I began to read a series of conversations between Nick Cage and Seán O’Hagan in Faith, Hope & Carnage (published by Farar, Strous, & Giroux in 2022) after a friend recommended Cage and his music last month. In the opening salvo, Cage comments:
It struck at the very core of my being because I was this thing that …
My core consists of:
- Family man
- Collectivist
- Mulatto
- Multilingual
- A walking dictionary, like my dad
- Warm smiles — smiles that put others at ease — from cheeks like my mom
- Cool, calm, and collected
Speaking of being like my dad, I like the lyric from “I Look Like My Dad” where Khary or Abhi the Nomad rap:
The last one to speak but the first one you quote/
Could feel what I wrote /
Concealed in a note
Last year during an introductory exercise with 4 questions, one of the questions was Where is home? In that moment, I answered as I’ve answered for the last 30 years by commenting that home is where I pay rent and sleep most of the month. The following day I had the revelation that my first home will forever be in this skin — the skeleton, organs, fascia, chromosomes that lie within.
I recall how in high school Biology class we were shown the cross-sections of the 3 layers of the dermis: epidermis, dermis, and hypodermis. I marveled at these lower layers, how the sensitivity changed between the layers, and that this explained how there could be some cuts that bleed and some scratches that don’t bleed.
A few pages later, still describing the initial COVID-19 lockdowns of social distancing, Cave said:
It felt as though, whatever we assumed was the story of our lives, this invisible hand had reached down and torn a great big hole in it. (4)
Invisible hands, as proposed by Adam Smith have been tearing holes in families and societies for centuries. When there’s a hole torn, what do we fill it with, if anything? I can see the years of wear on a few tshirts in my drawer from the holes growing in the armpit, neckline, or over the belly. They won’t all be stitched up.
I’ve been attentive to the holes in people’s hearts, as I’ve understood the metaphor for decades, a hurt or vacancy that propels them to act and live in ways seeking to alleviate pain but sometimes exacerbating that pain of isolation. The holes that I perceive as emotional and psychological that, in this heyday day of 2 centuries of invisible hands, people oftentimes fill with material items, wondering if those purchased goods or services might fill the hole in or around their heart.
So many holes torn into families, neighborhoods, communities, workplaces, and countries are tears made by financial instruments. That’s how I’ve perceived the manipulators of the speculative markets ever since July 1997 when Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea, the so called Asian Tigers, were punished by speculators concentrated in New York and London but with associates, if not yes men in Hong Kong and Singapore. At that time, I was unaware of the Neuromancer adage that the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Through the mid-90s, I read The Economist, heralded in most liberal arts college and university Economic Departments as the premier weekly magazine. And the journalists and the editors at The Economist heralded the mighty economies until they lambasted them. I was not yet repulsed by the Economist, but I was galled at how the lives of millions of people were caught in the wind and legal gambling of guys in financial centers.
I went from tracking the economic forecasts closely to slowly creeping away from the hard maths inside finance as I saw how reckless the money making could be and how wide and vast the devastation was.
Cave rattles off descriptors, on pages 31-32, about grief as:
- an exalted state closest to Great Spirit [aka the fundamental essence of things]
- deeply acquainted with the idea of human mortality
- a very dark place
- an experience of the extremities of your own pain
- the very limits of suffering
- where suffering transforms, alters, or remakes you
- where you’re closer to the veil separating this world from the next.
Maybe that proximity to death during the early months of COVID was propelling millions, or billions, closer to death and that frightened people who did not want to feel that grief or be forced to reckon with their mortality.
I suppose I feel very much at home in proximity to death. I have not been in a grieving state for the last year, but the last 24 years.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 