8.05.06, Who Is This Mr. Jones Anyway?

[Franky Scale for today remains in the 6 range, no vomiting but nausea still; and I had some real hunger and a brunch to match in the a.m. with Mr. Ted; all such good things today were no doubt transcontinental gifts of providence from Francis, after whom we name our scale, and who was born on this day those years ago. Peace. -Mr. J]


“Who Is This Mr. Jones Anyway?”

Why has no one even questioned what’s in this name? I assume it’s collective tact to explain why no one asked why a pseudonym, now defunct save for the continuation in its new or afterlife as nom de guerre. I appreciate all of your tact while it was needed. But the provenance, am I the only one who thinks it’s strange? An in any event I clearly seem to want to talk about it, so you’re stuck, unless you hit fast forward.

Mr. Jones, the obvious initial source character is from the Counting Crows song, “Mr. Jones,” in the little prophetic fantasy room built by Adam Duritz in their first album (August and Everything After), but still he’s someone who’s misunderstood there too. First, of course the song bears his name — but what I noticed when going back to the song for details is that it’s not really about him at all. It’s very much about the “me” of the singer, the speaker of the poem returns.

Second, logical correlative to the first, there is only one line about Mr. Jones in the whole song, only one that says anything about his desire, and of course I’m going to take the Lacanian route here too and assert that the desire is sign of lack and the lack constitutes a person’s identity, if you will. The one-line persona then there: “Mr. Jones wishes he was someone just a little more funky.” Period. That’s it. He’s a cipher, a projection, or a foil, a person with an unrealized desire or the person of unrealized desire. Who lives on a wish and a wish alone. Everything else you think you know about him is projected from “me” onto him — yes, I like the conceptual pun that it’s me who has to tell it to you, it’s me you rely upon, it’s me who narrates who the I am supposed to be. And at the same time, the “me” of the song isn’t me. Productive confusion is necessary for any good poem.

So back to numbering things, you could say there’s a seemingly manifest level of the song and thus of the person, first off. Next, you could say there’s a latent level too, as with dreams, as with all texts, as with always. You get the man-on-the-street Mr. Jones who comes from not listening carefully enough to the song: hanging out at the New Amsterdam, drink in hand, watching the beautiful women, strolling through the barrio, images of Picasso, grey guitars, wanting, watching, me on TV, fame, Bob Dylan, and so on. Go deeper and the more careful listen gives you what? Buttkiss. Butkiss? Butt-kiss? Nada. You realize this whole story you thought you knew in this song is really just someone else’s tale. Another person thought it up, wrote it out, sang it out. So much for song of myself. Shit. The whole story has been filtered through someone else’s desire/s, through someone else’s words, somebody who can play the grey guitar, hell, any color guitar. Mr. Jones, I think, doesn’t play, but his friend apparently does.

There’s a third Mr. Jones who doesn’t show up, not even in the song, though he’s everywhere. Filling the world as a trope. “Mr. Jones” of “the jonez.” The martini jonez, the OC jonez, the desert jonez, the book jonez, the work jonez, love jonez. We’ve got it bad and that ain’t good, and all of us seem to play the Jonesey role at some point. Some of us play it all the time. The modern bourgeois subject jonez. The subject of capital Jonez — now before you roll your eyes and make any disparaging comments about academic-speak or deliberate unintelligibility or intellectual posing or whatever, let me say that for my part, at least, I’m dead serious. This person of our modern age is precisely a non-person, and if we’re brave enough to look really closely in the mirror, too many of us will see it there — nothing. Just a bunch of borrowed desires produced by a system we’re stuck in. I don’t care how it sounds and if it breaks from what is usually a more direct style of writing found here, it’s the truth and it sucks and it’s to be faced. If not, take Camus’ other alternative seriously.

The blog identity is as much about this as it is about the imaginary projections of somebody else’s storytelling. The power of narration. A great line from the literary theorist Pierre Macherey is right on the point: “[Literature’s/narrative’s] discourse has a shadow-life at the edge of a radical exclusion, the exclusion of its pretended object, which does not exist” (Theory of Literary Production, p. 61).

Well then, Mr. Jones: I think it’s not just me, but it is definitely me. If nothing or no one else.