I realize there's no words. But there need to be. I know the last thing you want to be doing now is counting up your dead like spare change in the crook of your palm, check if that's enough now, and find inevitably there isn't. They always seem to hike the price when they spot you about to come through the door. But eventually, inevitably, it will be your turn to be lost to the world. It is not now. For now, your place is here. On the shore. You must use your words to build a boat for inexperienced hands that couldn't build one for themselves.
I know to foreign eyes, it seems terribly calloused. The old wives of the valley with their hyena-call. Who does he think he's kidding, selfish on the beach, being himself, making things. How dare he make things, wherefore the strength. Only you and I know under callouses and old, water-logged galoshes, only we know the secret. That there will be no strength acquired here, not by us, but by our words, there's a promise still of making yourself less weak. Consolidating the hull and with it, the cave of your bones.
I see in the commas and ellipses how hard you're trying to be strong. I know, too well, you've known yourself as a coward, finicky man before. Have realized, even before this final heave, that you would not withstand this. That you only ever got up to the knees, and haven't built for yourself a full man yet. That you were too busy learning how to be a son to hear the bell-ring to daddy. That you didn't in time make the transition and must burden yourself now for always.
That if there is a shovel, it will be made of words also, like your bosun's cap. And you will never finish asking yourself if that's enough, and what gives you the right to make words on the shoreline, when he is lying at the bottom of the ocean, for divers to peek at.
You will never be a diver yourself. We must agree on that from the get-go. Never. But you may yet be bosun. A father turned bosun. That has something of a nice ring. That in time, as your effigy nears completion, you'll begin to recognize your words as the vehicle that they are, the fare towards oneness that pulls your soles out of the quicksand. The suffering of one to bring back light through the darkness for the many.
I don't know about God yet, but I genuinely think words, the act of making boats, can save us.
I think I've seen him before, but can't be sure. If I did, then we were both small, perhaps hadn't decided to walk these lives as they turned out for each of us at all, and sure, that shouldn't count. But I wish, still, I had some memory of him other than a too small body to bury. I wish I didn't think so much about the living and how they survive this, I wish I didn't feel selfish for thinking there's salvation through art. But I do. I can't help myself. I think, increasingly as I go, that the act of crafting something, of making things, of putting into words what it is to be living, I think it means something. I think it's how you pull yourself out of a hole, yes, but also, I think it's an act of bringing the laws down the mountain. I think when it's real, art about the most terrible, frightening things can strengthen this boat we all ferry in.
So today, my songs are, appropriately funerary. I think the entirety of Nick Cave's Ghosteen would suffice, and that would be way more than three songs. Still, I've cherry-picked.
Well I left you sleeping like a ghost in your wounds
Darling your dreams are your greatest part
I carry them with me in my heart
It's a fantastic, soul-shattering album from start to finish. I've been listening to it as I write, and find Hollywood, the closing song of the album, best embodies this idea that's been nagging at me. That it's only through togetherness, though oneness that we survive unspeakable things.
Kisa sat down in the old village square
She hugged her baby and cried and cried
She said everybody is always losing somebody
Then walked into the forest and buried her child
I'm speaking about love now
And how the lights of love go down
You're in the back room washing his clothes
Love's like that, you know, it's like a tidal flow
And the past with its fierce undertow won't ever let us go
Won't ever let you go
Recently, I finished Nick Cave's book-long conversations with Sean O'Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage, and I was moved so much by the openness and the reality with which he talks about losing his fifteen-year-old son. A terrible, frightful thing, one that could've easily swallowed him whole. But didn't, and I do think his beautiful art is in no small part responsible for that. Here is a man who took his suffering and used it to come back to us, to grow his love and give others strength, and in doing so, found strength for himself also. I found this beautiful note from The Red Hand Files,
"It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve
That’s the deal
That’s the pact
Grief and love are forever intertwined
Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love
And, like love, grief is non-negotiable"
The entire album is devastating. I think of Nick repeating, chant-like "And I love you" through the end of Spinning Song. Or him waiting for his son to return in Waiting for You. I think of my uncle waiting for his boy to come back to him and hope he finds, like Mr. Cave seems to have, the strength to go on living while he waits. I hope his words, his clever words help him through that.
But ultimately, it's Sun Forest that I must settle on. Because it's here, in this song, that Cave first begins to notice the terrible, wondrous beauty of a world in which his baby's dead again. A world in which, rather than close himself around the absence, he begins to see his son everywhere, and then, how can the world be anything but beautiful?
There is nothing more valuable than love
And I lie amongst the leaves and the burning trees
And the fields of smoke and the black butterflies
And the screaming horses and your bright green eyes, so beautiful
Ah, your bright green eyes, so beautiful
