catapult magazine

by Bright Eyes is incredible, too. Or try “Lifted, or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground.”

He came to Columbus a few weeks ago… wonderful performance.

I guess his is a depressing worldview, but he is so amazing at expressing it, it is impossible not to gasp at the sheer beauty of this hopelessness. Artistry.

i have to agree with you, this is an incredible cd from a gifted artist. however, is hoeplessness beautiful in any context? it seems to me that well articulated hopelessness may make for a wonderful piece of music but is it maybe going too far to suggest that hopelessness is beautiful?

any thoughts?

Perhaps hopelessness is not beautiful. But what is hopelessness? People try to construct meaning of some sort even when they believe they have no hope, and Conor Oberst is no exception. If hopelessness is seeing no reason to live, then Conor is not hopeless; rather, he is mad to live and sees hope in love, friendship, and life.

I’m not sure that anyone is truly hopeless. Even if one killls oneself, there is still the hope of avoiding future pain… it all depends on what we hope for. Perhaps the very concept is meaningless.

I don’t know. What do you think?

if we’re still talking about bright eyes then i think you’re right. mr. oberst seems to possess and inconsistent hopelessness. i think you are right with what you point out about where he finds meaning in life. in this way i suppose he is something of an existentialist but maybe that is categorizing him a bit too much. maybe part of his goal is simply to refuse to be categorized.

if we are talking about humanity in general i think people can be without hope. however, i suppose there are varying levels of hopelessness which then begs the question what does it look like to be truly hopeless?

not only are there varying levels of hopelessness, the mathematician Georg Cantor demonstrated that there are varying levels of infinity

While studying a problem in analysis, he had dug deeply into its “foundations,” especially sets and infinite sets. What he found flabbergasted him so much that he wrote to a friend: “I see it but I don’t believe it.”. In a series of papers from 1874 to 1897, he was able to prove among other things that the set of integers had an equal number of members as the set of even numbers, squares, cubes, and roots to equations; that the number of points in a line segment is equal to the number of points in an infinite line, a plane and all mathematical space; and that the number of transcendental numbers, values such as pi that can never be the solution to any algebraic equation, were much larger than the number of integers. Interestingly, the Jesuits also used his theory to “prove” the existence of God and the Holy Trinity. However, Cantor, who was also an excellent theologian, quickly distanced himself away from such “proofs.”

which begs the question: which infinite abyss are you suggesting we have fun exploring?

Honk if you love non-sequitirs.

On a more serious note, true hopelessness is the absolute negation of being, which is to me a good description of damnation. Even the bleakest, most Beckettian, most existentially absurdist play/book/film/song contains a glimmer of hopefulness, because the very act of creation is fundamentally an act of hope, no matter how dark the subject-matter. I don’t think we ever experience true hopelessness (fortunately) in life, but I think a lot of what we see comes close. Some people cut themselves as a relief from the numbness they feel, just to remind themselves that they CAN feel. That comes close. Maybe it would be worse if they simply accepted the numbness, but we seem to have a pretty powerful built-in need to feel, to resist damnation in spite of everything, like an animal that will chew off a leg to get out of a trap. Even suicide, horrible as it is, is sometimes understood as a need to assert control, to act as an individual, to make a choice, even if it is so clearly the wrong choice.

not that i don’t find this discussion on hopelessness interesting but let’s get back to bright eyes for a minute. any thoughts on digital ash? how do y’all think it stacks up next to wide awake?

Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, in my opinion, superior to I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning. As an album it is more cohesive and parts remind me of the greatness of Lifted.

Granted, there are a number of fine songs on Wide Awake – perhaps the individual songs themselves are better – but in toto Digital Ash is my favorite.

Any indie-snobs out there may disagree with me, of course.

I just have to say that I recently heard “I’m Wide Awake” for the first time and I am amazed at its goodness. The story that begins “At The Bottom of Everything” kind of knocked my socks off. I don’t see, however, this hopelessness that has been discussed. Is there a particular chord progession or specific bits of lyrics that you guys find hopeless? I hear poetry. Searching, maybe. No hopelessness though.

Haven’t heard Digital Ash yet.