CARNAGE -Nick Cave & Warren Ellis

Hand of God

So after Nick Cave was passed a letter that discusses accessing the potential of forever as one's personal life goal, he puts out this song. Because I have edited out everything explanatory, it's a little difficult to isolate these concepts in the edited letter. So pretty much the best I can say is that the passage on page 6 is about giving up on the potential of eternity and not wanting it. 

Also I removed the analogy of the river/universal unconscious sea and what specifically was going on with that in the recent past, which is what this song is about. But I made three references to it in the song analysis Nick Cave first received on October 27th, 2019. It makes mention under the song explanations for GHOSTEEN's "Night Raid", "Leviathan", and "Ghosteen". It is also omnipresent in the book, as it is the mechanism for the plot's premise. The explanation that specifically alludes to the river analogy is about "Bright Horses", because when I first arrived at the definition, the song that caused it all was alluding to a river, namely "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses". This is the advent of the definition in the book. Under "Bright Horses" this is referenced by page number in the iBook.

So, to reiterate, the universal unconscious sea/river is the human universal unconscious, a sea of unconscious connection of arch-types and symbolism that connects all of humankind. The plot idea was whether actual human connection could arise out of the universal unconscious sea, or had already potentially begun? This song is about going into that confluence to witness the appearance of God (in terms of being an active, universally orchestrating inspirational force), which is what the letter relates happening on an interior level. After this letter was sent to Nick, because as it so happens L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S describes the appearance of God in the self-same context the letter describes (so the letter had to be sent before its release), Nick Cave and Warren Ellis released this song three months later.

What affirms God's appearance is transcendent transmission of this event through the universal unconscious. It happens unconsciously, it is inspired. Going to the center of the river is meeting the event where it took place, which is exactly what this song actually does. Being a child on the bridge is to be inspired, i.e., engaged in active interaction with the river. The song is also in the first person describing Cave's immersion in his inspriation.

"You're a body of water flowing across the bed" - the sea is feminine, the sky is masculine. It was the woman who was defined and arose from the u.u. sea. The book delineates this and the woman is named for such as well. That it happens on a hotel bed is an allusion casting back to "Night Raid" on GHOSTEEN, with starts with a picture of baby Jesus on the wall. 

Old Time

We get the birth of the child with whom appears a Sun that hearkens back to the Bible, a sun that appears behind the woman's head, who is the object of love, a woman symbolized by the "watery moon" (her symbol in the book since 1991, in conjunction with appearing inside the universal unconscious sea). I don't think I need to specify how the letter elucidates this but September 17th/18th would be the day specifically. This is a reiterated allusion with "Carnage", "the sun a barefoot child with fire in his hair", witnessed appearing from a driving car.

"Just like old times darling, I'm not coming back this time" -you will know what this means if you read.

Rejoining by getting back into the car is an analogy that casts back as far as when this happened twenty-one years ago in the lyrics. The last time this encounter happened and was elucidated in the feedback, (which resulted in the woman literally surfacing out of the u.u. sea in terms of proving it to one witness), the allusion to the near future encounter was getting picked up by the man this was supposed to meet in his car. This was recaptured on GHOSTEEN with "Waiting for You", so I  referenced it analysing that album.

So if a songwriter were integrating the situation as presented in terms of the present, they'd do so creatively by songwriting about being in the car together. It's an analogy that represents being back in conjunction. It is also the couple analogy on GHOSTEEN, with the pairing of "Waiting for You" and "Night Raid" (with "Night Raid" being consummation in a hotel room), also "Leviathan", which could easily be the same moment. Happening in a forest is the step back into the primeval (along with casting back to biblical times), but in terms of the song explanation Nick Cave received and where this began with the music feedback in time (1991), it is also a literal allusion, as that is where the protagonist lived when this was beginning, in the middle of a protest to save virgin temperate coastal rainforest. (This is also explained in the song analysis Nick Cave received for GHOSTEEN, because the "couple in the forest" theme is a revisitation from that album, with "Sun Forest" and "Fireflies". So the forest signified as the place where the sun/son appears was conferred by song title on the former album, now explicated.) "Old Time" is about consummation in the present, as is the letter, after he describes being lost in the "old time" which is equated with the Bible, which is what the letter gave him. On CARNAGE, Nick Cave has deliberately merged these two themes so they reflect the same context, which was how they were in my view/song analysis for GHOSTEEN to begin with. The song also uses winter/cold allusions to convey a dakr past in which the woman was formerly lost, but still followed. The appearance of the sun/son is in conjunction with the woman (after another primeval appearance in the forest): 

And a hild is born upon this trembling earth, displays each day across the hallucination of your hair

A strip of ordinary sun, a biblical sun, a colonial sun, an enlightened sun, the same sun

Made always glorious at your head

"Just like the old times, wherever you are darling I'm not far behind" - With Nick Cave the lyrical linking incidence casts back a very long time, possible over thirty years, but when it merged significantly was 1994 with three tracks. The album before that, Nick Cave announced his capture. With the delivery of the book on October 27th, 2019, Nick Cave was introduced to this history for the first time, with spiefic mention of the Chatper "October" starting on p. 902. "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" cast back to the first album of Nick's I ever purchased (his cover anthology).

Carnage

The first verse of the chicken slaughter is a memory of Nick's as a child. The balcony allusion is significant, but will be explained later with that particular song. (What do you do on the balcony? Read a Catholic southern female writer.) The train personification will be explained with this one. Meeting "the other [male] side" got the analogy of getting picked up in a car in the conjunction/encounter with WPC (still happening), whereas meeting Bono conjuncted with the train analogy. Both were patterns in the music feedback. The song with the train's arrival, "Bright Horses", has the history of the train as it appeared in the music feedback. "Bright Horses' has it bringing "my baby" "back", which was what the album actually did. Here the train is the train of love, the insurmountable unstoppable background noise which appears during the downturn, rain equating with tears/unhappiness. Love overwhelms the rain to the point of incendental insignificance. 

The second verse brings back the couple in the car analogy driving through the forest, with the appearance of the child equated with the appearance of an exploding sun that has to do with the woman once more (as in the song prior), an appearance which is only because of love. The appearance of the sun child is because of the woman. 

 White Elephant

This song was about political curencies, so thankfully I get to leave it alone. It was written at the onset of the pandemic. My position on racism is clear. This was coincidental and happened months later in October. 

I think the song has arch-typical transcendence of the currencies and becomes about the broader cry for justice to be visited, requisitioned of the pain of the earth/creation/the exploited feminine arising with sea symbolism as wrath personified (frozen rage -it's not the love goddess this time), which demands the appearance of the kingdom of heaven/God, and then lifts up to heaven with the last reprises connoting rapture, i.e., a collective lifting up into heaven of the collective group awareness that is self-aware, i.e., those who have transcended by attaining a transcendent consciousness. The currencies are the frieze in which this takes place. 

 Albuquerque

The first verse in this song recalls an early childhood memory of Susie's, Nick Cave's wife. It is about the enforced solitude of the Covid lockdown, so again, it gets left to itself being about itself.  

Lavender Fields

Nick Cave has related how "Lavender Fields" plopped into his lap. It harks back to track VI: Litany of Fragmentation on L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S., "atoms a lavender sky". As it so happened, one of the few lyric quotes I made in the full letter was the "purple" line in David Bowie's "Atomica". The analysis of the track on L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S. (fortunately in this context), given its nature is so unusual, relies not so much on what was divulged in the letter but what transpires in the iBook. Bowie's "purple" was in the chorus of a song that alluded to existing in a framework of the impossible. Swimming in a covered up pool was an allusion to a submerged existence in the universal unconscious that was concealed and underwater.

It makes sense to see "lavender' as a deliberate linking allusion between the two songs. The first is sung by the feminine in L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S.. The lavender fields in "Lavender Fields" reach up and form the sky, whereas the woman singing in L.I.T.A.N.I.E.S. is the cause of the lavender sky; -it is the signified irregular feature in the heavens, features that are formed by parts of her being/body. So it would make sense if the song "Lavender Fields" was a continuation of her path and her road. As such, it continues to make sense, because the reason her features form the sky (her blood sprays the sunrise) is because she is dismembered in terms of her features being objectified by the songwriters in the universal feedback loop. They described her back to her. And back when it began there were many songwriters, many pens, who have now faded from view. The road is singular in the sense that she's the only individual on the planet that this has ever happened to, which makes her singularly alone in the world by being unable to communicate it. "Lavender Fields" broadens this, the colour becomes code for common identity: we don't ask, we walk together through the lavender aware of the kingdom. We have the reprise of the appearance of the kingdom in the sky for the third time on this album...which Cave now says is no big deal, as in the words are not to be given weight of meaning or attention, the elevation is due to the music.

Shattered Ground

This one I'm leaving alone because it is about the wife first and the arch-typical second. The moon is the symbol of the feminine in the arch-typical context and has been since the beginning. The couple have the moon in their eyes because the first iteration of the Divine in this context was symbolized by the moon and an iteration of the Divine feminine. What elevates this song past simply the interpersonal is that it reprises the analogy of the car with the woman now packing and leaving, as if the passage of the album itself is an entity unto itself that is visited and leaves with a repeated good-bye, which is reinforced by "the moon is a girl with the sun in her eyes" being a double allusion harking back to earlier on the album, the esoteric appearance of the Son/Sun in "Old Time" and "Carnage" in the self same context (the couple driving through the forest), an appearance which is explicitly due to the woman in the car in "Carnage". Also the description of shattering without her links indirectly to hers in the "Litany of Fragmentation", when the masculine was absent for her.

Balcony Man 

This continues the analogy of the road tripping couple at a hotel stop (point of place of consummation on GHOSTEEN with "Night Raid"), with the appearance of a meat bag human with dancing shoes, lap dancing ones at that. So I'll refer you to p. 20 (Saturday September 19th) and the third paragraph on p. 25. and the third on p. 41. Dancing had a lot to do with it (when it's not in bed), and yes, Nick Cave was sent this well before this song was released. (This was lovely in conjunction with this album as well.) Again this appearance of the living dead meat sack is equated with the morning and the rise of the sun. 

Why balcony man? When I wrote the explanatory letter(s) to Nick on RedHandFiles I gave page references. I gave the page and Chapter for what happened with Nick Cave's The Boatman's Call ("October", p. 902) which was when he resurrected me involuntarily the first time, thanks to the nature of the conversion to Christ he depicted with that album. (I also mentioned the beginning with Let Love In.) I explained how the two were linked for me (what happened with GHOSTEEN was very similar to what happened with the former album), which meant I regarded the Ghosteen and Christ as one and the same. 

I spent a little too much time in the book explaining how this song with the scene on the balcony had fused in my mind with this song thanks to the way it latched directly into my subconscious, where the only linking substance was a dream I'd had, where victory took place with me on a balcony next to church bell, where the saving magic was song (p. 910-14). It took writing the book to figure out exactly what had happened with that and how it had so singularly lurched me back awake. When Nick Cave's acting as the resurrection, he's acting as the balcony man. (And if you read that Chapter and recognize what his thread/chain of inspiration was designed to do in time and what it was releasing me from, you'd realize that this is fully literal.) It's a veiled allusion to the first time this happened and what it really means, because that is where he is in the first person in the song "Where Do We Go But Nowhere". He's reprised that juxtaposition here in the context of being back with his lover, instead of her being permanently lost, but what "Balcony Man" is meant to convey is that the "Balcony Man" isn't really him, but someone compelled into flesh ("Fred"), conferring a transcendent morning. "And what doesn't kill you just makes you crazier" is an acknowledgment of the interior questioning that goes on in producing the writ of what happened honestly, the real fear.