The loss of my father, I found, created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose. The great W.H. Auden said: “The so-called traumatic experience is not an accident, but the opportunity for which the child has been patiently waiting - had it not occurred, it would have found another - in order that its life become a serious matter.” The death of my father was the “traumatic experience” Auden talks about that left the hole for God to fill. How beautiful the notion that we create our own personal catastrophes and that it is the creative forces within us that are instrumental in doing this. We each have a need to create and sorrow is a creative act
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In Lou Reed’s remarkable song “Perfect Day” he writes in near diary form the events that combine to make a perfect day. It is a day that resonates with the bold beauty of love, where he and his lover sit in the park and drink Sangria, feed animals in the zoo, go to a movie show etc. But it is the lines that lurk darkly in the third verse, “I thought I was someone else, someone good” that transforms this otherwise sentimental song into the masterpiece of melancholia that it is. Not only do these lines ache with failure and shame, but they remind us in more general terms of the transient nature of love itself - that he will have his day “in the park” but, like Cinderella, who must return at midnight to the soot and ash of her disenchanted world, so must he return to his old self, his bad self. It is out of the void that this songs springs, clothed in loss and longing
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The Love Song must be born into the realm of the irrational, absurd, the distracted, the melancholic, the obsessive, the insane for the Love Song is the noise of love itself and love is, of course, a form of madness. Whether it be the love of God, or romantic, erotic love - these are manifestations of our need to be torn away from the rational, to take leave of our senses, so to speak. Love Songs come in many guises and are seemingly written for many reasons - as declarations or to wound - I have written songs for all of these reasons - but ultimately the Love Song exists to fill, with language, the silence between ourselves and God, to decrease the distance between the temporal and the divine
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By Nick Cave
This was given as a lecture at some university somewhere. It's very cool.
Ladies and gentlemen ( ... )
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