HERE COMES THE MAN

They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night.
—Job 5:14

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All is darkness. A human form crouches down, hands reach about its bare shoulders, like an animal curled up into the warmth of its own body. As the world turns night upon day, light into shadow, the universe orbits cold against the naked figure of the human. There is nowhere to hide but in the shelter of memory—a cluster of rocks, the hollow body of a dying tree, flowers without light wilting marking—the remains of a forgotten world. Desperate eyes scan the arid flatlands, looking far and long into the great blankness that surrounds them. It sniffs, stares, sees other forms in the gloom, silhouettes break away from the landscape. In the darkness we are never entirely alone, both hunted and haunted, imagination takes over, waiting for the unknown.

The setting for the Skeleton Tree song “Anthrocene” finds Cave lost deep in his own grief and self-doubt. Like the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s metaphor of the abyss, he is confronted by a dark distance that also feels like a close and immediate threat. In this black mirror Nietzsche argued we see something of ourselves—the longer we stare the deeper it looks back into you. So often on Skeleton Tree we see Cave brought low by the weight of grief, now lost in a state of permanent night; he is not simply alone but captive to his loneliness.

The song’s atmosphere begins with the pain of waking, another day, a fresh reminder of all that we have lived through and must yet begin again. Philip Larkin’s poem Aubade speaks to the same fright of the very early morning that could also be nighttime, the deathly hour when no one else is around, so you might be the only human being alive and awake in the world. Cave breaks down his misanthropy to expose the impact of sudden disconnect from the earth. The often intense isolation of grief becomes manifest in the song, where Cave’s self-alienation is turned outward, casting a gloom of wasteland all about him.

Dropping a couple of letters from the term “Anthropocene,” to form the track’s title, Cave denotes a unit of geologic time, the point at which humanity’s presence on earth started to have a significant impact on its ecosystems; when the balance is upended. Cave’s altered term “Anthrocene” suggests the final state of this process: man’s footprint is everywhere and has ground down all other life to the point of extinction, placing humanity at the top of the food chain.

Cave sarcastically intones the rise of the Anthrocene as something of quiet and terrifying magnificence, “behold, behold!” His words echo Jesus’ biblical announcement: “ecce homo”, in a tone dense and foreboding as the darkness that surrounds him. Protected and insulated by our cities and sustained by technology and mass production, we appear to defy scarcity, while breeding poverty among others. The place of man within the earth is not unlike a god, both generous and cruel in uneven measures. On “Anthrocene,” Cave has overturned the dominant dynamic, imagining an almost posthuman world realized by our destructive impulses, perhaps the result of nuclear war or environmental collapse, a point of no return where humanity is yet to become the next great extinction.

As an exploration of emptiness Cave lets the song’s subtle but lush orchestration circle its way around him, slivers of tremolo guitar edging back and forth like a breeze, fuzzy synth and skittish snare drum tapping bloom into washes of cymbals before rolling off the tom-tom drums. Cave picks away at plaintive piano chords struck with both hesitation and a lingering sense of purpose. The loose form of the track lands like improvisations following off-beat rhythms, charged with a constant hum of background static. The Bad Seeds use these dissonant sonics to establish an oppressive tension that isolates Cave’s voice adrift in the ambient hush of gloaming half-light, drawing our attention to his words. Like the fading signals of a dying star haunting long after its last gleaming, Cave’s vocal breaks through the haze a pathway that might guide us back toward the light.

The track “Magneto” is built largely out of synth static and the throb of looming bass slides, where “Anthrocene” uses jazzy skittish snare and tom fills typical of Thomas Wydler’s ability to drum loose “around” a track rather than trying to dictate its flow. This merges into the web of humming harmonies and deft piano chords.

“Anthrocene” becomes Cave’s black hole fever dream, the waking nightmare of a ruined planet that finds him out in the deepest desert of the lunar cycle where reflection becomes reckoning. When we might feel ourselves truly alone, we are no longer forced to bear witness or to be seen under the harsh light of day, our presence extinguished by the night.

Across Skeleton Tree, we find Cave chained to the weight of consciousness, struck by wave after wave of emotion that at once draws him back into memory and thrusts him forward to the bleeding edge of the present. On Ghosteen these feelings build into relentless self-examination, echoes of the past “and its savage undertow” threatening to suck him under. “Anthrocene” exposes Cave held painfully awake to everything, captive to the present looking over his shoulder toward a better past as he tries to deny the inevitability of the future. The downbeat mood of the record finds him frozen in supermarket queues or stuck behind the wheel of his stationary car; he steps outside of himself to observe his own life. Cave is stalled before the crushing inevitability of time passing by, with or without him. In racing thoughts, he wanders across an alien landscape. Under the dawn of the long night, he reflects upon the future of the earth and our place within it, finding himself caught between the dawn of man and post-apocalyptic emptiness.

Cave’s mood of isolation smothers the track, echoing in the form of a nocturne. Drawn from classical music, such as the spare and haunting piano pieces of Chopin and Satie, it is representative of the album’s minimalist approach. Cave’s song speaks to the same mournful tones of the nocturne and its use of fleeting runs of piano or violin that build toward a crescendo that never comes, using the rise and fall of volume, intensity, and attack to create restrained dramatic force. Nocturnes tended to be composed with the theme of night in mind, where the hour meets the mood. The nocturne has its roots in the traditional canonical hour nocturns in the practice of Christian worship, the Liturgy of Hours. Inspired by the Bible Psalm 118/119:62 (“At midnight I rise to praise you”), referring to times of night worship that crossover between sleep, dream, and waking life. The exact hour has changed in contemporary practice, but traditionally the night offices were delivered at midnight or Matins at 2:00 a.m. to mark the quietest hours in which to give praise through the reading of psalms, hymns, and prayer.

Setting “Anthrocene” in the nocturne aftermath, between the day’s ending and the new hope of dawn, Cave edges the ritual practice of night worship further into the darkness. He turns to imagined enemies, half-hidden furies in the long night, a time of personal searching in a sea of doubt. He imagines a nowhere place where our prayers yield no guidance or deliverance from our struggles and we are left to beg the question of a silent God as a figurehead of power and authority ambivalent to our concerns.

Cave offers up a prayer “to the air that we breathe.” This lyric works as a form of worship toward the earth as an ecosystem that sustains all human life, a brutal reality delicately balanced and fleeting as breath itself, but also as a reflection on the immateriality of prayer as an act of conscience. We reach out in the hope that the words passing from our lips might cast our struggle, pain and regrets beyond the concrete world and connect with something greater than ourselves—the spirit of the earth as the prime force of nature, or a higher power such as the Christian God.

In David Bowie’s “Word on a Wing,” he uses the same language of breathless exhaustion, pleading for holy intervention to rescue him from the depths of his cocaine addiction. All he has to offer are his words as an address to the “void of unknowing,” that deeper kind of darkness. It becomes a cry for help that was never meant to be answered, but we say the words all the same.

In the wake of much disaster movie imagery, the Bible offers a representation of God as formless but powerful wind that tears mountains in half, and within it a calmer sound that can only be heard through an open and ready heart: “And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.” In other translations the voice arrives as a soft murmuring, a gentle whisper, these qualities suggesting that we might hear God best in stillness and contemplation, close and near, as when we wake to our own breath, or hear the pulse of our blood in the ear. Suiting the temper of the song and reconnecting with expressions of terror in the earlier Bad Seeds’ sound, “Anthrocene” underlines something of the new minimalist phase in Cave’s music—speaking in full voice but with the lights turned low.

Cave’s central image of the “last man” trapped in a dying world suggests a return to the atmosphere of “The Good Son”. Cave feels a smothering blanket of night shrouding a pale naked body, to emphasize its very separateness from the dark space that encloses it. The night is both familiar and alien, a cold comfort that swallows up distance, bringing our fears to the fore. We withdraw, retreat; but there is nowhere left to go as the very “realness” of the world becomes too much to bear. The horrific intensity of “seeing things as they are,” like a dark mirror echoes  the muted glow from a screen that overwhelms the image it tries to show. In Leila Taylor’s book Darkly, a history of Black lives and the gothic imagination, she uses the images of a door left ajar, the edge of the woods, or stairs leading into a dark basement to present the tipping point between curiosity and uncertainty that marks the edge of the unknown. This is the liminal hinge of strangeness where Cave’s darkest songs are not simply heard, they happen to us. “Anthrocene” draws upon our more primal fears: the shapeless mystery dancing in the dark, a movement we can feel but are unable to define. We go forward into the night in both wonder and terror.

Within the environmental framing of the track the world is cast into a great coldness; like Adam and Eve banished from paradise they finally see themselves as naked, adopting shame and the fig leaf. They feel the sudden chill of spiritual abandonment, being exiled from God’s grace, haunted by a sense of desertion that follows them like a shadow. Cave would return to the lost promise of Eden (as a state of mind) that is regained with Ghosteen.

The ghostly approach of “Anthrocene” evokes the premise of William Golding’s 1955 novel The Inheritors and the dawn of a new age. Set toward the end of the prehistoric era, a time well before our most ancient civilizations, the novel features the lesser creature of Neanderthal man confronted by the new breed of homo sapiens. The “cave man” is forced out of existence by evolution and the survival imperative of the selfish gene, humans driven to thrive and to overcome: veni, vidi, vici. With the rise of the first humans the extremes of their needs rise to the surface. Cave sings with a wounded heart seeking someone to love but also something to set on fire, laying bare the dual aspects of our nature.

Modern man arrives like an army marching over the horizon of history. In their nascent sophistication of using fire, animal skins, and flint tools the humans bring with them a new day and a new faith in technology, after which the world will never be the same again. Cave sings of the human being as he was and the Homo superior he wishes to become, drawn tall, growing into his hubris. This modern species readies itself for a fall. In their coming they bring with them an aggressive new attitude to life, eradicating their forebears as a potential threat, erasing their past. They see themselves as the future.

Following the song’s through line, the people living in contemporary society are set to become “the last man,” accelerating toward their fate as a species of individuals splintered across tribal divides of class, wealth, and status. Where The Inheritors shows the “cave men” in a primal but more benign position of needs and means, the last man now lives beyond them. The neoliberal single-minded vision of culture often polarized between the ideologies of neoliberal Western capitalist democracies or nonsecular authoritarian states is driven by desires for wealth, progress, and individual freedom, so the environment becomes a lesser consideration. This is the new (modern) world Cave started to confront on Push the Sky Away. The globalizing reach of technology has made the world more connected but also shrunk smaller with individuals more atomized from one another. But the world is not only “I,” the universe revolves within itself, not individual or collective human concerns, and with the growth of the family many people begin to speak and think not only of their children’s future on the planet, but of all children’s place on earth.

“Anthrocene” reaches back to the casual nihilism and wider misanthropy of Cave’s earlier music; humanity is an abortion of failed promise. As hinted at on “People Ain’t No Good,” people are not inherently bad or evil, but they are often found wanting where the person who believes in nothing finds nothing in the world worth saving. Perhaps Cave sees humans as the symbiotic parasite that degrades and damages the planet, with our climate change crisis a prime example of neglect and self-inflicted harm to our global ecosystem where the realest threat to the human race is humanity itself: the constant undercurrent of violence and greed, alongside the damage caused to the planet, manifesting as extreme shifts of climate, destroying ecosystems, and diminishing natural resources.

Philosophical theories of environmental ethics place humanity’s role and responsibility for the well-being of the earth at various levels of deep and shallow ecology. The caretaker argument aligns with Christian theology, claiming that the God-given status of the human on earth is to tend the garden, living for and within the natural world to sustain the wider ecosystem. Viewing the planet as a life-form separate from our wants and desires, “Anthrocene” suggests a relatively benign, albeit indifferent, system that supports the possibility of all life and natural flourishing, encouraging us to step back from the indulgence of defeatist nihilism.

Elsewhere Cave’s level head is upended by the gut punch of brute reality, which is always there in the background, threatening to erase the good we are capable of with a sweeping gesture. On the 2004 songs “Breathless” and “There She Goes My Beautiful World”, Cave praises the divinity of nature but also foresees its verdant wonder laid to waste, when all we have left will be “the sad music of humanity.”

Knowing that the brilliance of new growth must give way to decay and when the brilliance of the creative human spirit is sometimes performed at the expense of others and the world around us—writing great words of art while the house we live in burns down around us. This is not necessarily an argument for environmentalism, simply an acknowledgment that the imaginative handprint of the human also demands the impact of its footprint. In the race to outdo one another, to colonize the blank space of the moon for its own sake, to exploit and shape non-human life comes to dominate our worldview, like a false god, we preach both survival and extinction at both ends, where “Anthrocene” reaches forward into the blind future echo.

“Anthrocene” comes from a place of personal grief but becomes a requiem for the human race. In the modern world the most real threat to humanity is humanity itself: we are our own worst enemy. Self-inflicted wounds of pollution, deforestation and climate change all damage the ecosystem and diminish the natural resources we depend upon. In a wasteland that suggests both imaginative and environmental collapse, Cave finds the last man met with knowing isolation. Cave now comes to understand the closing of one age and the beginning of another, after which everything has changed, and nothing will ever be the same again.

Feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell.
—Rilke

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Darker With The Dawn: Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death is out now on hardback, paperback and audiobook from Bloomsbury.

Adam Steiner is a writer, journalist and poetry film-maker. He has written a novel, Politics Of The Asylum, and three books of music criticism on Nine Inch Nails, David Bowie and Nick Cave. He runs a quarterly poetry-film screening Living With Buildings and in 2017 completed the Disappear Here poetry-film project about Coventry Ringroad. He can be found at www.adamsteiner.uk and on IG @AdamSteinerAuthor