Love songs

This week, chance has pushed me to the Deleuzian coasts, to blur their outlines. Deleuze argues that sadness does not make us intelligent, nor lucid; on the contrary, in sadness we are lost. This is why powers have the need to feed sad subjects. When we have a sad affect, according to the philosopher, a body acts upon ours, a soul acts upon ours, from conditions or through a relationship that does not suit us, that extinguishes our powers. There is nothing in sadness that allows bodies or souls to form a common territory.

For this very reason, a few years ago, I advocated for joy as a technology of resistance. Faced with the sadness that makes us powerless, immobile, submissive, we must persevere in joy. Deleuzian thought, rooted in Spinoza's garden, advocates for joy as resistance; it is a power, a force that allows us to enact our capacities. It allows us to avoid sad passions: resignation, bad conscience, guilt. This cartography of sadness aligns with my way of being in the world; since childhood I have tried to escape the tentacles of melancholy, sorrow, sad passions. This summer, however, reading "Pánico y ternura, by Paz López, has made me redraw the outlines of sadness, to approach the concept from another place.

Paz López tells us that, in July 2015, one of Nick Cave's sons fell from a cliff by the sea and the injuries were fatal. How is it possible to survive the devastating absurdity that the death of a child entails? Nick Cave continued to sing love songs, which according to him are the “sound of sorrow”. Not the singular sorrow that isolates, nor the one we nurse to feel self-pity, not the sorrow that turns us into the center of the world, an unlivable center, like hell. The sorrow Cave speaks of is a void that cries out to heaven, to ask for love and solace. It is a unleashed lament that seeks others. Like a bird that walks close to the ground, injured, but wants to know that it is not alone, wants to know that it will take flight again.

Paz López argues that perhaps sadness is born with us to save our lives. Like a mysterious and congenital intelligence, arms that lift us a little above the waterline. Sadness reminds us that it is necessary to move, to ignite the unusual forces that will allow us to continue living. Sadness, if we look it in the eye, pushes us to abandon certain spaces, to seek more propitious places.

In the pages of Pánico y ternura, I have found a Nick Cave reading García Lorca. According to Lorca, there is a sad spirit that inhabits certain works of art, he calls it the “duende”. It is not like inspiring muses or a faculty of intelligence, but an instinct for life that is rooted in human pain and allows us to soar. It shakes the sun beneath our feet, it strips us of comfort, of strength, it reminds us that “to live is to become impoverished of certainties, of securities, of closed forms”.

A liberated body

The sadness Lorca speaks of, from which artistic creations can draw, is not the suffering of an inflated ego, it is a return to the “remote province” where our early sadnesses were imprinted, it is the enigma that makes us feel love for a scent, for a voice, for a gesture, for a landscape. Lorca's sadness, the one that permeates Nick Cave's love songs, does not leave us locked in the room of wounds, exhaustion, resentment, but rather opens up in us the possibility of movement, of a new word, of a liberated body.

The author of Pánico y ternura argues that when we hear a love song, sometimes we cry, not because we become sad, but because the sadness becomes light for us, like a tender joy. Every time we listen to a love song, not the superficial artifacts that fit within the thresholds of each era, but a song that disturbs our body and soul, something is reborn within us. We can look at the past and suffer without becoming cruel, without remaining immobile, with hands full of tenderness.

According to Paz López, Nick Cave's songs are a refuge for people who do not find enough shelter in the spaces of life. Nick Cave understood that to lighten the burden of existence it was necessary to become tender, to pierce the walls where we have enclosed the wild and fascinating beast that is life itself. We must break down boundaries, to touch and be touched, to step out into uncertainty as one steps out into the cool night air on summer evenings.

Love songs are a beach of words that receives us, shipwrecked, while we understand why we have been saved, while we bide our time before returning to the open sea. Tenderness is oceanic, unlike panic, which is terrestrial.