refrains. Just its continuance, white in white. White light, like a migraine. A pallette of high notes (non-notes); voice and guitar, both high. A fierce guitar break. But still on, going on. Monotonous. God, what intensity. Who’s doing this? Whose strangeness is this?
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