The Offerings of Art to The Human Condition

“A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity…” – Søren Kierkegaard, (The Sickness unto Death)

In December of 2017, I spent a Christmas with my grandparents in the windy, northern city of Devonport, Tasmania. A despondent high school graduate with little grasp of myself, and even less of who or what I was to become, I found myself on the precipice of my artistic realisation. Entering my young life’s eclipse, I was distracted by disappointing school results and a common displacement with the world and my place in it. Too distracted to notice that the first real and everlasting connection to art was being made within me, and one that would assert itself as a significant and shaping piece in the puzzle of my identity. In that summer of 2017, and in the weeks following that year’s ARIA awards night, one band and one album remained in the settling sediment of the Australian music scene discourse. Gang of Youths and their second full-length offering, the triumphant odyssey that is Go Farther in Lightness, was wreaking pandemonium and making its way across the headlines of the country. Unsurprisingly, this album would make its way to me, fusing itself into my consciousness and later my heart wherein it would reside eternally. I remember sitting on the rocky shores of the Mersey River in Devonport when I pressed play on “Go Farther”. What I didn’t know was that I was pressing play on a piece of music that would change the way I view and value art and life itself.

When I consider what my favourite pieces of art have in common, it is difficult to find a universal theme or idea but one that I find increasingly present in albums and novels that I love, is an inquest into what it is to be human. If nothing else, Go Farther in Lightness is an engulfing album, traversing the perpetual struggle of the very miracle that is the human condition. Through the lived experiences of lead singer Dave Le’aupepe, the album paints a visceral picture of a man’s struggle with loss, absence of identity and an ever-intensifying grapple with faith and God. Although these themes were not what my 17-year-old self was living, I immediately fell in love with this album and to this day it sits at the summit of the mountain of music in my life. Unlike the album’s conceiver and protagonist, I did not, and do not, consume it in piety. In my secular life nothing is self-evident, I feel obliged to verify feelings and uncertainties through lived experiences rather than through a guide in, or connection to, God. It is through this obligation that I feel my compulsion to this record is born. The French philosopher and author Albert Camus, who’s work reveals itself repeatedly across the album, once wrote:

“In order to speak about all and to all, one must speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The seas, rains, necessity and desire, the struggle against death- these are the things that unite us all. We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suffer together. Dreams change from individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all.”

Go Farther in Lightness is an ode to the human condition and a celebration of the trials and tribulations that we all live and share.

Scattered across the record are references to the philosophical works of revered and controversial writers such as Camus, Kierkegaard and Nietzche to name a few. Incidentally these are all writers I have come to explore, in admiration and abhorrence, in recent years. This has fostered a reignition of my love for the album and within that, a further solidification as to why this album was so instantly redeemable to my budding identity. The record serves as a resolution to the youthful preconceptions of my being. Go Farther in Lightness presented to me a branch of my identity that was unknowingly already nestled within.

Similarly, the transportive power of music is something I have long adored and will perpetually seek. With each song, a place and time somewhere within me waiting to be relived, and a former self that I like to believe will exist there forever. This album, perhaps more than any other, incessantly invokes memory and revives my former selves. I know when I hear these songs that in some dim past, whether in life or in revery, I had heard their tale before. A definitive cry in the present age, Go Farther set a benchmark in me, for music to come and music that has been.

I found myself compelled to write this piece as I have returned to the windy northern shores of Tasmania for the first time since that fateful summer in 2017. While the last trip was one of familial gratitude and joy, the recent passing of my grandfather has beckoned my return, and within it a return to Go Farther in Lightness. Navigating grief, regret over lost time and a sudden desire to return to that 2017 summer, experiences of loss and love are rendering themselves wholly necessary and wholly true as again I sit on banks of the Mersey where I first pressed play on Go Farther nearly 7 years ago. I sat on this very river a shell of myself, naively waiting on a future rather than living presently. Now, entirely conscious of space and time, the deep wounds of loss are revealed to me. But equally a feeling of love within loss is present and I am reminded of the value of laughter and joy felt and lived over a vast, undying tract of time.

Now, as then, I sit listlessly in my place on these shores, a tranquil observer of the very scene before me. For the last 7 years whenever I would press play on Go Farther in Lightness, I would be transported to the Mersey River. All these years later, having seen death and finding myself navigating my most profound experience of grief to date I feel inherently more human and more importantly, have a will to carry on. I know going forward I will continue to be brought back here, but I will also be reminded that lived experiences of grief and loss are what makes me human. As I write this, I am drawn to Dave’s words on Persevere: “I used to wanna be important, now I just wanna be alive and without fear…”. Dave and Gang of Youths have exalted in me an affinity towards life and the human condition, for within it a lightness untold awaits.