Content advisory: The post below references suicide and depression. I found the interview that inspired this post to be quite depressing. Tread lightly here.
Yesterday, I found myself quite down after listening to an interview with David Berman. I first learned of Berman years ago, when I saw this beautiful eulogy video by Jeffrey Lewis. I proceeded to get deep into Berman’s music, and, though it was beautiful, man, was it heavy.
I shared about my down-feelings in a meditation group. After the group was over a guy came up to me and told me that he has the same sort of experience with certain sad music. Sad music makes him feel real and deep, and also, often, low.
Berman is probably the darkest musician I’ve ever listened to. His lyrics paint the outlines of depression in 4K HD technicolor detail.
Take this one:
Suffering jukebox in a happy town
You’re over in the corner breakin’ down
They always seem to keep you way down low
The people in this town don’t want to know
Berman’s lyrics consistently paint a picture of loss, isolation/lack of belonging, negative social comparison, shame. Even the band name — Silver Jews — points to this: a silver Jew is a Jew by patrilineal descent. Jews have been outsiders in many cultures throughout history. A silver jew is an outsider among outsiders.
This story — that Berman is an outsider among outsiders, a silver Jew — isn’t helpful. Yes, there are the gatekeepers, the people who think that patrilineally-descended Jews aren’t “real.” And there are other communities who welcome them. I’ve been through some of these same feelings with my own relationship to Judaism: I’ve let the shame and gatekeeper storylines into my head. My journey in the past few years had been to realize that if a community doesn’t want me, the world is big enough where I can find a community that will.
In the interview that got me into a dark mood, the interviewer repeatedly makes positive statements to Berman: “You must be excited for your upcoming tour,” “I really love your music.” These can’t penetrate Berman’s dark mental storyline.
In response to the excitement about the tour, Berman replies, “I have a lot of credit card debt.”
To the sentiment of admiration, Berman says, “Of course you would say that.”
Reddit and Youtube comments on Berman’s music range widely. The music makes some people feel low. It makes others feel less alone:
As someone battling with a depression that doesn’t seem to end, it saddens me that David took his life. I feel both ingrained in the melancholia and removed from it when I listen to him. Stay safe everyone.
RIP and thank you dave for giving us the words to describe what we all feel.
You’ve been an enormous inspiration and your work has helped me through several hard times.
After all this thinking about Berman, in the end, all I can confidently say is that he was an artist. He told the truth about his emotional reality with precision and eloquence. And: the reality he inhabited was very, very dark. His music describes every outline of the windowless cellar in which he lived, every centipede and cobweb. He rarely gave his listeners any ladders out.
I think if Berman himself had ladders that worked for him, he would have shared them. It’s just that nothing seemed to work. He knew about CBT. He was very self-aware. For whatever reason, the dark coating on his glasses was stuck on very stubbornly.
Berman says his favorite song on his last album is “Darkness and cold,” which has these lyrics:
Darkness and cold, darkness and cold
Rolled in through the holes in the stories I told
Conditions I’m wishing weren’t taking control
Darkness and cold, darkness and cold
Berman’s music pairs well with this TED talk by Andrew Solomon, who also suffers from treatment-resistant depression. The music gives me a visceral feeling of what its like to have depression: a feeling that no matter what you do, the darkness and cold rolls in through the psychological defenses. I’m lucky to never have had depression set in for very long in my life. My “psychological immune system” seems to be fairly robust. Berman’s music gives me empathy for people who chronically swim in very rough mental waters.
On the clown trip I took a year and a half ago, one of the questions Patch Adams’ wife asked us was: “How can I make my mind my friend?”
Tragically, David Berman did not find a satisfactory answer to this question in his life. No matter how much external love or therapy he got, it didn’t help. David Berman’s last album comes from this place of a mind that was not a friend.
His music resonates with a lot of people, because they’ve been there, too.
In another interview, Jeffrey Lewis talks about how he loves music that integrates both optimism and sadness. I love bands like the Grateful Dead and The Flaming Lips for these reasons (the top-right corner in my graph above).
Take these lyrics:
All those birds go chasin’ some better sunny days
You can’t hear them singing ’cause they’ve all gone awayBut this one bird didn’t leave you
It stayed through the wintertime
You can’t hear it sing but you can hear it as it fliesSo don’t you believe them
They’ll destroy you with their lies
They only see the obvious
They see the sun go down but they don’t see it rise–Flaming Lips, My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion
This song helped me through a dark time, when I didn’t see much hope for the future in my life, when I was in a prison of shame. This song became like a mantra to me. I played it on repeat and would sing along to it. This song helped me see there was always a small bird of hope, even in the bleakest situation.
Or take this song:
Mother I’ve taken LSD
I thought it would set me free
But now I think it’s changed me
It’s changed me
It’s changed me
It’s changed meNow I see the sadness in the world
I’m sorry I didn’t see it before–Flaming Lips, Mother I’ve Taken LSD
This song helped me see the beauty in the sadness of life. A similar sentiment is found in this song:
Stop the car, lay on the grass
The planets spin and we watch space passWalk a direction, see where we get
I never knew nothing, so there’s nothing to forget
Get real drunk and ride our bikes
There’s so much beauty, it could make you cry–Modest Mouse, So much beauty in dirt
Another way to see the beauty in sadness is by seeing the beauty of empathy itself, the beauty of deeply listening:
Old man down
Way down, down, down by the docks of the city
Blind and dirty
Asked me for a dime, a dime for a cup of coffee
I got no dime but I got some time to hear his story
My name is August West, and I love my Pearly Baker best more than my wine
More than my wine
More than my maker, though he’s no friend of mineEveryone said
I’d come to no good, I knew I would Pearly, believe them
Half of my life
I spent doin’ time for some other fucker’s crime
The other half found me stumbling ’round drunk on Burgundy wineBut I’ll get back on my feet again someday
The good Lord willin’
If He says I may
I know that the life I’m livin’s no good
I’ll get a new start, live the life I should–Grateful Dead, Wharf Rat
Empathy is worth more than “a dime for a cup of coffee.”
Objectively, the old man is in a worse situation than Berman. Yet he believes he can make a change, and this makes all the difference.
As my great-uncle Chaim used to say: “If you lose money, you’ve lost nothing. If you’ve lost hope, you’ve lost everything.”
In sum, I believe that music and musicians are doorways to emotional worlds. Music can help us feel more deeply. It enriches life. That’s the sentiment behind the Nietzsche quote in the picture above.
And also, if we’re not careful, music, and art in general, can imprison us in someone else’s dark emotional world.
Diversify your music and art consumption. Be aware of how it makes you feel. Don’t be afraid of the darkness, but be aware that, as Nietzche said: “If you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
Yes, these are notes to self.
danscreativeoulet 