Love the World; Rock Out; Do Some Shit. Your choice…

Stimulus:


There She Goes, My Beautiful World
Nick Cave, 2004

The wintergreen, the juniper
The cornflower and the chicory
All the words you said to me
Still vibrating in the air
The elm, the ash and the linden tree
The dark and deep, enchanted sea
The trembling moon and the stars unfurled
There she goes, my beautiful worldThere she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes againJohn Wilmot penned his poetry
Riddled with the pox
Nabokov wrote on index cards,
At a lectern, in his socks
St. John of the Cross did his best stuff
Imprisoned in a box
And JohnnyThunders was half alive
When he wrote Chinese RocksWell, me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears
Me, I'm lying here, with nothing in my ears
Me, I'm lying here, for what seems years
I'm just lying on my bed with nothing in my headSend that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to meThere she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes againKarl Marx squeezed his carbuncles
While writing Das Kapital
And Gaugin, he buggered off, man
And went all tropical
While Philip Larkin stuck it out
In a library in Hull
And Dylan Thomas died drunk in
St. Vincent's hospitalI will kneel at your feet
I will lie at your door
I will rock you to sleep
I will roll on the floor
And I'll ask for nothing
Nothing in this life
I'll ask for nothing
Give me ever-lasting lifeI just want to move the world
I just want to move the world
I just want to move the world
I just want to moveThere she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes againSo if you got a trumpet, get on your feet,
Brother, and blow it
If you've got a field, that don't yield,
Well get up and hoe it
I look at you and you look at me and
Deep in our hearts know it
That you weren't much of a muse,
But then I weren't much of a poetI will be your slave
I will peel you grapes
Up on your pedestal
With your ivory and apes
With your book of ideas
With your alchemy
Oh come on
Send that stuff on down to meSend that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send that stuff on down to me
Send it all around the world
'Cause here she comes, my beautiful girlThere she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes, my beautiful world
There she goes again

Some comments (the first by the author himself)

• There’s also the song about inspiration – or the lack of it – from that same record, ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’, which begins with a list of flowers. I’d found a wonderful little book, an illustrated Victorian dictionary of flowers. I loved the pictures and the names of the flowers; listing them became a kind of launch pad for the song. I was struggling that day with the whole writing thing and the way into this song was to pick up the little book and start naming flowers.
  
  
• Yet, if the touchstones of 'great' poetry and art are humorously deflated on this record, they are also coveted on 'there She Goes, My beautiful World'...
  
  
• Nobody I can think of has ever leant on the world of literature quite as frequently, frankly, and fastidiously as Nick Cave. … ‘There She Goes My Beautiful World’ expresses the fact that hardship is ever-present but so is beauty, and in fact, it is from this hardship that beauty can spring forth like the Pox riddled poetry of Willmot.
  
  
• “There She Goes, My Beautiful World” can be broken down to three words: Do some shit.

• It’s ironic that a song about the numbness of writer’s block would, in turn, produce one of Nick Cave’s most well-rounded tunes.
  
  
• In ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World’, for example, he offers up his personal canon of great artists, writers from the seventeenth-century libertine Rochester to the New York Dolls, from political theorist Karl Marx to the poet Philip Larkin, spiked with similarly audacious and hilarious rhymes – ‘blow it’ / ‘hoe it’ / ‘know it’ / ‘poet’.
  
  
• All of them, he reminds us, were merely suffering mortals, and the wellspring of creative potential those fortunate icons accessed can and should be accessed in every person.