What was it I was supposed to do this morning? My Visitor works in the other room. In this one, I can play Jandek very very quietly. Six and Six – ‘Point Judith’ and ‘I Knew You Would Leave’ from the LP, not the CD – the difference: more surface noise; more ‘distance’ to the music – or rather, that it retreats to its distance, pushing me back. As though it played to itself at some remove from me. As though Jandek sung to Jandek, and I am only overhearing.
Another difference: the noise of something being dropped – a microphone? – breaking up the song. An accident, but not of the sort Bacon would have used as the basis of the image (or the image’s deformation): the CD reissue corrects this fault, but I miss it, and listen to the older recording by preference. And now imagine such a fault across the surface of your life – life like a record, unfolding in space across time, a needle running in a groove – but the needle, now, out of its groove, scratching across the record’s surface.
A noise made by the medium. The medium’s noise – and in Jandek’s case, it is probably a dropped microphone, rolling across the floor. And imagine that life has a kind of thickness and makes its own quiet noise. That it’s like the sound you carry in your head and through which you hear everything. Through it, but not it, as though it sang to itself, that it roared distantly and to itself, and you heard it only a great distance.
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