Goodbye, David: A Blue Arrangement
Eric Benick remembering poet and singer-songwriter David Berman, of Silver Jews and Purple Mountains, with a truth that’s truer over time.
I walked to work this morning in the rain listening to Tanglewood Numbers. I never once thought about calling a ride, even as the drops grew from drizzle to fat, weeping carpets of water. It felt appropriate — a shitty, self-fulfilling path of minor inconvenience. But I was set — set to relish my soggy dejection upon hearing David deliver the refrain “Let’s not kid ourselves, it gets really, really bad.” A sentiment that felt close and true. Truer than before. Truer than usual. Truest, perhaps, in the present, where the worst is right before us, leering, loitering, challenging us to stay. I sat under the awning of a Persian deli for a few minutes to pull myself together, to think about David, his work of humors and horrors. To stay.
I heard American Water for the first time when I was sixteen — likely in my mother’s condo in suburban Nashville. Those first, oft-referenced, and, for many, inaugural lyrics, “In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection.” David’s delivery so dry it almost stung like paint thinner. I had no idea how to approach what he was doing. His strange method of taking the absurd and delivering it flat. The undulant croons between sincerity and satire. The seemingly innocuous indie-alt-country-pop-rock laying a tarp for the drippage of lyrics like “can you summon honey from a telephone?” and “people gotta synchronize to animal time” and “the NASCAR blurred into porn” and “it is autumn and my camouflage is dying” and then — and also — and still. In many ways, what David did with Silver Jews was introduce me to poetry. Or rather to the strange, untenable, idiosyncratic mode of art that simply confused me and pushed me further, to welcoming ununderstanding.
David’s lyrics are as vulnerable as they are estranged. The uncanny distortion of a viewer too close to its subject. A talent of rendering intimate, interior worlds not unlike Paul Celan or Clarice Lispector, but with a wild, infectious humor. “I’m drunk on a couch in Nashville,” he sings in Bright Flight’s “Horseleg Swastikas,” “in a duplex near the reservoir. And every single thought is like a punch in the face. I’m like a rabbit freezing on a star.” There is no moment of performative distance. David’s work swallows the listener and turbines them into the same mess of color, philosophy, hallucination, and raw experience, leaving the full amount of the world around nothing more than a swirl of particles, both transfixing and meaningless. These are the markings of Berman’s voice. The micro and the macro, the humorous and the severe, the sublime and the asinine all soaked in barroom dialectic — like if Hieronymous Bosch grew up in the suburbs of Virginia.
I can only fail at describing David’s work because it eludes me. It is the reason I return. The reason I am taken and changed with each encounter. I grasp at it but not quickly enough. I ruminate but lack point of view. I am, perhaps, too complacent with a strange couplet and not wise or ardent enough to sit alone with his terror. Or if, by chance, I glimpse it, it is only as apparition. A terror I can sublimate. A terror that, perhaps by David’s own design, sublimates itself.
And so here I am, drinking cheap Canadian beer and crying openly into a Google Doc as I try to process what an appropriate goodbye to a stranger looks like. A goodbye that David seemed to already know about. A goodbye he intimated long before any of us was the wiser. A goodbye that danced half-broken, half-exultant in the neon chorus of “All My Happiness is Gone.” A goodbye that only he could truly give. And so I’m left with nothing more than cheap, emotional platitude — fucking parsed-out because David already did the work, already said what was worth saying, already held the jewels and horrors so close to our eyes that we burned like some big (ironically sepia) albatross. And so there’s nothing else. Nothing worth much more. I’m stuck at a place of closure and so, once again, I fail and settle. There is only Fuck. And Thank you, David. And Goodbye. And to sit with it and mean it and know it changes nothing and still care.
Eric Tyler Benick is the author of the chapbook, The George Oppen Memorial BBQ (The Operating System, 2019), as well as co-founder and editor at Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of chapbooks. His poems have appeared in The Vassar Review, No, Dear, Graviton, Reality Beach, decomP, Souvenir, Fruita Pulp, Fog Machine, and elsewhere. He lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
