Five years at the purple mountains' feet

Digging into the archive, digging up the memories

It’s been half a decade without David Cloud Berman. The poet and songwriter for Silver Jews and Purple Mountains departed on August 7, 2019. As with any anniversary relating to his oeuvre, I am only one of countless voices celebrating his work and his life, what he brought and what he left behind. I promise this newsletter isn’t going to be entirely Berman-focused.

To commemorate, I dug through some of my oldest writing and found a short stream-of-consciousness scream, poured out only moments after I heard the news and still unedited. 2019 was a very dark time — I was in the depths of a hopeless depression that would only begin to break years later. Losing Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchinson the year before and now Berman left me ravaged and bittersweet. Anger and spite fueled my forward momentum. These words came from that.

how is that the ones who seem to have made it the longest fall the hardest? they’ve stretched days across years and given hope to so many others. “if they did it, maybe I can live to tomorrow too.” chances are they’ve been exhausted for most of the time they’ve been living. exhausted by pain and sadness and emptiness and depression and loneliness and the heaviness that comes when all of it is placed right on top of you. something that humans aren’t designed to survive. but if they did it for this long, maybe I shouldn’t slip away, maybe I shouldn’t dissolve, maybe tonight isn’t the last night. then comes the news that they succumbed. their lives ended how all lives do, with a click and a flood of light. but their stones keep rippling after they’ve sunk. we can’t help but stare at the spot where it happened. we watch with bated breath for them to resurface and ten years later we’re still there. because the ripples haven’t stopped.

why is it that art grows in significance as soon as its creator dies? I am incapable of appreciating something made by the living. the emptiness they leave behind draws me in and suddenly revelation swirls around me and I know what I’ve been missing. why couldn’t we just tell? when they tell us where they’re going to die, maybe we should make sure they don’t go there alone. when they tell us that all their happiness is gone, maybe we should do something.

they didn’t lead big lives, per se. but they were enormous to us. towering figures of poetry and craft. yet never inhuman. they were aggressively opposed to that idea. every voice crack or tortured couplet was an indication that they’re in this hellhole too and they’re gonna keep fucking breathing if it’s the last thing they do. the fire grows to its highest heights just before it flickers for the final time. one burst and then it’s gone. it’s a cruel bait and switch. the message of false hope, perhaps given unknowingly or unwillingly.

Five years later, five years that I continued to live despite the urges towards the opposite, my frustration and sense of betrayal has cooled into transient sadness. People we look up will continue to die. People we love will continue to end their own lives. Their sentences don’t end so much with a period as with an ellipsis. Words and the breath that creates them halt briefly, trailing off under the guise of an ending.

I think often of the lyrics to “Nights That Won’t Happen.” Berman sings, “Ghosts are just old houses dreaming people in the night / Have no doubt about it, hon, the dead will do alright / Go contemplate the evidence and I guarantee you'll find /The dead know what they're doing when they leave this world behind.” Our dreams don’t end when the dead take their final leap. Take heart that they’re doing alright with whatever’s hiding behind life’s dark curtain. We’ll keep suffering, I hope.