A man had sold the world, and made it uninhabitable. A capitalist, a man with neither faith nor law, an unfeeling man. Who was that man? All of humanity, as if Man’s destiny was to sell the world instead of learning to enjoy it, to take delight in its riches; without learning how to share or preserve it for those who came after. Kurt Cobain was born damaged. Kurt Cobain was born with a piece missing, and this missing piece became an extension of his self. The impossibility of living – what could be more romantic, or more tragic? Kurt Cobain had sought to build a home for himself in an inhospitable world, yet he had built a dream that was comforting, up to a point. This place he would call ‘Nirvana.’ Nirvana was extinction, the end, the apocalypse of the established order. It was supreme liberation; the path toward the divine, toward the next world. It was both exodus and return to this world of sell-outs. Nirvana was also a way of evading the artificial paradise of drugs. Losing your way to discover the joy of life, and forgetting for an instant the suffering of being born. Dreaming, over and over, in song and in the music of his guitar.
Young people heard their experience reflected in his songs. Disenchanted youth, knocked back by the world and the loss of direction. Kurt Cobain was like Rimbaud, the cursed poet of an entire generation. He had given a voice to the teen spirit of those united in disenchantment.
“Load up on guns, bring your friends
It's fun to lose and to pretend”
Kurt Cobain was not alone; the youth of America were with him, along with his many imaginary friends. Did any of them really exist? They were ghosts of love, but not love. They were eyes of love, but not love. There had been Courtney Love, love in name only. But so alone he’d felt. She was the queen of his “blooming love”, the one he saw when he closed his eyes and who disappeared suddenly into the black cloud of the sell-out world. They took drugs together, and held hands so they could breathe. They held hands to keep their head above the water. But the waves were cold, and tall, insurmountable. But behind them perhaps, if you bent your ear, you would hear a siren song – like the cry of a humpback whale, the bright, shapeless music of Nirvana.
Kurt Cobain was found dead on 8 April 1994. He had shot himself in the head; an act of extreme violence. Who would blow their own brains out? He had shut off the flourishing of his thought, shut off the quiet, broken music. He had shut off the pain. An entire generation wept as he did so. “Better to burn out than fade away!” he’d explained in his suicide note.
“I laughed and shook his hand,
And made my way back home
I searched for form and land
For years and years I roamed
I gazed a gazeless stare
At all the millions here
I must have died aloneA long, long time ago
Who knows? Not me I never lost control
You're face to face
With the Man who Sold the World.”
Alan Alfredo Geday
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