Sometimes some truths are too severe to live on the page, or in a song, or in a heart. Hence, metaphor can create a merciful sense of distance from the cruel idea, or the unspeakable truth, and allow it to exist within us as a kind of poetic radiance, as a work of art.
Nick Cave, Red Hand Files, 2022
… trying to be normal with the children & concentrate on their needs (is desperately hard)—they are quite relaxed & are only waiting it seems, for me to be the same.
Christine to her sister Marian, 1969
From spring through to autumn, between about 3.30 and 4.30 in the afternoon, a small, weather-beaten greenhouse, polycarbonate walls patched with tape, glows with a golden light, translucent and diffuse, holding leaf, stem…