Blue in a Baroque World: The Nourishment of Accepting Darkness in Our Lives (Cold Play, "42" Live)

Clear Lake, Utah © Steve Brown 2013

There is something profoundly life-sustaining about accepting sadness.  I don't mean dwelling in it or seeking it out, but in simply recognizing it as an integral part of yourself and a natural result of loss or a discrepancy between the divine soul within and the often banal world without.

Even when you're on the up-swing of fortune, I think it's healthy to touch base with sorrow through art. It reminds us how fragile we are.  It softens the ego, makes us more human.

Optimism has its place and overall it's probably healthier to have a positive outlook on life.  But to me, the forced smiles of those that deny grief are incredibly frightening.  If you feel like you have to see the silver lining behind every cloud that comes your way, you are not fully experiencing life. Below are two poems I wrote during the time I was losing my father to rare disease that attacked his vital organs.  I didn't set out capture darkness and I was actually often happy during this period, but there was frequently a deep sense of loss that welled up when I sat down to write.  I listened to Cold Play's Viva la Vida album then, and I think much of the albums dark, murky tones in songs like "42"  surfaced through my words, especially in "Blue in a Baroque World":

Blue in a Baroque World

Through some worm hole
there is a cobblestone lane
lined with oil lamps
and pocked with rain.

Galaxies of light unfold
in ripples spreading out
in gathered darkness
puddled at the bottom
of a high hill

The ragged man
with the blue glow
hears a violin in his soul
cut a coarse chord
that says I'm so damn tired

of this.  It isn't his loneliness though
he knows as well
as high halls
and crystal chandeliers.

He'd like to pound a harpsichord
until it squeals like a pig.  For 
some reason he can't explain
he knows traces of God
puddle in the mire

at the bottom of the high hill
where a long tide pushes in

to fill the mud flats
obsidian pocked 
by cold hard rain.

© Steve Brown 2010

Hope!

My granddaughter refuses
to look in my casket
at my pale, plastic
flesh,

after my soul has sucked      out.

She sits in the corner on the floor
to the dismay of her mother,
headphones on, tuned out
from the horseshit

they dream up to make me
their vision.

She is totally tuned in
to a song like camphor,
sees a steep hill where wind
blows ferns between
tall trees that seem
to climb out of the sea
churning below,
green.

© Steve Brown 2010