Finding a Wild God
The Stories We Tell Together
Two events happened this week and they were profoundly different but offered an important shared lesson. On Wednesday my partner Lorraine and I went to Nick Cave’s The Wild Gods concert. It was church, in all the best sense of that word. It was a communal gathering with its own rituals and tropes. It was an event created to fill us up as participants in an audience. I know that ‘entertainment’ performs a number of roles and each person may have different needs that it fulfills in their life. I remember listening to the Smashing Pumpkins, Jelly Belly in 1995 and I felt like my thoughts were being obliterated, the music left no room for my consciousness, it was a good thing for me at the time.
I knew a little about Nick Cave’s music and became interested in him from his writing in The Red Hand files, where he answers questions from fans potently and honestly. The last concert the two of us saw was a crowded, over loud, standing mass of people all armed with their phones—no one seemed to be present, there was a sheeple need to prove they were there through their phones. Nick Cave kept telling people to put their fucking phones away. I took a few shots only because the power of the images were so overwhelming—I felt like I was violating our pact with his performance.
The 4th year Illustration grad class had their awards night on Thursday. It’s only after the event and likely the inspiration of Wednesday’s soul revival—both soul music and that ineffable part of our selves that we need to draw on more than ever in this world—that I saw what our event meant. Celebrations and rites of passage as a community are what helps to cement our connection to each other. We seemed on Thursday, to reclaim some of the communal energy, the buzz, that COVID had taken from us.
It is at a graduate event that we look up from the road we are on and try to see the road ahead. That doesn’t mean that we teach in a bubble, as the future won’t happen if the present isn’t addressed. Illustration’s present, since the adoption of the computer in the early 1990’s has been in constant flux and change. The near extinction of magazines, and certainly a dimming of media brands, with ‘legacy’ media being less a place where Illustrators ply their trade, has meant new tools and approaches to respond to the change we live in. It is part of my job outside of my role in the drawing studio to look at the curve in the road, but Wednesday’s concert reminded me of something else that we don’t need to learn, but to remember.
The isolating and atomizing of social media does not fill our hearts or expand our souls. Nick Cave played his last song of the evening on stage alone seated at a piano, Into My Arms, a song about loss that he knows only too well, having lost 2 of his sons. He asked us to sing the chorus with him and ended with the over 3000 people present singing together without him…..
Into my arms, oh, Lord
Into my arms, oh, Lord
Into my arms, oh, Lord
Into my arms
The energy of shared experience and the open arms of a community give us much more fuel to navigate the uncertainty of our world. We cannot lose the importance of events in person that call for participation and offer us awe because it is shared. I know there is still some of that hard wiring left in us from when we formed communal groups in a circle around a fire, sharing light, warmth, and the first stories we told and that we must continue to tell as long as we are here.