Into My Arms

On gratitude, intervention, and when times are good.

Nick Cave doesn’t believe in an interventionist god, and neither do I.

Looking at ancient art, one could be tempted to categorize the depictions smeared on the cave wall or delicately imprinted on ceramics. Historical or religious. Cave paintings, rock drawings, and other primitive art tend to show hunting scenes or illustrations of the flora and fauna of their surroundings.

A few millennia later, a more refined expression appears: geometric patterns, storytelling, and iconography — the stuff of a prospering, growing society. When the wild boar is over the fire, the children are safe, and the threat from the neighboring tribe has been extinguished, ancient man could then engage in the frivolity of religion and speculation.

As a descendant of these men and women, it would be wrong (and has been so) to treat their understanding of the world and their spiritual inclinations with arrogance. For the better part of my youth, that’s what I did, castigating any of my predecessor’s belief in the divine is irrational. Sky-god dumb, bringing down a wooly mammoth good.

I realize I extended the judgement to the 21st century. Despite dedicating all of my adult life to the arts, I never confused it with the seriousness of war or agriculture. Because art is something you do when things are good, when the dam is holding and when the moon is full.

The way you raise a child tells the truth about what you believe.

Our little girl, not yet three, has been constantly surrounded by the frivolity of photography, poetry, music, and painting. A print of Matisse’s La Gerbe hangs in her bedroom, and Dance is in our kitchen. I read Tolstoy to her mother while she was pregnant, and for several months after she was born, I would read to them both as they rocked in the corner of her room.

My wife has sung her Mr. Tambourine Man every day of her life, I’m sure. Our daughter’s burgeoning taste in music speaks to her parents’ pretension. For better or worse, she isn’t familiar with Baby Shark, the Wiggles, or Frozen. She requests Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan by name but prefers the Rolling Thunder Revue Dylan record over his studio albums — or as she calls it, ‘the white one.’

To balance out how nauseating we must sound as parents, for every night the past month, we’ve danced to ABBA in our living room. Is that better?

I don’t think it’s pretense. I don’t think it’s indulgent. I don’t think it’s two opposing categories; I think it’s about survival.

The first evidence of a composition is the ‘Hurrian Hymn No. 6’, which dates back to 1400 BC, but the earliest musical instruments we’ve discovered are as much as 40,000 years old. The musical tradition in humanity is no trivial exercise, and singing to our creator isn’t either. It’s the tradition of King David, the fugues of Bach, and the songs of Paul Simon. The universe hums in the key of C.

I used to sing of it but had no clue what I meant, but I heard Rick Rubin say that all art is an offering to God, which I think is right. It’s a stab at what we think is true, a token of our gratitude; a new ark and personal tabernacle. My work has improved since I realized it wasn’t something I wanted but what I had to do.

It’s a tool to survive, to express yourself, and to commiserate and rejoice with our fellow man.

Coincidence and its trappings of randomness became less convincing after I met my wife; further still after our daughter was born. How could a love so pure have been derived from a game of numbers? Yet, reluctance to relent to egotism and my hardwired logic make it that much harder to accept my circumstance as hand-selected.

Maybe we’re too myopic in our conception of intervention. It’s possible that the fact that any of this is here at all is evidence of intervention and demands a life of servitude.

And when I drive home with my wife in the February rain, and the little voice of our daughter sings the words she knows to Cave’s ‘Into My Arms,’ I think I might be onto something. I’m grateful for the gift I’ve been given.

I don’t believe in an interventionist God
But I know, darling, that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him
Not to intervene when it came to you
Not to touch a hair on your head
To leave you as you are
And if He felt He had to direct you
Then direct you into my arms

Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms

To a better next week,

Cheers,

~FDA