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Somewhere
on the stretched skin that covers the ground between the personal and the
existential there can be found a mark. This mark indicates the place beneath
the heavens that is equidistant from the poles that govern human desire.
Between the desire for life and the desire for the beyond, between the desires
of life (of sexual need and the need for recognition) and the desire for some
(half-recognised) link with the sacred (the source of the guarantees, the
force, or, at least, the rhetoric of eternity) lies the place of which this
mark is a sign. This is the place marked out by the tension between the
individual and the metaphysical. It presents a tear in the unity of the self; a
double-voiced, double-meaning, double-dealing dissonant harmony of the self.
The double-entendre of the
metaphysical. It is this tension that haunts the lyrics of the songs of
On the
shoreline that divides the city and the sea we find the place of these songs,
their place of reference, the singer found walking beneath the stars, the songs
traversing the horizon between humanity and its other.
A classic
case is the ambiguous deixis, the polyvalent
richness, the varieties of reference, of ‘you’ and other indicators of person.
Marking out the distance from those motivated by individual desire (the typical
‘you’ of the lyric) to those motivated by a desire for god (‘You’). A
difference inaudible in the pronunciation of the word alone, but retrievable
from the context.
Songs in
this category: ‘Straight to You’: ‘Into my Arms’ (even more so after the video,
with the singer, the ‘I’ of the song, assuming a Christ-like, redeeming
figure); ‘Are You the One that I’ve Been Waiting For?’ (the metaphysical
connotations of which suddenly transform the song’s genre from lyric to hymn).
In this
way, many of Cave’s songs cover a range of reference from the notion of
personal, individual care and solicitude through to a global metaphysical
solicitude, which calls up -even if only as a negative- a sense of redemption
and salvation (the latter element is less ambiguous in such songs as ‘Red Right
Hand’, which draws upon ‘Gothic’, Romance, that is allegorical, demonic, and
‘trickster’ type traditions, all of which are already replete with supernatural
connotation).
‘Dodgy/Edgy’…
(Gothic). Signalling the key role of transgression, of a transgressive
edge to be found in many of the lyrics (something seized upon in their
re-presentation, their re-contextualising, in video form, part of the new trend
for the consumption of music on DVDs). Transgression in the arts. Pretty much
established as a late 20th c art form. A given (co-opted and
canonised by consumerism and the cultural shifts of the ‘60s and ‘70s). And the
function of transgression; its end and its management; its role in the conservation
of identity, as marker of generations and of class difference, as an affront to
others. Its role in ritual effects (the pop/folk ‘single’ as ritual). Again
heir to the demonic, to the supernatural, to Romance (‘Gothick’)
and to ‘trickster’-type traditions in culture, as to their appearance in
popular culture – source and inspiration of many of the ‘ballads’. (Not least,
of ‘Murder Ballads’).
Songs in
this category: ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’; ‘Henry Lee’; ‘Stagger Lee’
(sacrificial rituals all); ‘There’s a Devil Waiting Outside Your Door’; ‘Red
Right Hand’.
At the interface of both of these two categories…
Transgression and metaphysical desire; a combination whose result is truly
ritualistic. This drawing upon so many powerful wellsprings of meaning is
ritual in effect (as also in affect, on the feelings conjured forth in the soul
of the listener). For transgression is but another route (the ‘other’ route) to
the sacred; a route taken via its opposite, its negative exemplar, its limits
and so its lining, its edge, its outline or horizon. We may trace the form of
the sacred through its abjected borderline, through
the rejected matter that litters its boundaries (as in linguistics where things
are often defined by what they are not, and are thus rendered dependant, are
flavoured, coloured, even haunted by these -putatively- excluded meanings). For
these reasons transgression is so often a part of ritual; providing a taste of
the other, a taste of chaos, before the return to order is re-affirmed. This
transgression, this movement beyond, echoing, presaging or accompanying the
movement of ritual beyond our world of temporal sanity and into the insanity of
the land of eternal myth, the exterior and eternally Outside where the
foundations of the self, society, and reason are to be found – their fictional
point of support. A fiction by which we all live. The songs of
Copyright
2005 Peter Nesteruk