In-der-Blog-sein

Spurious listens to Jandek with help from Levinas.

The drama of Jandek's music is given in a freeing up of fate, a kind of mercy - not as it lifts itself from despair altogether, but as it momentarily allows despair to sing of itself. Mercy lies at the root of the surprise of the address, of being able to address. This carries the music; it bears it - there has been a retreat of suffering in suffering sufficient to sing of it - but suffering is there nonetheless. This does not imply a detachedness or an objectification of pain; there is still a bearing of suffering, a way in which suffering is enacted. I am tempted to put it emphatically, without knowing what this formulation might mean: at issue is not simply a performance of suffering, but of suffering as performance.

We are thrown into existence, says Heidegger; the fact of human existence is aways pre-given such that we are obliged to find ourselves in a particular situation, understanding (in Heidegger's sense) and taking a stand upon what exists in our vicinity. We do not throw ourselves into existence, we are thrown; and we cannot get back behind or thrownness. This is why the adolescent's wail, 'I didn't ask to be born' is not ridiculous. Not only that, but we are obligated to do something about our condition; we exist in time, and the future opens before us. Our existence is a project [Entwurf]; we remain in the throw of thrownness [Geworfenheit]. The project is what means we are thrown into the future; we have to do something about our condition, even if it is only to accept it. To chose to do nothing is itself a choice (a refusal to choose to choose). But are we always capable of making such a choice? Can a merciful surplus of strength lift us from that despair in which incapacity voids our ability to choose, to live, to act, from the start?

Writing in a prisoner of war camp, the young Levinas suggests thrownness should be understood as a kind of abandonment or dereliction; that it has the sense of a desertion such that our relationship to the fact of our thrownness returns to overwhelm us, disrupting the opening of the project, of that projection that throws us into the future.

Frankly, listening to Jandek requires much mercy from the listener.

Hovering uncertainly between speaking and singing, the voice remains unmelodic, with wayward, part-improvised lyrics which are usually clearly audible despite slurred, irregular phrasing. The singing, so difficult to bear for many listeners, never settles into a particular pitch, remaining agonisedly in motion; Jandek presents us with a voice in extremity, and an endless quarrying of pain and related states, in which infinite gradations of suffering are allowed to differentiate themselves. The music of the albums with which I am concerned here remain in the singer-songwriter tradition, even as song prolong themselves into half-hour soundscapes.

  ¶ 9:10 AM