Grief is a patient teacher.
It accepts feelings the same way paper cradles a writer’s words. It commiserates lightly and celebrates equally. It’s unrelentingly there, an omnipresent black-and-white vein dividing every thought and subsequent action.
A tattoo of eternity, perhaps.
Regarding other people’s grief (and how to empathize with it), I’ve tried over years to offer solace and have failed miserably. I don’t beat myself up about this: to start, grief cannot be translated, and I’m also aware that anything I say or do cannot mean much when weighed up against any particular case of grief.
This aside, I surrendered to another person’s grief last week. I subsequently came out transformed, and now feel compelled to describe what light has spawned from that experience.
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My grief-laden foray came via Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ latest double-music album, Ghosteen. An across-the-board critical success, the work’s title combines the English word ghost and the Irish-language suffix “in” (anglicized as een), which translates as “little,” “small,” or “benevolent.” With this in mind, the additional information that Cave’s fifteen-year-old son Arthur fell to his death from a cliff in 2015 puts the title into perspective.
I mean, how do you deal with something like that? A fifteen-year-old boy and friend go wandering one July Tuesday, and in a heightened state they encounter visions and promises only for the cold hand of death to strike and strip away all sense and peace and promise.
I’ve considered the tragic case of Arthur Cave ever since. And now, both as a long-time Nick Cave fan and with Ghosteen available, I lay down with it late one silent night. Headphones on, heart and mind open, I mused over the YouTube lyric film’s prologue:
The songs on the first album are the children.
The songs on the second album are their parents.
Ghosteen is a migrating spirit.
I’ve never been one to spoil the locus of an artistic piece, and I won’t start now. What I will say is that once the synthesizers rolled, the visions flowed freely. First up was Spinning Song. Like dreams fighting against the dying light, the contradictions of existence jostled for mind and heart, the heartbreaking understanding that we are all at the mercy of death’s cold blade like a password to beatific wonder.
Cave and co. stole me from the start and never let go. Teased and tormented via pain, mercy, faith, fear, and more, each successive lyric spelled an island, each chorus painted a country, and each song spanned a continent. The totality of the first album felt akin to disassembling childhood simply to reaffirm that it’s real, and also whispered of a live, breathing spirit seeking out a new vessel to pilot its fate.
An interlude falls before the second album, its silence as profound as that which precedes and follows it. In characteristic Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds style, binaries soon fall, and a cosmic counterpoint to the first album arises, the sum of which of feels like an astonishingly beautiful prayer nut-shelling the glories and desperations of all our lives. Metaphorically speaking, the double album feels like the essences of dead twins meeting in the aether, holding hands, and dissolving into everlasting peace.
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I’ll go out on a limb and call Ghosteen a once-in-a-generation masterpiece. There exist both obvious and incomprehensible reasons detailing why it’s met such universal favor, and I feel blessed to have witnessed the sunrise that’s resulted from Cave’s grief-stricken voyage into the colorless unknown.
Thank you, and may we all know versions of peace.