16 July 2015

Dear Nick and Susie Cave

Dear Nick Cave

I am sure no words can add even a drop of solace to what you are going through.  The relationship between artist and audience is a strange one in our modern world. You have been a constant companion to me, since I turned 17. Only just a some precious months longer than the age of your own son, Arthur, who was lost just this week. I will be 40 in a few months.

Knowing some of my own contemporaries with artist's souls, I get it, I figure you are likely driven to create, to tell stories, not necessarily through ego but through a core part of your being. To make sense of the world, to join the dots, and to reflect it back to itself in a mirror. Showing the cracks and the misery as well as the joy and fire and anger and delight.

You are an artist with a place in  the the home of probably millions. Today I cried real tears for you, for Susy, for your other sons.

Yes, I have been a fan, since I saw you play in 1992, and a fan is not  friend. Of course. But also true, you have been a friend to me. You have given me permission to cry. You have also given me an outlet for  the wildness and the yell inside that demands an outlet from time to time, for the solitary sadness and introspection times that come into every life.

I don't have a child.  I don't know what it is to lose one.  I think I will always be a little sad that I didn't experience that part of life that takes your own existence and makes it connected to an other's.

But from the years of stories and songs I have just a small window into your feelings. Standing  beside all the word's artist and storytellers you can take them,  share them with the rest of us and help us know that our experiences are alike. You have lived, loved, lost and also shared.

This week your experience must be primal and horrible. I wish there was some way I could give back some hundredth of what you've given me over the years. But I can't.  

All I can say is sorry.

Yours,
B.

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