Recently I stumbled on this 2010 album: Death, by Anne-Lise Berntsen and Eisler Ensemble. It contains pieces by Kurt Weill, Monteverdi, Bach, Shostakovich and others. My attention was caught especially by songs written by two of my favourite artists, Bob Dylan (Death is not the end) and Nick Cave (well, Little Water Song is actually by Nick Cave and Bruno Pisek). In fact (I confess) I was actually looking for another song by Nick Cave (Shivers), which starts out with the lyric “I’ve been contemplating suicide”, but somehow my Apple Music search brought me to Death. I guess that says something about me ☺.
Later I found a 2000 version of LWS by German chanteuse Ute Lemper, the first recorded version I think. Both versions are lovely, but the Ute version really hits the heights. I can’t find a recording by Nick himself, and when you understand the song, you realize why it could really only be sung by a female voice.
Listen to the two songs, I reckon, and check out the lyrics, before reading on. I’ll wait while you do that. Here are the YouTube links:
Death is not the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrmndIkB8GU
Little Water Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGqU0DhVO9Y
LWS is such a remarkable song, and through it you could tell the whole story of human life and death. Yes, I’m not joking. It is truly great art – what art and only art can be when the great artist nails it. The Bob song is very sweet, but I include it really only for purposes of comparison. Bob is certainly capable of great art, but this one doesn’t quite get there.
To Death is not the end first. This is a piece from Dylan’s Christian phase (c.1988). You can guess from the title what he has to tell us:
When you’re sad and when you’re lonely
And you haven’t got a friend
Just remember that death is not the end
And all that you held sacred
Falls down and does not mend
Just remember that death is not the end
Not the end, not the end
Just remember that death is not the end
That’s about it, really. The verses keep rhyming away, a simple song, sung beautifully by Anne-Lise and the ensemble, with multiple voices taking turns. See also a version by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, providing a quirky contrast on Murder Ballads (1996). It’s a simple, hopeful message, a succession of nice clichés about the solace that can be found in this life by the hope of a lovely after-life. I hate to say it, however, but it’s an understanding not based on any really deep reflection on life, death, existence, pain, fear, love, despair, etc.. That’s where LWS comes in.
LWS is a murder song. Yes, murder. But it’s the murderer who gets murdered! When you understand the song, you realize that it could actually also be called “Death is not the end”, and that it gives a much more meaningful account of the possibility of transcendence of death than Bob’s song.
Under here, you just take my breath away
Under here, the water flows over my head
I can hear the little fishes
The first things you notice are the slow grandeur and intensity of the music, and that beautiful, familiar expression of romantic love, “you just take my breath away”. But “under here”, “the water flows over my head”, “little fishes”?
The musical, poetic beauty of it all doesn’t change, but slowly you realize, with horror, what is happening. The beautiful woman, who is being suddenly and unexpectedly drowned by her jealous lover, sings her own gradual realization of what is happening, of what he is doing to her:
Sir, under here, I have such pretty hair
Silver, it is, and filled with silver bubbles
Ah, and under here, my blood will be a cloud
And under here my dreams are made of water
And, Sir, you just take my breath away
Yes, she is waking out of a dream, a dream of false love: her false, misplaced love of him (it wasn’t him she loved, but a false idea of him), and his false, jealous, controlling love of her (which likewise is a false idea of her, not her herself). It is a good dream to wake out of, one it would be good for us all to wake out of, even when we’re not being murdered.
You see that it is not death she is approaching, but life. Not death he is giving her, but her life back. He’s waking her up out of dream-death. Death is really false-life, so that really we are often living-dead when we live a false life-dream. If you get what I mean.
People do get murdered – people like you and me, who have striven, long and hard, to live happy, meaningful lives, then it all gets suddenly snuffed out in the end. It’s such a tragedy, and part of us feels that the final outrage somehow cancels out any meaningfulness that might have been garnered in the person’s life, so that ultimately there is death, just death, no meaning, pointlessness, futility, just a waste. It’s so demoralizing to think of. Death is the end.
But Nick and Bruno provide the antidote to the futility of a murdered life. In the final split second, the drowning woman becomes conscious of what is happening to her, and defiantly, magnificently, declares:
Under here, I am made ready
And under here, I am washed clean
And I glow with the greatness of my hate for you
Isn’t that the most triumphantly beautiful line in the history of lyrical music: “I glow with the greatness of my hate for you”! Thus she transcends, defeats death, which is really just a life lived falsely, in a false dream, a life devoid of real meaning.
Real hate is so much better, so much more meaningful, than false love (which is what Bob himself says in all those great songs like Idiot Wind, Positively Fourth Street and Like a Rolling Stone).
The murderer is trying to kill the woman’s body; but, much more than that, he is trying to kill her soul. Killing the body is not enough (just like in the old days when it wasn’t enough to execute a person quickly, they had to be tortured long and slow first, to maximise soul-suffering and consciousness of death, before being consigned to eternal, conscious torment in Hell). The murdering lover pretends to be playful at first, deceiving the woman into thinking that he is being loving in what he is doing (“under here, you take my breath away”). He’s trying to kill, not just his lover’s body, but what he sees as her false, deceiving love for him. He’s trying to destroy her love with his hate, or, rather, with his false, controlling love for her. If he could keep her body alive, but kill her false love, he would probably be happier doing that. But he knows that’s not possible. The only way, he thinks, that he can kill her soul – her love – is to kill her body.
But it doesn’t work. It could never work for him anyway. She realizes, eventually, what he’s up to, not too late, and life – real soul life – swells up suddenly inside her and bursts out: “I hate you”. Life affirmed, death transcended. The murderer is the one who really dies (i.e. his soul dies).
In the Dylan song death transcendence is purely theoretical; in LWS it is absolutely real. Which is why DINTE is sweet, but LWS is truly great art. Who would dare imagine, speculate about, the experience of a person being murdered? Only the bravest, most loving of artists. It’s not as though anyone has ever lived to tell their own murder story, and doesn’t everyone deserve to have their story told? Isn’t it beautiful – isn’t it just so important – that there is someone who will be brave enough to tell it. Even if it’s only the hopeful version – that there is a consciousness at the end, and a great surge of life awakening to propel the person beyond the portals of death to whatever’s beyond (even if it’s just nothing). Plenty of people just die (I’m guessing) while still in the dream; what is there for them beyond the portals, I wonder?
We’re now in danger of getting entangled in a whole lot of mystical, existentialist philosophy. Yay! But there is a very practical little take away for us in this lovely song (LWS, not DINTE). Wake up out of your false life-dream which is really just living death! Do it now; don’t wait for someone to come along and murder you, hoping you’ll finally wake up just before you snuff it.
Yes, death is certainly not the end of Little Water Song ☺.
November 2020