Bears Repeating

From last night, before sleep took me:

I just got home.  It's after midnight. I'd promised myself I'd disallow writing a blog. Apparently, someone has lost a battle. Who? I spoke with many different people about Burning Man, too many. Cab drivers, close friends, acquaintances, nobodies. I thought of old friends, old lovers, recent lovers and recent friends. The night was fluid, I instated no order.

But now, I've arrived home and I need to focus my intention. I need to ensure I'm remaining constantly intelligible, relatable and relevant. So many news stories lately, all armed with the power to divide. Whether from the right or left, all the news just serves to divide. What unifies? What promotes solidarity and cohesion? A common enemy? A common good? A noble cause. A Barnes and Noble clause.

Have I ever relayed the story of how my first real job was at a Barnes & Noble? Oh what a terrible experience it was. The only job I've had to quit due to sheer mental anguish. Never again, or so they say. I feel like that's something we say to ourselves, but even as we say it we know we don't mean it. It's something we say as we drive through the McDonald's 'drive-thru' of our hearts. I said it to myself tonight. It's appalling I'd repeat it here. Like posting a dirty photograph of myself.

I don't even know what I'm writing. I've been letting the music carry me away. I haven't even given a thought to the types of things I'd say. But I guess the realization of this is an indication of its untruth.

I've started reading Joyce; I know, I've said that in a previous post, but it bears repeating. He is a master. A lord. I wish I was reading him right now instead of writing this. I wonder if anything was lost as a result of the shift from writing to typing. Is there something inherently more beautiful about a practiced pen diligently scratching against the page? Or has the type-writer revolutionized literature in a way that is wholly positive? Who knows.

I was born after the pen-to-the-page method, so I think I'm the most able to say that the means do not matter. Content matters. Whether written, typed, or passed through lips. The thoughts never spoken though, perhaps possess the most duende of all.

"In his brilliant lecture entitled "The Theory and Function of Duende" Federico García Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. "All that has dark sound has duende", he says, "that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain." In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often; anger, sometimes: but true sadness, rarely, Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. It haunts Polly Harvey. My friends the Dirty Three have it by the bucket load. The band Spiritualized are excited by it. Tindersticks desperately want it, but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care." All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil - the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here - so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering"


- Nick Cave