Forty Minutes Of Nick Cave

Some time ago C (of Sun Dried Sparrows blog) left a comment in response to one of my posts about Isaac’s death saying that when she suffered a loss there were times when the grief felt so personal and so awful, that it feels like this can only be happening to you, that no one else can possibly be feeling this way. She said she found comfort in the realisation that anyone you see in the street could be going through exactly the same thing, that grief and loss are universal and not something that you are going through on you own. The horrors of the death of a person close to you, especially one who dies young, are so traumatic and so terrible that it can feel like it has only happened to you but the truth is that we are not alone, no matter how much it might feel like that at times.  

 

Since Isaac’s death some people close to us have gone through similar experiences, the loss of a young person. I subscribe to Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files. Nick has opened his email address up to anyone to ask him a question and he operates it unfiltered, there no assistant reading through the inbox first and selecting them for him. Nick reads all the questions and letters sent to him and decides which to respond to. I don’t know how many he receives a week or a month- thousands I’m guessing. It’s a big undertaking and he freely admits he’s got no especial skill or training in terms of offering advice to people, many of whom are going through the worst situations imaginable, other than his own experience and a seemingly unlimited capacity for compassion. Many of the replies he posts are on the subject of loss and grief. In recent weeks he’s posted two which have struck chords with me. One is from a man, Mark from Scotland, who has suffered the death of his young son in truly awful circumstances. It's here. Nick's reply to Mark's letter contains these lines...

Your letter will be difficult for anyone to read, but it will also take many of us back, with a shudder of recognition, to our own times of sadness and loss.

We grievers know, Mark. We recognise in your letter the bottomless sorrow, the outrage, the desperation, the helplessness, the feelings of cosmic betrayal. We understand the sense of having nowhere to rest our minds that is not full of the darkest treachery. We know what it’s like to be confronted with the impossibility of a future life and the feeling that things will never be bearable again. Many of us also know the ghastly mechanics of planning the funeral of a child midst the zombied chaos of new grief. We know, Mark, and we are so very sorry.

But I want to say something, and even though it will doubtless mean little to you at this moment, I hope in time you will look back and know I spoke a kind of truth. Some years have now passed since the loss of my own sons, and though gone from this world, I have come to understand that they still travel with me – they are with me now – but more than that, they have become the active participants in a slow but certain awakening of the spirit. It saddens me deeply that they never lived their own full lives, but though I would give anything to have them back, these departed souls ultimately served as a kind of saving force that revealed the world to Susie and me as a thing of outrageous beauty. I have found my relationship to the world enriched in a way that I never dreamed possible. I know this to be true, but I also know it is a truth beyond understanding in your time of fresh grief, and so I say these things with extreme caution and pray it doesn’t come across as a kind of glibness uttered into your despair.

These are the saddest and most hopeless days you will experience, but I want you and your family to know this – if you can just hold together, I believe that life will get better for you, in ways you cannot yet comprehend. One day you will find Murray travelling with you, not just as a grief or a memory, but as an animating and guiding principle, allowing you to experience joy in a way you have never experienced it before. Be kind and patient and gentle and merciful with one another. Stay close. Hold firm. Forgive. Grief prepares the way. Joy will in time find you. It is searching for you, in the impossible darkness, even now.

I don't have anything particular to add to this. I'm not at the point Nick describes, I haven't had the world revealed to me as a thing of outrageous beauty (although I can see glimpses of it at times) but I'm also no longer at the point Mark, the letter writer, is either, where only a few weeks in everything is raw and brutal. For weeks after Isaac died waking up each morning was a wrench, a punch to the gut, every morning he died again when the realisation that I was awake and he was still dead hit me.

Nick is open and direct in his writing.  One of the issues surrounding death is the language that people employ (or don't). People regularly use words like traumatic, horrific and devastating to describe commonplace situations- their football team conceding and losing in the last minute or having to take a day off work because their Nick doesn’t use euphemisms or dress death up  And this is the truth about it- you can and do find a way to live with the loss. It doesn't go away. It sits inside me in my chest like a ball of pain, sometimes big, present and engulfing and sometimes smaller and pushed down a little by life. It's always there and I know it always will be but you can get used to living with it. Nick responded to another Red Hand Files question since the one above, a letter writer asking how he deals with receiving these emails and whether it is a kind of catharsis. That letter and Nick's reply are here.

I have been listening to Nick Cave's music for many years, since the late 80s. In the 90s I dropped in and out, sometimes tuning in and sometimes missing albums. I really connected with his music with Abattoir Blues/ The Lyre Of Orpheus in 2004, then Dig Lazarus Dig!!! in 2007 (which has two of my favourite Cave songs, We Call Upon The Author and More News From Nowhere) and then the first Grinderman album (also 2007). Nick's run of albums since 2013- Push The Sky Away, Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen and then 2021's Carnage (with Warren Ellis)- have been big albums for me. Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen are both in different ways connected to the death of Nick's son Arthur, Skeleton Tree written before Arthur's death but recorded after, and Ghosteen written as a way to deal with and live with the grief and the loss. Nick has described how while writing and recording Ghosteen he could feel Arthur as part of the process. There are times when they are difficult listens and there are times when they are absolutely what I need to hear, a mirror to my own bereavement.

Today's mix is a Nick Cave mix drawn solely from albums since Push The Sky Away and with a definite emphasis on the songs that have Nick dealing with Arthur and his death. I know some people find these songs difficult, a tough listen in places- but it does find hope and uplift as well. I did try versions of this mix with some other songs in there too to lighten or change the mood but in the end it didn't work and I took them out.

Forty Minutes Of Nick Cave

• Push The Sky Away
• Lavender Fields
• I Need You
• We Are Not Alone
• Into My Arms (Idiot Prayer Version)
• White Elephant
• Leviathan

Push The Sky Away is the title track and closing song from the Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds album of 2013. It is a minimal and stately, synths and rumbling percussion, a much subtler record than previous ones.

Lavender Fields starts out with the line, 'I'm travelling appallingly alone'. The song groans and sways, synths and organ swelling. Nick says the song is about change, moving from one state to another. A choir comes in singing, 'there is a kingdom in the sky', and the song becomes about rebirth or renewal (the pale bird represents that I think). The chords rise, the singing rises, everything moves upwards. Lavender Fields is from Carnage, the album he made with Warren Ellis in 2021, a record that deals with the chaos of the modern world as well as Nick's interior life. White Elephant is a change of mood, a riotous, ridiculous and profound song that takes in Black Lives Matter, protestors, statues, Botticelli's Venus and (again) the kingdom in the sky.

I Need You is heavy. Heavy as fuck. It is the bottom of the pit, absolute hopelessness, the horror of loss and a world that has become meaningless. The woman, presumably Susie, is in the supermarket with her red dress on, they're holding hands, and nothing really matters. It's from Skeleton Tree, from 2016, the electronics, loops, atmospherics and synths now central to the Bad Seeds sound. The songs don't conform, they exist. Nick sings from a place of numbness and of grief.

We Are Not Alone is from a soundtrack recorded by Nick and Warren Ellis. The film is a documentary about snow leopards, La Panthere Des Neiges, from 2021. It is ten minutes long, a slow moving and layered piece of music with synths, strings, a choir, acoustic guitar and Warren's violin and eventually Nick singing about being observed and unaware and how, ultimately, we are not along. It seems to me like a counterpoint to the song that precedes it here.

Into My Arms is one of Nick Cave's most loved songs, a love song and a ballad, from the 1997 album The Boatman's Call. Famously, Nick wrote the song at a battered old piano while in rehab. Nick performed it at the funeral of Michael Hutchence. The version here is from Idiot Prayer, a live recording from Alexander Palace on 23rd July 2020. Nick was the only person present at the concert, a solo concert, just Nick and a piano and a vast empty space, deep into the world of Covid and lockdown.

Leviathan is from Ghosteen, the 2019 double album that is some kind of Cave masterpiece. It's a song about love and loss, about Nick and Susie and about Nick and Arthur. The second verse hits me hard- 'We talked it round and round again/ Then we drove down to the sea/ We sat in the car park for an hour or two/ I love my baby and my baby loves me'- the visuals it conjures up, the prosaic nature of a couple talking and driving round. I think they're talking about the death of their son and what the fuck they're going to do, how on earth they're going to manage to move forward, to do anything. Meanwhile the piano and the atonal synth sounds lurch and swim around, choral harmonies taking over as the song crawls towards its conclusion, a slow motion sonic rendition of grief. It's utterly beautiful, an immense and emotive expression of the human condition. Ghosteen is bleak and beautiful and ultimately it's about survival.

It's Vast And Wild And As Deep As The Sea

This is the second post written this week in response to something coming through the ether/ internet that connects me to Isaac's death. This has led to a couple of more straightforward, lighter hearted music posts being shunted back into next week. The first connection was Fontaines DC and their cover of Nick Drake's 'Cello Song that I wrote about two days ago here. The same evening I sat writing that post I got my regular email update from Nick Cave's Red Hand Files. 

Nick started The Red Hand Files a few years ago as a means of direct communication with fans, an interaction with no moderation involved, no one screening the emails or reading them for him. He gets hundreds, maybe thousands of emails a week (and says there are some people who email him weekly too). From these emails, all of which he says he reads, he replies to one, publicly, sending it out to subscribers by email and uploading it to The Red Hand Files website. You may well subscribe and read them already. 

The topics range widely, taking in all kinds of art, life, culture and personal enquiries. Recently he's replied to questions about Johnny Cash, the banning of the song Delilah, the cougar in the Hollywood hills, AI produced art, religion and spirituality, tattoos, his lyrics, learning to play the guitar aged sixty, Love Island, tinnitus, the meaning of life, and inevitably the death of his son Arthur. Nick's replies are considered and thoughtful, sensitive, insightful, funny, warm and moving. Sometimes he reaches a conclusion you didn't expect. Sometimes he admits he doesn't know. Sometimes he imparts something profound. He has experiences to share. And, the man can write. The one that popped into my inbox on Tuesday was from Dave in El Paso, USA, who wrote...

My son died almost a decade and a half ago. I don't have nearly as many dreams about him now but when I do, as when I had many, many dreams of him...he never speaks. I can be virtually right next to him in a known location. He never talks. Is there an underlying meaning to this?

This caught my attention as you can imagine. I took a breath and read on. Nick replied...

Dear Dave,

I read this question to Susie, as Arthur appears regularly in her dreams. She says she experiences him in the same way that you describe – Arthur is there beside her but never speaks. She tells me he feels hyper-present, and that he stands very close to her, and sometimes he hugs her, but that nothing else happens in the dream, there is no one else there and there is no real narrative. She says that the locations in the dream are familiar, but she has the sense of being a visitor to a different realm, and that within that realm there is an intense feeling of ‘unbounded love’. She says that upon waking she feels a residual presence of Arthur that takes some minutes to subside. I asked Susie why she thought Arthur didn’t speak to her and she said, 'because it’s a place where we don’t communicate with ordinary language.’

Dave, I asked Susie your question because she has a rich and vibrant dream life. Unfortunately, I do not. The rare dreams I do remember are extraordinarily banal and neither of my late sons appear in them. But I know Susie finds much needed respite from her loss through the softness of dreams. They are beautiful, comforting, even saving things. We can find great solace in these ‘encounters’ with loved ones who have passed on, meeting them in our memories, recollections or conversations, through signs, whispered intimations or imaginings. I am very happy your son continues to visit your dreams and Susie and I send you our very best.

Love, Nick

I've dreamt about Isaac in the year and three months since he died. To the best of my memory, it happens once every couple of weeks. Dreaming about him always wakes me up with a jolt. I am suddenly and violently awake, both eyes wide open in the dark. It always disturbs me, leaves me thrown and startled. In my dream he's so real and he's alive. Then there's a moment and it sinks in again sharply and suddenly that it was a dream and that he's gone. Each time it happens, there's a mini- loss all over again. I seem to be getting used to that more now. 

In some of my dreams he talks to me. I never remember what he was saying or what we were talking about but am aware we were talking. Like Dave and Nick's wife Susie, sometimes he's there but silent (which seems unlikely if you knew Isaac, who was rarely silent for long). Sometimes he seems to be just being there, alongside whatever other weirdness is going on. I have been having very vivid and odd dreams for the last few months- even the ones without Isaac in them can wake me up feeling a bit perturbed and unsure what is going on. I'm not sure how I feel about the Isaac that exists in my dreams. I don't think it's actually him, it's my subconscious dredging things up while I sleep. Nick Cave says above that Susie finds respite and comfort from dreaming about Arthur. I'm not sure I find that yet about Isaac- I hope one day I will. Nick and Susie and the letter writer Dave are a long way ahead of us in their grief in terms of time. I like Nick's phrasing and idea that the dream versions of our lost sons are 'encounters'. That's a way I'd like to get to feel about them I think. 

Lou dreams about Isaac sometimes and she always has the same dream- in her dream he's crossing the road outside our house, his back to her, going towards a car to be taken somewhere. She's holding a sandwich wrapped in tin foil for him but he doesn't hear her. On the occasions when she's told me about it or when I've been present when she describes it to other people, it crushes me. It has just now, typing it. 

I got Nick's book Faith Hope And Carnage for Christmas and have been reading it recently, a chapter every now and then, trying not to race through it. It is set out as a conversation between Nick and writer Sean O'Hagen, taken from a series of long conversations they had starting around March 2020. Much of Carnage is about Arthur, and about Nick and Susie's grief. It is also about Nick's faith, his songwriting and music, the transformative power of live performance of songs and how sometimes they only reveal their meaning when played live, the albums Skeleton Tree, Carnage and Ghosteen (especially Ghosteen), his childhood, the relationships with musicians he's worked with (especially Blixa Bargeld, Mick Harvey and Warren Ellis) and his creative projects away from music- The Red Hand Files among them. I might come back to writing about the book and what I've taken from it another day. I need to write about Ghosteen too at some point. There's one bit from the book that stood out for me even before I'd started reading it properly. On the back cover the pull out quote reads...

Sean O'Hagen: 'But surely your outlook is entirely different now?'

Nick Cave: 'Well, the young Nick Cave could afford to hold the world in some kind of disdain because he had no idea of what was coming down the line. I can see now that this disdain or contempt for the world was a kind of luxury or indulgence, even a vanity. He had no idea of the preciousness of life- the fragility... like I say, he had no idea what was coming down the road'.

This struck a massive chord with me. When I think about us, me and Lou, as younger people I feel exactly what Nick Cave describes- we had no idea what was ahead of us, that this was coming and how this would feel, how it would turn us inside out, how painful it would be, how (as I said on Tuesday) we might never be the same people again. In some ways it shocks me. We had no idea what was coming down the road. 

There's another part of the book where Nick says, 'Arthur is a regular reminder I don't really have to conform to the rules the world has laid down for me, because the world feels chaotic and random and indifferent to any rules. When I call Arthur to me and I feel him around me, as an optimistic force... I don't have to be afraid. I am aware of how that sounds to many people but this is, at the very least, a survival strategy- and grievers know. Generally, they know.'

Being a griever isn't a club any of us would choose to join, certainly not one in the circumstances of the death of your child, but it is some kind of comfort to see some of your own extreme and awful experience reflected by someone else, to know that others have gone through this too and can survive it. In some way, it helps. Trying to make sense of grief may well prove to be impossible- there is no sense to be found, it just happens, part of the chaotic and random world Nick describes above. Maybe all we can do is talk about it, describe it, write about it. Maybe the act of saying it out loud is as close to making sense of it as we're going to get. 

This song is from Ghosteen. I've got nothing to add at the moment, no description its power or explanation of it, other than to say it chills me to my absolute core and in some way brings a kind of comfort.

Leviathan