This song always reminds me of the fall. It’s a moribund, sad tale, and I don’t know why, but that’s what the fall is to me. Not that I think the fall is a time of sadness, rather it’s a time of great reflection. After the exuberance of summer it’s the period of winding down, before the cold death of the winter. The leaves give their last hurrah before collapsing, animals prepare for the hard times ahead. One system dies for the other to live. Reminds me of the absolutely heartbreaking passage from this song:
There was a flood
A world of water
The mason’s wife
Swam for her daughter
One thousand people
Did what they could
They found the steeple
And tore up the wood.
Five hundred pieces
Means five hundred float.
One thousand people
Means five hundred don’t.
It’s sad as fuck and at the same time tragically beautiful, and that’s what the fall is to me, a great tragic romance. It’s the kiss before dying, the exultation of love before the separation, the boldest stroke of paint that defines an overall work. I don’t use the fall to mourn, rather it is a celebration, an explosion of life where colors fight off the cold. One life gives into another, and we pay it forward. Sacrifices are made, pain is bled, and what we are left with is the warmth of our shared hands.
This is par for the course for me, as I tend to see things as tragic, but in the absolutely most beautiful way possible. Our time is limited, and that’s why it is so valuable. In my teens and college years I was drowning in a sea of darkness, I was obsessed with all art and expression that was pitch black, nihilism laced with arsenic and bullets. I had no faith in humanity to do the right thing. I guess as I got older and wiser, I realized that dressing in black and writing / painting the most evil things I could think of was simply an affront. It shocked people with evil, but it’s not what I fundamentally believe. Evil is for the soulless, and after falling in love with my wife and building a family of artistic collaborators, I saw that I had a soul. And in that realization I also understood that once my heart stops pumping and my brain dies, all of this will go away. It’s a morbid thought but the beauty of it is staggering - the world and I were meant to be together, but our destiny is to eventually be separated. The ultimate cosmological Romeo and Juliet.
We will all die, which is why we have to live.
I was going through some old files and saw some of the things I used to paint in college. It was some seriously twisted and dark shit. I asked a dear friend of mine as to where all that went - I’ve still got a pretty morbid and dark imagination, but that razor edge of evil is gone. I asked my friend what happened to that. My friend paused and said:
“You got a cat, Sridhar. That’s what happened.”
Ezra the Pound and King Pavlov - saviors and clowns.
Have a great weekend!
