A Sense of Doubt blog post #3734 - The Impossible Realm - More Thoughts on Grief and Nick Cave's Faith, Hope, and Carnage

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3734 - The Impossible Realm - More Thoughts on Grief and Nick Cave's Faith, Hope, and Carnage

Essentially this is my second installment in response to issues raised in the book Faith, Hope, and Carnage by Nick Cave and Seán O'Hagan.

My previous post on this book and these issues is here:

Saturday, February 8, 2025

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3644 - Nick Cave on Grief

I am a creative artist, or at least, I like to think so.

I have lived my life with my imagination as my most revered and cherished attribute and things produced by the imaginations of others as my favorite things in the world.

Yes, I am Enneagram Type Four. In the MBTI, I am INXP. (An X is a balance, so T-F balanced.)

Because I live life in my imagination, I am highly sensitive. Things affect me more deeply than they may affect others. I am easily hurt. I spend a lot of time processing my thoughts and feelings, especially the latter. Again, I have an X in the MBTI Thinking-Feeling spectrum, so those forces are both working in tandem all the time.

Some would say that my constant habitation within my imagination means that I am not reality-based and live in a fantasy world. This was definitely true when I was younger. And by younger, I mean, at least, well into my thirties, AT LEAST. This fantasy-life is less true today. I am much more reality-based, though I still retreat into my imagination all the time, especially when times are tough. After all, I am dreaming up stories, things to write, whole worlds, world-building, so even though I feel that I have a grasp on reality, I spend a lot of time in fantasy realms.

And because I retreat to my imagination, I make art, mostly writing, like this blog entry, but other things, too, like fiction and poetry. I find solace in my writing. I find value. I love doing it. Writing is among my top five self-care pursuits. I have always done it, and I always will.

Thus, when it comes to grieving, I am going to write about it, and I am going to write about it for a long time.

Today is day 3599 since my Mother died in 2015. The tenth year "anniversary" of her death will happen this year on July Fourth. In that time, I have produced most of the 3733 blog posts on Sense of Doubt. Today is post 3734. There were 50 posts prior to starting HEY MOM on July 6th, 2015. I then wrote HEY MOM for three years, daily,  that's 1095 posts. There were also 80-or-so Daily Bowie posts in 2016 along with the daily HEY MOM posts. And I have posted daily blog entries, some of which are HEY MOM posts, since quitting daily HEY MOM on July 6th, 2018. And so, all told, that's 3734 posts as of today.

Not all of those posts are about grief. The nearly 1100 consecutive HEY MOM posts are not all about grief. The blog is about life. My life. My study. Things I want to share, things I am reading, things I experience, sometimes long, and sometimes very short, and sometimes reprinted because there are 3700+ to choose from. And yes, some things I have reprinted more than once.

I have written previously about my views on grief, views which are in the process of evolving.

One of my more significant posts on the topic is here:

Friday, March 28, 2025

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3692 - SEVEN Months and The Orphaned Adult By Alexander Levy

Today marks the 254th day since my Dad died. I was with him. I was holding his hand. I will write those sentences for the rest of my life and never feel I should hold them back. I am so honored and fortunate, so blessed, to have been with my Dad when he drew his last breath. I had wanted to be there with my Mom, too, but that didn't happen.

In that post from March 28th, I wrote about how we do not "get over" grief, and those who think they do are probably repressing. And yet, there are people in this world who will tell us that we need to "get over it," stop writing about it, talking about it, acknowledging it. Not all people. Some people. But it is a pervasive cultural belief. It amounts to "stop being such a cry baby," which should trigger many of us with memories of being bullied or even just unjustly admonished for our feelings.

Feelings are not bad; they are feelings. We are going to have them. We need to have them. We need to let them through. What's bad in regards to feelings is trying not to feel them. This is repression. It's not healthy. Also, feelings can fester, and we should avoid allowing them to spawn like a cancer and eat away at us.

Instead of telling people not to grieve, to stop grieving, we should see what we can learn from how others are experiencing and processing their grief. We are all in this together. So far, I have learned so much from others about their experiences with grief. I hope to keep learning. I am not sure if I have anything to share that is worth learning. Others will tell me if they found anything of value in what I share. I welcome that feedback.

In learning about grief and in reacting to other people's grief, empathy and compassion are nice, sure. But since we will all experience grief, and all of us will likely grieve the loss of our parents, then instead of denying that it hurts, that it should only hurt for a short time, that we all should "move on," like a gas station we used to fill our tank on a long trip, and then leave in our rear view and never visit again, we should try to learn from each other because community is powerful. We are here on this earth to form communities and help communities thrive. "Remember, when you go out in the world, hold hands and stick together." That's part of the CREDO in Everything I Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten, one of my favorite books.

And, of course, I have shared about it a little bit:

Friday, November 4, 2022

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2817 - Everything I need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten Credo - THAT ONE THING FOR 2211.04

Granted some are/were not close with either or both parents, some may die before their parents, but generally, most of us will lose our parents and will grieve them in addition to many other grieving experiences we will have in our lives, sadly, some of us, more than others.

And so, I am back for another installment about grief and things I learned from the book Faith, Hope, and Carnage by Nick Cave and Seán O'Hagan. We can all learn from these interviews as Nick Cave discusses intersections of art, religion, and the death of his son, Arthur (see the previous blog post linked above for more details); I highly recommend this book.

When Arthur died, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds were in the process of recording their 2016 album Skeleton Tree. 

"I’ve always suspected that songwriting had a kind of secret dimension, without getting too mystical about it," Nick explained. Cave, Nick; O'Hagan, Seán. Faith, Hope and Carnage (p. 34). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition. 

Some might call this "secret dimension" the state of flow, but it's more than that. There is something mystical to creating art of any kind, and writing, whether it is songs, poems, stories, or blog posts has a different element of communication than other art forms that are primarily visual, auditory, or somatic. Not that writing is superior in any way, not that it is special apart from those other arts. All art forms have their vocabularies. Writing just happens to have words as its primary vocabulary and surely a more dominant tool than in any of the other art forms. That's important to the topic of this post as well as just how the post has come to be: in words.

MORE FROM NICK: "I don’t really want to make too much out of it except to say that I think songs have a way of talking into the future. I tend to think my records are built out of an unconscious yearning for something. Whether that is a yearning for disruption, or a yearning for peace, very much depends on what I was going through at the time, but my music does often seem to be one step ahead of what is actually going on in my life.

"I guess I believe that there exists a genuine mystery at the heart of songwriting. Certain lines can appear at the time to be almost incomprehensible, but they nevertheless feel very true, very true indeed. And not just true, but necessary, and humming with a kind of unrevealed meaning. Through writing, you can enter a space of deep yearning that drags its past along with it and whispers into the future, that has an acute understanding of the way of things. You write a line that requires the future to reveal its meaning" (pp. 35-36).  

All of this that he says is true of much of my writing and definitely this blog. I often feel that I am "talking into the future" and that I am yearning for something. I am finding my way to that thing (or those things) being yearned for and often I am not reaching the things; I am still on the journey towards the things no matter how much I write, what I write, or even whether I share what is written.

Grief is like that. It's all journey into the future, it's all yearning with no end. The lost loved ones are not coming back. We can feel them. I feel my parents with me all the time. They tell me things. They hold me in their love. But they are not returning to life as they were. The yearning for them will not win out in a return. It will just go on. 

SIDENOTE: Some people see "ghosts" (for lack of a better word or concept). I do not. But I do sense my parents. I do not "hear" them in the way I hear my dog barking or my wife telling me a story, but I do "hear" them often, in my mind, with what they would say in a situation, something they would remind me of, something comforting.

These blog entries unfurl themselves much as Nick describes above but poetry even more so as it is much like the song writing that he is talking about with the incomprehensible lines whose meaning may be revealed in the future.

This is what I am doing with writing the blog posts, journals that are private, stories and poems that may some day be published, letters to friends and family, and more.

I enter this Imaginal Realm, an Impossible Realm as Nick describes in the next passage:

"... there is another place that can be summoned through practice that is not the imagination, but more a secondary positioning of your mind with regard to spiritual matters. It’s complex, and I’m not sure I can really articulate it. The priest and religious writer Cynthia Bourgeault talks about ‘the imaginal realm’, which seems to be another place you can inhabit briefly that separates itself from the rational world and is independent of the imagination. It is a kind of liminal state of awareness, before dreaming, before imagining, that is connected to the spirit itself. It is an ‘impossible realm’ where glimpses of the preternatural essence of things find their voice. Arthur lives there. Inside that space, it feels a relief to trust in certain glimpses of something else, something other, something beyond. Does that make sense?"

(p.39).

Yes, Nick, it does. This all makes PERFECT SENSE for those of us who have experienced it.

In this realm, a liminal space, (I love that word), "things find their voice."

"Imaginal" strikes me as related to the imagination and yet not specifically of the imagination, hence the liminal space between two states, despite Nick claiming that it is "independent of the imagination" and "before imagining." 

Meditation, prayer, and even lighting a candle relate to this space.

I would counter that for me, for my experience of this state, I can sense the imagination lurking, like I always feel it all around thoughts, feelings, mental states, consciousness.

But I agree that within this state of imagination and not imagination, of the mind but not the rational world, that we encounter "the preternatural essence of things." One could argue that this Impossible Realm is a state of mind connecting to the unconsciousness or even the Collective Unconscious.

MORE FROM NICK: "I think at its very least it is a private gesture that signals a willingness to hand a part of oneself over to the mysterious, in the same way that prayer is, or, indeed, the making of music. Prayer to me is about making a space within oneself where we listen to the deeper, more mysterious aspects of our nature. I’m not sure that is such a bad thing to do, right?

"...there’s something about being open and vulnerable that is conversely very powerful, maybe even transformative. For me, vulnerability is essential to spiritual and creative growth, whereas being invulnerable means being shut down, rigid, small. My experience of creating music and writing songs is finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You’re being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. There’s certainly a vulnerability to that, and an incredible freedom.

"SEAN: The two are connected, maybe – vulnerability and freedom. 

"I think to be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. In that place we can feel extraordinarily alive and receptive to all sorts of things, creatively and spiritually. It can be perversely a point of advantage, not disadvantage as one might think. It is a nuanced place that feels both dangerous and teeming with potential. It is the place where the big shifts can happen. The more time you spend there, the less worried you become of how you will be perceived or judged, and that is ultimately where the freedom is" (p. 40-41). 

Giving one's self over to the mysterious.

Being open and vulnerable.

Strength in vulnerability.

Freedom in vulnerability.

Feeling extraordinarily alive.

BIG SHIFTS CAN HAPPEN.

Since the death of my parents (and really starting when I married my wife), I feel things much more strongly than ever before, I experience things with an intensity I had not previously encountered, I am vulnerable in ways that humble and surprise me.

I feel extraordinarily alive.

Strength, freedom, openness.

It's all there before me as I experience love and grief and all the feelings that cascade through those experiences.

These are the essence of life as humans, and to be present in these experiences, present in the moment, the NOW, one cannot push down one's grief into a box deep within one's unconscious mind. Or anything really. Feel it. Feel it all. Experience it all. (Yes, I know I made a reference to a song by Feist.)

MORE

"SEAN: Yes, and nothing prepares you for it. It’s tidal and it can be capsizing. 

"That’s a good word for it – ‘capsizing’. But I also think it is important to say that these feelings I am describing, this point of absolute annihilation, is not exceptional. In fact it is ordinary, in that it happens to all of us at some time or another.

We are all, at some point in our lives, obliterated by loss. If you haven’t been by now, you will be in time – that’s for sure. And, of course, if you have been fortunate enough to have been truly loved, in this world, you will also cause extraordinary pain to others when you leave it. That’s the covenant of life and death, and the terrible beauty of grief" (pp. 41-42). 

YES.

I am just going to leave it at that.

"SEAN: We talked earlier about the act of lighting a candle, and that for me was the only thing that could still my mind. It was as if peace had descended if only for a few moments. 

Stillness is what you crave in grief. When Arthur died, I was filled with an internal chaos, a roaring physical feeling in my very being as well as a terrible sense of dread and impending doom. I remember I could feel it literally rushing though my body and bursting out the ends of my fingers. When I was alone with my thoughts, there was an almost overwhelming physical feeling coursing through me. I have never felt anything like it. It was mental torment, of course, but also physical, deeply physical, a kind of annihilation of the self – an interior screaming" (p. 42). 

"And, in that period, the idea that we all die just became so fucking palpable that it infected everything. Everyone seemed to be at the point of dying" (p. 43). 

"To be forced to grieve publicly, I had to find a means of articulating what had happened. Finding the language became, for me, the way out. There is a great deficit in the language around grief. It’s not something we are practiced at as a society, because it is too hard to talk about and, more importantly, it’s too hard to listen to. So many grieving people just remain silent, trapped in their own secret thoughts, trapped in their own minds, with their only form of company being the dead themselves" (p. 44). 

Yes, to all that.

Everyone seemed to be at the point of dying. I could see the mortality in others and that reminded me of the mortality in me. I told people to cherish their loved ones, to tell them of their love, to not take anyone they love for granted, because soon, too soon, they will be gone. I routinely ask friends how old their parents are, the status of their health, and how lucky they are to still have them in their lives. Maybe people do not need me to share those things. Or maybe these are good reminders. I make them anyway. I think it matters.

And though I am not "forced" to grieve publicly like an artist of Cave's magnitude, influence, and responsibility, like his online journal, the Red Hand Files, in which he discusses grief among other things with fans each week, I am blogging every day, and sometimes, I am grieving publicly, writing about grief, like I am right here.

And here's one of the many lessons, and the note on which I will end: 

"So many grieving people just remain silent, trapped in their own secret thoughts, trapped in their own minds, with their only form of company being the dead themselves."

Doesn't that just ring true?

What we can learn here is to not be silent, to not be trapped in our own minds.

Be in therapy.

Share with your community.

Hugs.

Discussions.

Shared experiences.

Ask people who you know have lost loved ones how they are doing, even after YEARS. Remember the anniversaries of those deaths. Be there for those people you love.

Light the way. 

Because many of my friends have not yet lost one let alone both parents. It's our job to show them what coping looks like, to help to prepare them if they choose to engage and if they choose to consider anything we share as valuable. Because maybe it isn't. Maybe it's too individual, too much of my experience, just mine, or they are not ready. I would have had a difficult time relating to the grief of a friend when I was in my 20s or even my 30s.

But here it is. Here is some coping. I cope with writing, with art, with imagination, with feeling the feelings and understanding that I can let the feelings flow through me because more feelings are coming.

It is not an all-the-time thing. I am not grieving actively and consciously in every moment of the day, but it is there, the feelings, the memories, the thoughts, and they appear at many times throughout the day, the week, the month. Often, they appear at very unexpected times and in unexpected ways.

This is also an Impossible Realm, this grief, one that I could not imagine, but it has many sides, many aspects, much to explore.

There is the "imaginal realm" that liminal sense between imagination and the rational world that is much like meditation and prayer. And there's an Impossible Realm of the world without the people we love, the people we thought would always be in the world with us, especially those people who have been with us from birth (our parents) and those for whom we have been present with since their birth (our children).

Both exist.

Both exist to be explored and experienced.

I am very grateful to Nick Cave and Seán O'Hagan, and their wonderful book Faith, Hope, and Carnage. 

I will post about what I have gleaned from it again some day in a third installment.

If intrigued and/or inspired, give it a read. I recommend listening to the audio by the two of them. It's best, such great voices and expression in their voices.

FYI, I am seeing Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in concert tomorrow.

Thanks for tuning in.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2505.09 - 10:10

- Days ago: MOM = 3599 days ago & DAD = 254 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.