Pretty Eyes
On art, grief, and remembering David Berman.
When I describe and evaluate art, particularly music, I do so on a spectrum between two poles: art that transcends the normal, and art that makes the normal feel transcendent. To get a sense for the former, seek out Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew, GY!BE’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven, Radiohead’s Kid A, or My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless; these are albums that twist, stretch, invert, and rupture our conceptions of music. They are oceanic and visionary. They transcend the normal by sweeping us off our feet and bringing us back down exhilarated. If they represent one pole on a spectrum, their point of contrast is music that takes up the less glorious task of making the normal feel transcendent. This, to me, is the legacy of David Berman.
David Berman did not make mind-blowing music. He made simple, sometimes sparse, and often sloppy alt-rock that tread similar sonic territory to his friends in Pavement and his Drag City labelmates Will Oldham and Bill Callahan. Not that his music as the core member of Silver Jews and Purple Mountains wasn’t beautiful; it often was. But Berman’s power lay in his poetry. To borrow Audre Lorde’s language, Berman was capable of “carv[ing] from the rock experiences of our daily lives” to “give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” Put another way, he breathed life through his language into what we deeply feel but struggle to express. He gave us words to describe the fixtures of daily reality: our relationships, families, landscapes and cities, fears and follies and neuroses. In doing so, he left us with a thousand endlessly quotable couplets and verses that thoroughly and brilliantly capture our lived experiences. Here are just a few of the many examples:
Berman on love: “He almost walked into a wall / Oh, man, she was a sight to see / And at the party down the hall / He said, ‘you are the highest apple in the tree.’ ”
Berman on longing: “All houses dream in blueprints / Our houses dream so hard / Outside you can see my shoe prints / I’ve been dreaming in your yard.”
Berman on loss: “I asked the painter why the roads are colored black / He said, ‘Steve, it’s because people leave / And no highway will bring them back.’”
Some of Berman’s writing is reducible to themes like those above. Much of his writing, though, is less precise. To me, it is about the feelings he provoked by describing a situation in such a fresh, hilarious, heartbreaking way that you almost felt as if you lived it yourself. In “Black and Brown Blues”, he wrote: “Well the water looks like jewelry / When it’s coming out the spout / Nothing could make me feel better / Than a wet kiss on the mouth.” Later in the same song, he goes on to say: “When I go downtown / I always wear a corduroy suit / Because it’s made of a hundred gutters / That the rain can run right through.” In his hands, the most mundane and absurd items, concepts, and questions were deep wellsprings for wit and anguish. The landscape of David Berman’s writing is littered with car key skylines, bathroom graffiti, suffering jukeboxes, stars, and smokey pick-up bars, all rendered meaningful. Who else dared to invent a character, as Berman did in his acclaimed poetry collection Actual Air, who says “ ‘all water is classic water’ and shyly turn[s] her face away”?
I consider myself fortunate not to have experienced much grief in the past. I’ve mourned the death of two grandparents and other extended family members, but I haven’t faced the agony of losing a parent, partner, or friend. This is a blessing; yet it places me in the funny position of grieving most strongly in life for a man I never met. For the last year since David Berman’s death, I’ve cycled through the tried-and-true stages of grief — refusing to believe he could be gone; angry at the pain that drove him to his death; wishing I had somehow known and preempted his fate; devastated, struggling to listen to his music yet wanting only to listen to his music; and slowly accepting the reality of the situation and the need to find some semblance of meaning from it. In “Pretty Eyes”, Berman wrote: “Final words are so hard to devise / I promise that I’ll always remember your pretty eyes”. Finality in any form is hard to devise and hard to accept; no less so the loss of one of music’s greatest songwriters. But I’ll always remember Berman for the way he used music to make me and so many others feel seen — that is, for his pretty eyes.
I believe David Berman knew the impact and the legacy of his craft. On Purple Mountains, the album he put out a month before taking his life, this is what he tells us about songs: “Songs build little rooms in time / And housed within the song’s design / Is the ghost the host has left behind / To greet and sweep the guest inside / Stoke the fire and sing his lines.” As I grieve, this verse gives me hope: even as he decided his life was no longer worth living, Berman knew that his writing would build space for those of us who sought it out, to find those quiet, joyful moments in which the normal seems to transcend itself.
