May 2nd, 2017: To Cave, With Love

Cave,

I don't doubt you've had a great outpouring of grief and support in the last few years. I thought of you often, as an artist I've invited into my life, and I often wished you well. But now that it's been 8 months... now that the iron of my rage and indignation has cooled... I want to tell you...

I want to tell you...

Those words, and that unfinished sentence ring into this hollow place where I am a consumer of your art, and you are an autoclave into which I placed all my infectious glass beakers of emotions to be steamed away, track by track, the morning Skeleton Tree was released in the US. 

It was September, beautiful, bright and golden light dancing through trees unwilling to shed for the year. It was warm. The inside of the car was heated enough to make me sweat as I drove, the flat brown box like grim pornography on my lap. 

The night before, I drove two hours over the Sierras into a pink sunset to see your film, and I watched it stricken, letting it wash over me like a terrible telling of my fortunes. My brother (34, stubborn, childless, engaged, immature, and always looking for the magic under the rocks of this world) was dying of cancer. 

In three months I watched him waste from a stout and thick-armed rifle hunter to something bird-like and deformed, but this isn't about the torture he endured. It's about the gift delivered that morning, right on time. 

It took all day for his heart to stop, and I left after dark, the streets bathed in cool winds. In my apartment, I examined your album. A blank screen, the words a fresh splash of comfort after a machine fails, and then recovers itself. 

A hard reboot, my brother called them. The expectant green shade of a return to sanity; a hope that your work was saved after all. And is it? I found myself questioning that optimism. Is it safe, for when I return, this massive body of my own work, my own unfinished art? Will it be here, when I come back? There's nothing a writer fears more than amnesia, or death.  Will anything be waiting for me, when I come back to this earth?

I listened with some trepidation. I know you too well to think you'd be placating and maybe I wanted that. But what I could expect was for you to look straight out, over the vast terrains of the earth, and tell me what you see of magic that is tucked beneath the rocks. 

-Evelyn