Lesley Jenike

THE SOULS OF SONGS

Cause they say there is a cougar that roams these parts /
With a terrible engine of wrath for a heart
—Nick Cave, “Hollywood”

A black suit could stand by itself on a mannequin in an art gallery, and I would think, Nick Cave, the musician.

But there’s an artist named Nick Cave too, and that Nick Cave makes sculptures called Soundsuits—suits that stand by themselves in art galleries—and if that Nick Cave’s suits are designed to refract the light, then the other Nick Cave’s suits are designed to absorb it absolutely.

This is what I’m thinking about as I drive to the funeral of a twenty-one-year-old man—a nephew by marriage—dead of an overdose. I’m thinking about suits. I’m not a good person, obviously, but bear with me:

Nick Cave, the musician, is always in a close-fitting black suit at every concert, in every interview. I might even say it’s a kind of uniform, a spiritual habit; it’s hard to imagine him in anything else. He looks, by turns, like an itinerant preacher, a gangster, a businessman, a funeral director. I might say his black suit is a defense against glib happiness, the sort of toxic positivity I hate. Or I might say that the suit is a pall to wrap his songs in, a protective layer under which they are born, grow, then harden.

On the internet lately some have wondered aloud about the “problematic” lyrics in Nick Cave’s older songs, a concern to which Nick Cave himself responded, “The souls of the songs must be protected at all costs. They must be allowed to exist in all their aberrant horror.” I sometimes imagine Nick Cave flashing the insides of his black suitcoat, and instead of gold watches, pocket knives, or porn, he keeps a cocoonery of songs, all in various stages of transfiguration, all horrible and wonderful and bright. And I’m left to wonder whether the songs—beneath their surface glamour—suffer independently of Nick Cave. In other words, do songs really have souls? To have a soul is to suffer, independently.

Even animals—according to the Catholic Church—were officially soulless until 2014, when the Pope decided otherwise. Soul is a word for platitudes, though the soul, incidentally, is what the Little Mermaid is after. Disney wants you to think it’s love, but actually it’s immortality of the soul, that very human invention for which the Little Mermaid gives her fins, for which she submits to extraordinary pain, walking, the story tells us, as if on knives.

The soul, contrary to popular belief, arrives—not naked, but in a suit. A birthday suit. A suit is good, I’m told. Everyone needs one good suit. But when they bury you in it, it becomes your death suit, and there will be pockets in the suitcf. You won’t need to warm your hands or store your keys, cigarettes, or tickets, because all the shows will be over and all the tours suspended. Yet, someone stitched them in.

The other Nick Cave’s suits, however, are sparkling, bedazzled, embroidered—meant for humans but without humans inside them. Where a head should be is sometimes a sequined wreath or a metallic tunnel, a halo of boughs and flowers, an explosion of color. These Soundsuits come, Nick Cave says, from a place of darkness, but end up lit. And here’s why:

The Soundsuits project began in 1992 in response to the L.A. riots. The suits were meant to be a sort of armor against racial violence, drawing visual attention to joyful otherness, like glam rock costumes or avant-garde couture from some weird corner of Milan or Chicago, conjured out of buttons, sequins, twigs, shells, feathers: the little things that hold us together. They are hazmat suits, suits for firefighters, and for fire starters. They are anti-viral, anti-racist, pro-love.

Of the project, Nick Cave says, “What I was really creating was something to protect my identity, something to protect my spirit.” I suppose Cave was making hermetically sealed defensive gear—wearable art inside which the soul formulates itself, the soul whose origin is at best hazy, whose destination is unknown. The soul must be protected at all costs, no matter its goodness or its badness, because these are empty words. The suits themselves sound the depths, make sound. Sometimes they stand silently in art galleries, but even in their silence, they are songs and the songs are full of soul.

The director of exhibitions at the college where I work once bragged he could bring Nick Cave in for an artist’s talk. I thought he meant the musician Nick Cave; I didn’t know there was another one. I’m not alone in this misapprehension. There are, in fact, tons of Nick Caves, just as there are tons of Nick Cave fans who believe there is only one Nick Cave—the one they know.

Many of us are under the same delusion, and also about other things like the number of wild cougars in Los Angeles (around seventy-five) or the rate of overdose deaths last year (around seventy thousand). Or mermaids (my daughter’s drama teacher told her class someone found mermaid bones, so they must be real). Look at it this way: “one train may hide another,” as the poet Kenneth Koch says in his poem “One Train May Hide Another.” It’s my favorite poem, and I live my life by it. It’s my religion and has taught me that behind the needle is the cougar, and behind the mermaid is the horror. Maybe one Nick Cave hides another. Maybe I should pull over and let the first Nick Cave pass by.

I’m driving south on 71, in a hurry to get to a funeral, and I’m listening to one Nick Cave with the other Nick Cave on my mind. Before I know it, I’m hitting that sweet spot in the landscape between death and a phone signal. A billboard that screams “HELL IS REAL” rises up out of a cornfield like a goddamn threat, though “HELL IS REAL” as a threat isn’t exactly a gun to the head, but more like the phishing email I once got in my inbox that said, “Everyone will know what you’ve been looking at online. Pay me money, or I’ll tell.”

What had I been looking at online? I wracked my brain:

celebrity nose jobs,

articles about the Royal Family,

cat videos,

some nakedness here and there, mostly by accident.

Nothing to worry about.

The internet is like the ocean, is like a cornfield. Sometimes you’ll find me there, in the primeval cradle of my own particular disorder.

What in the world is in there?

A poisonous blob of an animal,

Jesus freaks,

conspiracy theorists,

HELL IS REAL,

mermaids in the Mariana Trench who, at their aquatic computers, spread rumors about us.

As Nick Cave says, “Why not why not?”

Because the songs’ souls call out and, like ships, we bash themselves against their rocks, we didn’t heed the warning and let our first impulse pass by before proceeding. As a non-believer, I’m guilty for taking the body of Christ into my mouth then praying for deliverance from the first Gulf War. This was when the two most popular kids at my Catholic school came running back from church to class, chattering on about how their prayers caused a burst of light to stream in through stained glass, a potted palm by the altar to toss its fronds (no wind anywhere in the apse, no sun in the sky) and they said, breathlessly, No way this is like a SIGN or anything, but—

but, as Renato Rosaldo says, “The problem of meaning resides in practice, not theory. The dilemma… involves the practical matter of how to live with one’s beliefs.”

I didn’t know how to live with my disbeliefs. So, I was the kid who wedged her fingers between slabs, crouched down to watch nests of ants explode from sidewalk cracks. Any crevice of darkness, any unplumbed slit: my hand would go inside it. No light came out. No wind blew. When I prayed, absolutely nothing happened, and if I were home, I’d be in HELL right now. One crack may hide yet another crack just as one word may hide another word as surely as one sign may hide another sign. So behind the “HELL IS REAL” billboard is an artwork by Nick Cave made of black vinyl letters “21 feet high and stretch[ing] some 160 feet across,” spelling out the words “TRUTH BE TOLD” on a redbrick gallery in upstate New York called The School, made and installed by one Nick Cave high up on a ladder while listening to the other Nick Cave in over-the-ear headphones.

Nick Cave’s artwork is a threat to some people. “The Village of Kinderhook says it’s a sign, and hence in violation of local code, and wants it removed,” reports The New York Times. “The Building Department issued an order on Oct. 23 demanding the removal of the work and calling it ‘combustible.’” Behind the word combustible is the word fire, and behind the word fire is the word HELL. So, someone calls it a SIGN, and someone else calls it ART, though we all can agree that, as writer and economist Claire Wilmot says, “There are some things that cannot be represented without cheapening the message.”

My Messenger inbox is overflowing with unread messages. Messages, for me, have lost their luster, but I scroll through them daily when boredom strikes or sadness or when the buzz hits, and then I drown myself in the news feed, and that’s when I see it, in near-real time—a message from one old high school friend to another, though one of my two friends is dead. He writes on her timeline, “You came across my timeline today. It made me so happy to see it. It did exactly what you always did. You made everyone smile with that heart and bright energy. You blessed me today. I am so grateful. I miss you, beautiful. I hope you are resting well.” What is a timeline? I scroll down, down, down the dead friend’s page. Someone else had written to her, “Thinking of you wishing we could watch this together!  RIP” and “Hope you are celebrating in Heaven! <3 <3 <3.” Still someone else said, “I was hacked do not open anything in messanger [sic] from me!! Warning!”

I see the white baby icon, elemental in lotus pose, if I scroll all the way down the dead friend’s life. If I scroll any further, I’d hit pay dirt, hit the deepest part of the ocean, hit the earth’s hot core from before any of us were born when, in Forever Town, we put up our art—oops, I mean our sign—“TRUTH BE TOLD”—in black, combustible letters on The School’s façade. The School is an art gallery, after all, because behind a school can be an art gallery, and behind an art gallery can be an empty lot—scudding clouds, dandelions.

One unread message in my Messenger inbox says, “I apologize if my sending you these messages are offending or not appreciated. I won’t anymore unless you let me know otherwise. Regards.” I don’t know that person, so I ignore his messages, telling him nothing one way or the other. So the transmission goes cold. Another message is from a high school boyfriend who, on his own timeline, reminded himself (and us) that his mother passed away several years ago now. He typed, “Gone but not forgotten,” at the top of the memory. Then every year the memory became a memory. It lapped back onto itself and was shared again on the same day year after year, the original grief replicated and, in each replication, made yet more strange. Other high school friends posted hearts and hearts with little yellow arms around them and “Thinking of you,” etc. on his lifeline, his page.

I haven’t known my high school boyfriend in any meaningful way since his mother died, because “[t]he inner world of a grieving person is essentially other,” as Claire Wilmot says, and I believe her, even if I don’t understand, since behind one grief is a second, ever weirder grief than the first, growing a tail instead of legs, froth and cocklebur for a soul, and it is, at least for me, a horrible, terrible fairy tale.

In his message, my high school boyfriend tells me,

“Nick [Cave] is as interesting as you'd expect. Naturally, in Los Angeles his reputation precedes him, so very few people would approach him (although that's fairly normal out here), but he was still recognized and revered by everyone in the room. Extremely quiet, he typically let the other people he was with speak and he just listened intently, though when he spoke everyone was hushed until they realized he was telling a joke that was drier than a brut. I can't recall precisely, but he was complaining about how there's ‘never enough tapas’ and thinking it was hilariously ironic and several others didn't get the joke and just agreed, as I laughed wildly. I think I met him thrice. Very kind, very friendly, but extraordinarily soft-spoken.”

My high school boyfriend actually met Nick Cave “a few times,” he said. And I wonder how each encounter with Nick Cave reacted, chemically, with the fact of his mother’s death. When I was a teenager and in love with him, I was my own bartender, blending vodka and orange juice in various, obscene ratios. And now, reading his message, I picture my high school boyfriend as a cocktail genius, standing in half shadow, holding a tray of drinks, and listening to Nick Cave talk about tapas. In the moment, my high school boyfriend didn’t submit to self-seriousness (he never did) but instead “laughed wildly” at Nick Cave’s second meaning hiding behind his first meaning, which, I hope, pleased Nick Cave, and even pleased the other Nick Cave who, on the other side of the continent, was building his musical suits of light or hanging his vinyl letters on the dark sides of uncaring buildings.

I’m not as pure as my high school boyfriend. Sometimes I have to go to Nick Cave’s website to find out what Nick Cave means. On it, or—I should say—through it, I find Nick Cave answering sad questions from sad fans like, “Do you have any advice for a recovering heroin abuser?” or “How do I know I’m on the right path?” The whole premise, in fact, is bizarre in its earnestness, in the specter of Cave’s virtual presence emerging from the ocean of the internet to actually answer, “There are those who have an identity that is contrary and evolving and forever at war with itself,” and “You may be the one who shudders, you may be the one who spins and glows, you may be the one who shines, you may even be the one who bursts into flames, but even still, there you are and all along you go—your path, your path.” I find myself wondering whether Nick Cave is wearing his black suit as he sits at his computer, or if he’s suddenly comfortable in a pair of sweats, and whether he’d consider my path really my path, that is, headed south on 71, on my way to a funeral where the priest says, gesturing toward the body, “This young man believed. Yes, he wrestled with his faith, but that’s what faith is for: to be wrestled with.”

But I’m not there yet. I’m still driving. I’m imagining myself forward in time, sitting shoulder to shoulder in a packed funeral home with young mourners trying not to look down at their phones, dressed politely in Forever 21 sun dresses (though it’s only March and still so cold). There are tattoos of flowers on their arms. Their legs are crossed at the thighs, not the ankles. And at the front of the room, in a little recess, the deceased is in a box, lying down, loosely suited in black.

The priest tells the bereaved, “Let your hearts not despair.”

Everyone despairs.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he goes on, “How can I not despair? There’s a young man in that coffin. This can’t be real. But at least we know where he is now. Take comfort in that.”

The boy who is dead had only just become a man. My mom will say, over and over again at the reception, “What a sweet kid, but always a little troubled. I don’t know why.”

“Well…,” I’ll say.

I’ll tell her some things that sound like facts. But the truth is, many of us are deluded by our belief. One epidemic may hide another. Stop and look.

“TRUTH BE TOLD,” I’ll say, “There’s a drug problem everywhere. Ohio especially.”

She’ll seem surprised.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Lots of reasons.”

Renato Rosaldo, an anthropologist who studied the mourning habits of Ilongot men, learned that grief isn’t just sadness, it’s anger too, and for the Ilongot of a certain generation, that great swell of wrath can only satisfied by lopping off another man’s head. The word for this kind of rage is liget. I guess I might say it’s like a great cracking, a splitting apart, though I wouldn’t know because I’ve never felt it except, maybe, after my miscarriage when I’d be walking down the street—any street—then suddenly fall down, my whole body in panicked contortions, my face screwed up with rage. I wanted to lop the sun’s head off because it kept shining. I wanted to kill the internet with all its happy mothers and babies on their timelines. “Ritual and bereavement should not be collapsed into one another because they neither fully encapsulate nor fully explain one another,” Rosaldo says. “Instead, rituals are often but points along a number of longer processual trajectories; hence, my image of ritual as a crossroads where distinct life processes intersect.” In other words, one street hides another. While walking down the first, I fell down on the second. Call it a ritual.

But at least I tried to get somewhere. Nick Cave told me to, Nick Cave who so loves Leonard Cohen, who wrote, “Take a little walk to the edge of town / and go across the tracks / where the viaduct looms / like a bird of doom / as it shifts and cracks.” I believe he’s doubling down on Cohen’s sonic chiaroscuro, by which I mean light that sculpts darkness and that sputters out of offices, bounces off a wet retaining wall or a piss-soaked street, half hiding, half revealing (“there’s a crack, a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in”).

Now the page of the dead man (whose funeral I’m driving to) is lighting up. I know we say “lighting up” when we mean “going viral,” and “going viral” when we mean spreading and spreading and spreading, but there’s still his RL body to contend with. It’s in a box, lying down, loosely suited in black. About her dead nephew, my sister had asked, “What should he wear in the coffin? A suit or shorts?” “Some family members,” she said, “think suit. I think shorts.”

She paused.

“I mean, how do you choose what your child will wear for eternity?”

Soon I’ll be at his funeral, and I won’t want to be there. My fingers will be itchy. I’ll want to bend my head over the phone light. He was my sister’s sister-in-law’s kid. They say the epidemic will touch someone we know, and though I knew him, at least he was at an arm’s length. At least I don’t have to remember—too clearly—his babyhood, don’t have to see him frankly in full, quantifiable sun. I’ll always think of him in shadow.

“The boy who died was barely a man,” the priest will intone. So, one man hides one boy, and vice versa, and when a woman he was in love with broke up with him over the phone, one Nick Cave said he “was so surprised [he] almost dropped [his] syringe,” and when asked about his anger and his fear, the second Nick Cave said, “I remember thinking that my identity is really only protected in the privacy of my own home. That the moment I leave this space, I could be just another profile.” 

What makes one man different from another? Or one son from another? The dead man’s mother will look so beautiful to me from across the funeral parlor, I’ll think I’m looking at a mermaid. She’s just that foreign to me, and just that wild. And I could put a question I’ve been grappling with—no matter how large or how small—into her grief’s algorithm, and though she’ll tell me to go in one direction and I comply, reality splits, and another me goes in the other direction. This, at least, is what some scientists think, the outrageous ones. And as a result, one me is in darkness and the other me in light. One me is in a brilliant, blinding Soundsuit, and the other me in an Italian-made pinstripe.

One me is driving to a funeral, and the other me is in Hell. One me stayed home, glued to the computer screen, watching the dead man’s timeline light up, and another me is listening to Nick Cave’s song “Hollywood” play from my car’s stereo as I drive down 71. The song begins with a thrumming, troubled pulse until, at last, the voice comes in—“The fires continued through the night,”—and I wonder if Nick Cave means Nik Cave’s Soundsuit origin story, because to look at the Soundsuit is to look to the head in order to find the eyes, only there is no head, no eyes, just a tunnel where a head should be, and at the end of that tunnel a fire, and while one Nick Cave eradicates the darkness with his suits, the other Nick Cave welcomes it in like an old friend.

At the end of the internet, I’m told there’s a photo of both Nick Caves together, smiling with their arms around each other, until it’s hard to tell which Nick Cave is which, which Nick Cave said, “Once, when I was probably twelve, we were going to the grocery store and my grandmother said to me, ‘You have Papa’s soul,’” and which Nick Cave believes in mermaids because, “Why not why not?” After all, the mermaid gives her song to the sea witch in exchange for a pair of legs. She will eventually trade her legs for an immortal soul—the kind humans have.

But the mermaid already had a soul, she just didn’t know it. The soul belonged to her song, not to her. She only carried it. Sure, she’s a nice girl, but she’s half fish, half human: a real horror. Nick Cave would say she “must be allowed to exist,” just as I was allowed to exist for a while, when I was very little, walking out of my family’s rented cottage, taking myself down to the ocean along a sandy path between two dark, uncaring buildings. My parents, sister, and brother were frantic, then mystified when they finally found me at the beach, because, my mom says, you never really liked the beach. I have no recollection of it, but my mind at the time must’ve been churning.

Sublimity is a condition I wouldn’t read about for years, nor wish on anyone, but to at once love and fear a thing is what I’m trying to get at, that and the desire to utterly disappear. Also, to learn to pay attention to what doesn’t exist. “I do mermaid alertness course,” Nick Cave sings, but I’ve been doing it for years, ever since I snuck out of that cottage and went down to the ocean when no one thought I would. There is, of course, also the me who stayed inside. This was before the second me was born, and before anyone—outside a small handful of people—even knew my name.

LESLEY JENIKE has had her poems and essays appear in The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Rumpus, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and West Branch. She teaches literature and writing at the Columbus College of Art and Design and served as a regular contributor to Ploughshares’ blog in 2019 and 2020. She lives with her husband and two children in Columbus, Ohio.