Unwittingly

The outsider artist, on one account, is unwitting: he does not know what makes his work interesting. A kind of doggedness is his, that’s true – he gets the stuff ‘out there’ – but its source is also hidden from him. To go on, and that’s all. A blind need to continue. Relentlessness.

Certainly this image fits Jandek; there is a sense an idiom continues to discover itself in him – an idiom – but is this the word? is it not a question of what burns at the edges of folk, of the blues, of improvisation, of rock? – with respect to which he is always unwitting, making a music that sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails those peculiar capacities with which he was gifted: that voice, that way of playing, but also, moreover, that temperament, that depression, that set of lyrical concerns – all of that. Succeeds – when the lyrics, singing, playing, fit the mood his singing, his playing cannot help but suggest. Fails when they do not – on the love albums (When I Took That Train), for example, where the hope in the lyrics seem at odds with what we hear in the tone of the singing, the playing. Where it is still despair that attunes everything.

But it is naive to separate capacity from performance, as if the two were not joined on the songs and the albums: as if the potentials that would be his are not only transformed but made with each step in his extraordinary oeuvre. That he creates, he makes, as he also creates himself – creates, not from nothing, but from that peculiar destiny he made for himself as one album followed another. Creates from that set of possibilities with which he was gifted and that he also gives himself.

What belongs to him is relentlessness, the desire to make, that is also a desire to remake himself, to partition his life – separating the musician (Jandek – he and whoever collaborates with him, the songs copyrighted at the Library of Congress), the owner and manager of the company who releases his albums (Corwood Industries) and the white collar worker, busy in the world.

To partition his life, and by so doing, to keep that place of transformation and remaking open, writing his lyrics and recording his work, buying new instruments, collaborating with others on live performances. Keeping it open, and this is his relentlessness, it is this around which his other lives are a husk.

Who does he become when he becomes Jandek? Not himself; not the involate one kept apart from the world; it is not that simple. Another and someone else. The one who changes, and to whom transformation arrives. A kind of sacrifice, perpetually burning. An avatar …

Is he relentless? Certainly. What is its source? No matter. What matters is to continue, regardless of talent, of opportunity, all that … To continue, and this is the source, and the reason why these apparently despairing albums are not made in despair. Handed over to Corwood Industries, sold and distributed, they are made available to others; they communicate, and to do so is already hope, the source of hope. This is what cannot help but bear the music.

Is he unwitting? But only as he makes his own idiom, which means he cannot know what he does, and only does it. Only as he opens his own idiom by going forward – but what does this mean? A movement that makes sense only when you look back to see where he’s been.

Album after album leading back like the crumbs Hansel and Gretel left in the forest. And back to – where? The source is mysterious. Simply a will to begin, to make. Everything follows from that. A kind of relentlessness. A need to partition, to keep one part of life apart from another. And to live out of that separation, to live from it. As if it were also necessary to be reborn as an avatar. To let yourself be born thus as into another life. His life as Jandek, as another. His life as an avatar in another world, where he develops his own legitimate strangeness (Char).

To work unwittingly. Without knowing where it’s going. Steve of This Space has written many times around the problem of genre. Literature, if I understand him, belongs outside all genres, even its own. Literature remains outside, being displaced with regard to itself, and this is what marks a literary writing. Literature outside, in lieu of what it is, and experiencing that lack in every sentence.

Literature without model, as the experience of the loss of models. Modernism as this loss, when creativity begins in the wearing out of genres, as idioms become impossible and you fall beneath them. And this fall, with relentlessness, becomes a beginning, and a literary beginning. And literature begins in the fall, in the loss of all models, all genres. In the fall that makes talent irrelevant, ability by the by. What matters is exhaustion, the experience of failure. That is also, unwittingly or not, an experience of the whole of art.

How to start again? How to make a beginning? From a death to what has been. Until what remains are fragments. That point – where? Nowhere, until the necessity to begin rises up. The source, relentlessness. That magnetises those fragments like iron filings. That lets them point the way ahead, a pointing that is itself a moving ahead.

How to begin, to find a beginning? To fall. And know only the desire to move forward. This holds for the artist, but perhaps, too, for the listener. That you have to have exhausted something to listen to Jandek. Or that you have to have experienced his exhaustion, alongside his imperative to go forward. An exhausted going on, but a going on.

Isn’t that what you will need to hear? Isn’t that what qualifies and elects you as a listener? Isn’t that what marks you out? And then every time you listen, it is also a beginning.

It’s Sunday, and the first sunny day for weeks in our failed summer. Sunny and bright – blue skies, and my Visitor is out, and it is time for my listening. Time, which had been waiting in me all the while. Gathering up, that readiness for listening. To the brink of me, and bringing me to that brink. Until listening is a way of creation, of making. Until I make as Jandek sings and plays on Raining Down Diamonds, and then Khartoum.